Another Good Club Night - September 2005

The September club night is our AGM. I arrived early to find all the chairs set out in perfect straight rows, too formal for me, I wandered up and down and couldn't choose a seat to put my things on. It's a funny thing this, I don't like to think of myself as being fussy or choosy but I couldn't pick a seat that I felt comfortable in, there was only a handful of guys sitting but I couldn't settle. Then Zap and we were off again, guys asking about my competition piece, a couple of jobs for me to look at during the week and how to sort out the winner of the John Davis prize for the most improved novice this year, and yes, you've guessed it, I put my things on a chair and that's where I sat for the AGM quite happily.

I checked in with my competition piece and looked at the opposition, chatted briefly and collected the latest quarterly club magazine, guys were busy searching through it looking for the statistics for the years competition results. Also high on the reading order was the list of next year's projects; this always gets the conversations flowing. Further reading are the many articles, reports, club night reports, adverts, message from the chairman and list of committee members. Our editor Derek has done us proud again, I hope you guys realise how much time and effort goes into producing this magazine.

Robin Lacy had some amazing pyrography on the gallery table, I can't imagine how long it must have taken, sadly my pictures don't do them justice. We are very fortunate in that we have a good variety of very talented members to call on.

Well we had a relatively quiet meeting compared to last year. Due to the amount of damage to the tables and chairs caused by a disagreement between the members last year, the powers to be had the sense to place some 30 or so baton wielding riot police officers around the hall which obviously had the desired affect. A plus of course was that several of them enjoyed it so much they have now joined the club.

So that's another AGM over and new committee members signed in. Appropriately at this point I would like to take the opportunity to say thank you to our outgoing chairman John Webb for four years and welcome our new chair Don Smith. There's a lot to do now in this coming year one way and another, it looks very exciting, a lot of hard work but exciting.

After the tea break our "in house design specialist" as I call him Ken gave a demonstration on colour and light. Enlightening was a word I was going to use but that's too obvious so …………………………. Oh well, all right it was enlightening. It's made me look at so many things differently now, I find myself looking at things from different angles to see the changes. I get some funny looks on the high street but heck, who cares.

We had a good turn out of competition entries this month, and quality to. Sadly there will not be anybody representing the intermediates this year because of advancement of members into the next category. The results of the most improved novice winner will have to wait, all the guys were head to head on scores so its been decided to give them all one piece to make and hopefully we can get John Davis to judge and give us the winner. This will be either the October or November club night.

As usual it was the raffle next, nothing for me this time, have I lost my magic I wonder? During the raffle the chairs started to disappear from the centre of the room and with the last number called the guys disappeared out into the night air. Spooky.

And there goes another good club night.

Boots - September 2005