Author: larrywinger@icloud.com

If April showers bring May flowers, then the emergence of the wonderful wildflowers in south Northumberland, home of the high North Pennines, is no exception to the rule. Susie White, renowned nature writer and Country Diarist for The Guardian, lives locally and has contributed a delightful paean there to the mountain pansies that emerge at just about the time Allendale’s May Fair is in full swing.

The Business Meeting for May, 2013 was full, literally chocka, of considerations about the upcoming fair. Margaret Stonehouse reported that this year’s fair was looking like the biggest and busiest yet, or at least for many years. Indeed, it was looking so brilliant, as the planning proceeded, that visiting Zone Chairman, David Wheeler, wondered if our club could host a Zone meeting next year. He hoped that along with the free buffet, for which our club would be responsible, we would have a powerpoint presentation of some 15 slides featuring this year’s fair, for the assembled clubs of the North East Zone.

We must have seemed like an effervescent, buzzing club full of eager members, back in the day. Maybe that’s because we were! It was also at this May meeting, after all the fair business and organising had been discussed, that Peter Aldcroft presented a paper outlining the prospects for an Allen Valley Folk Festival, presciently budgeted into the AONB’s recent Lottery Grant for the Allen Valleys (in association with Fawside), for the remarkable sum, to be spent over five years, of £40,000 out of some £2.5million inward capital.

The meeting proposed to invite Andy Lees, newly appointed coordinator of the Landscape Partnership which would oversee the grant from the new office space being carved out of the old Bowls Club kitchen in Allendale Village Hall, to describe the situation with regards to funding and capacity, which might eventuate as a Folk Festival, at our July meeting, before the club came to a final decision as to how we might support this effort.

The April, 2013 minutes have become subsumed in the following month’s corrections, it seems, and probably lost for all time. So that offers me an opportunity for some quick and easy philosophising.

April, in our golden years as a club, was always subsumed in planning for the May Fair, or as it became known as the date kept slipping, the Allendale Fair. This year, as recorded already by our March meeting, the number of stalls was well up, and Diane Butcher had got the bit between her teeth and was rarin’ to organise things.

Perhaps it was the austere times and the dreary winter that encouraged us to pull out all the stops for the Help the Heroes themed event, to make this one the best yet. Whatever the motivation, we were eager to work together through the dreich that inevitably presented as lambing storms and then segued into bright sunshine. You can’t have a rainbow without rain and sunshine, can you!

Members new, for whom the Help for Heroes theme was particularly salient, included Tony and Ute Johnson. Tony is a veteran of several military campaigns and postings, but now is deeply involved in a local Animal Rescue effort. As I recall, Tony got involved with the club through his company’s fund-raising walk/march from Allenheads to Hexham, supported by several of Nigel Baynes’ buses, in an attempt to raise funds to help repatriate a comrade-in-arms who’d crashed his motorcycle in a foreign land and lay unconscious far from home. No doubt this effort was part of the inspiration behind this year’s Fair theme.

Suddenly, the pink camouflage T-shirts agreed in our March meeting as Lions’ and helpers’ Fair uniforms, made a great deal of sense.

Austerity really was biting hard, by March 2013, and the effects of this government policy were being felt across the land. In terms of the events and fund-raising that the Allendale Lions Club was holding, austerity was definitely cutting into the fun.

The Proper Boys gig did manage (just!) to make a small profit, with contributions totalling £123 on the night. The Lions congratulated Peter Aldcroft for pulling this gig through, though the gate turnout was much lower than expected. A variety of additional reasons were suggested for the paucity of paying customers: the snowfall; the free music on offer at both the Allendale Inn and the Crown in Catton; the absence due to far-flung travel of some 25 additional guests who would otherwise have been expected to be out. But it all felt more like the economy was turning against us.

And with a late-arriving pair of invoices for catering services during the 2012 and 2014 Bonfire Nights, the eventual profit for the 2012 Bonfire and Fireworks display turned out to be only £41. Not so much good cheer in a gloomy start to March, then.

But spirits seemed to be high for the preparations that might help to ensure a brilliant May Fair, when it came around. The meeting of the Stall committee sounded very positive, as a good variety of stall-holders was expected. There might even have to be an overflow space laid on to accommodate everyone! Karaoke heats were almost all organised for most weekends starting with the first weekend in April, running right up to the Fair.

I think everyone was rather bemused at the choice of T-shirt ‘uniforms’ for us Lions and helpers to wear at the Fair: pink camouflage! But Sheila Baynes was being commissioned to run one up to show us what they’d actually look like on.

Hard times though, they were definitely upon us, and we would just have to see how well we could eke our way through until the May Fair.

Minutes 101: Burns night post-mortem and Proper Boys reprise coming up

If the past Burns Night Supper was the last one in recent memory to have been held in the Main Hall at Allendale’s village hall, then that must have been the one in which I did my first Immortal Memory dressed in a kitchen apron fashioned to look like a kilt. That would make sense, since Carrie and I were in charge of the catering and the general organisation of the night.

I waxed rather gloomily, as I recall, about the typical Scottish cuisine, having found only a handful of Rabbie Burns poems about food. The one I recall in particular was the plaintive wife’s plea to her laddie to come hame, where she would cook so nicely and wash his claes so well, but it turned out that the only thing that could really entice him back was some energetic sheet music. Food, to my mind and in my address, it seemed, always had a subsidiary relationship to something else.

But then I had to turn my thesis on its head, for wasn’t Rabbie Burns among the very first ‘foodie’ folks, with his passionate rendition of his Ode to a Haggis? Of course he was. And that’s how the Memory finished.

But the evening was more of a ‘drag-yourself-through-it’ sort of affair, to be frank, and even the band remarked that this one felt like it was on its last legs. The minutes from our February meeting indicated that though the organisation had been smooth this year, for next year, if we did have a Burns Night Supper, we’d seek to hold it in the New Hall, in a cosier more convivial atmosphere, and not push for a band or dancing but go for more individual turns, singing and speeches. It had all been too much work for too little return, and the guests and organisers felt it was a tired process.

Meanwhile, The Proper Boys were preparing for a reprise themselves, and tickets were already being sold for the upcoming event in the village hall. Last year’s had been quite a sellout crowd. Time, and subsequent Business Meeting minutes, would tell what actually transpired!

The May Fair for this year was now registered with Help for Heros, so the theme was coalescing and ideas were being developed in increasing enthusiasm.

The last business meeting of 2012 saw our club visited by District Governor (of Lions Clubs UK) John Sutherland and wife Denise. By this time, the new minutes format was becoming embedded, and everyone was delighted at the way our discussion items were presented. Apparently the new format had not yet incorporated an attendance record (members would be noted by their initials, as in the ‘Action by’ section).

We Lions agreed to enjoy a buffet for our Xmas party on the 21st of December upstairs in the Golden Lion, a couple days after the annual Carols in the Square event. The re-written carol sheet was expected to make its first appearance, which was hoped would be a blessing to those with decreasing short-sight capacity!

District Governor Sutherland warned us that requests for funds for regional flood victims (York District) would be imminent. Apparently, all the trees around the village have been lit up with the light festoons fixed by Terry working with the cherry picker, but there is one more to festoon before that job is complete.

The reporting of DG Sutherland’s closing remarks bears many of the hallmarks of my own writing (hmmm) but the recording secretary for this set of minutes is nameless. Of salient interest is the new DVD which describes the story of Lions Clubs International, which DG Sutherland presented to President Richard Snowden. The minutes note that Jimmy Saville’s presence has been carefully expunged (the scandal must have broken over the past year?) and drily comment: ‘Thus history is subtly manipulated to gratify the present.’ I’m confident that these were my immortal words of wisdom, but I’d be delighted to be corrected!