Just at the moment, and for the foreseeable future until I can recover some of my historical emails going back to at least 2006, there’s a great paucity of documentation on many of the meetings we held during 2008 and 2009. Unfortunately, my ‘time machine’ storage device is itself packed away in store for the time being, so we’re likely to be depending on whatever I can glean from Trevor Newman’s otherwise copious archive of minutes, which have a gap of about a year between October ’08 and November ’09. It seems possible that the minutes weren’t actually circulated by email, during this period, anyway, unless a faithful Lion able to interrogate their own historical email treasure trove can disabuse me of that fear?
Fortunately, I’ve been able to discover some mis-filed clippings in Nigel’s folders, and I’m so delighted! The re-launched Kite Festival, in particular, with the salient information on the hiatus in many local events caused by the terrible Foot & Mouth Disease epidemic, helps us to place that event in the context of contemporary circumstances. Oh, and did somebody mention the awful weather that managed to cancel the kites in the previous year?
But the Kite Festival weekend in 2008 looks to have been a great success, which clearly helped to assuage the hurt from missing out on the two earlier years. I especially enjoyed seeing our bear mascot immortalised on a kite string as it sailed higher and higher before its parachute was deployed and it drifted gently back to earth.
In the July 2008 business meeting, the Lions had taken possession of Sid Martin’s portable bar, which no doubt was put to work under host Michael Stonehouse’s supervision. And in these days before the Allen Mill renovation had become accessible and Allendale Bakery was launched, its predecessor the outside catering enterprise Pennine Picnics was working hard to provide good nourishment over the weekend.
Lovely as well to see John Dobson fêted for the success of the event, which was a well-deserved tribute. And, of course, the wind up at Churchlands did not disappoint. I’m given to understand that they rarely do!