Just had a very busy three days!
Yesterday: 'Big Wave' pre-Copenhagen climate march, for which we duly dressed in blue. Joseph carried the Tottenham & Wood Green Friends of the Earth banner, and one of our bods had made herself a very fetching polar bear costume and sign saying 'Has anyone seen my habitat?' The news sites today say just 20,000 marched in London -- which seems impossibly low. It took 2 hours after the scheduled start time for our bit of the march to actually get moving, the same sort of delay as the million strong anti-Iraq march, or the 100-250,000 strong anti-nuclear marches. The whole of Piccadilly was definitely filled up by the march -- seems like there's a '0' missing from the official count.
Yesterday evening: local Civic Society Xmas dinner, at our local traditional country pub, the Ferry Boat, which sits on an island in the river Lea. JN is secretary, about 30 people. We took over one wing of their dining area, spread out at little four-person tables. Good tucker, then a communal lift home in Wendy's mini-van.
Friday evening: Wards Corner 'Winter Warmer' social, at what used to be the local Royal British Legion building, which has been taken over as a community centre called Tottenham Chances. That very day, the news came through that the Save Wards Corner campaign has been granted leave to take their appeal against a judicial review decision supporting the Council to the High Court. Entertainment featured a ukelele band, a cayley band (with a very dictatorial caller), an excellent bellydance trio (who borrowed the belly dance belt I wore along, as they were one short!), then a good Motown style singer -- whose set went on rather long. Not as much get up and dance time as at previous WCC socials. They'd sold very few tickets in advance, so were quite worried about numbers -- but it was packed out with people who paid up the higher 'on the door' price, and made a nice £800 profit to support the struggle. JN ended the evening fairly spectacularly inebriated -- I had to send a chap (the Civic Society chairman) in to retrieve him from the Mens WC, with various other blokes emerging looking highly amused... So at the Civic Society dinner, we were greeted by 'So you did get him home safely...' comments...
Thursday: TWG FOE Xmas meal, at an Indian restaurant in Wood Green -- all of us at one big table this time, next to a fountain with goldfish. Food was fine, jolly sociability, lift home with deputy leader of the local Council who is partner of our FOE Co-ordinator, who'd left her car parked in the official space marked for 'Leader of the Council'.
Quite a lot of overlapping people among all these different events -- Sue P (with whom I run plant stalls during the summer) and her chap Nick were the only people at all of them. Today: do shopping, hope the current sunshine dries the ground out enough for us to get to the allotment and dig up potatoes. Next week: I have a retirement party on Weds, JN has organised a 'thrashette' with his various girlfriends from work on Friday eve', Saturday is Friends of Tottenham Marshes Xmas social down at Picketts Lock on the Lea during the afternoon. The following weekend, we head for JN's parents at Lyme Regis, for his birthday. Plans for Xmas itself: eat, make jigsaws: we bought a Hadrians Wall jigsaw when we were up there in May, and the other day JN found a couple of plastic bags containing two jigsaws in their boxes and three jigsaws in plastic bags which no picture to show what they are.
Seasonal cheerios, etc....
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For completeness and accuracy, it should be noted that the plastic bags of jigsaws that I "found" -- a phraseology which suggests they might have been lurking forgotten in the bottom of a cupboard -- were freecycled from outside the front gate of the house at the other end of our road, where they had clearly been deposited in the hope that someone would help themselves.
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