For rich tapestry read webbing

28th September
We enjoyed a really amusing Book Group meeting this afternoon. It helps if the novel read is very funny which "We are all made of glue" by Marina Lewyncka certainly is.It contains all sorts of humour: that of embarrassing situations, the almost Chaplin humour of ridiculous physical situations, the wit of the choice of names of the characters, the fun of misunderstandings through broken English or garbled messages left on phones and the reactions of the characters. Even the cats have strong personalities! But beneath all this the author has serious concerns about the modern fabric of society where there are so many breaks in the material.She discusses the treatment of the elderly by the Welfare State and the threat of the worldwide web to youngsters suffering from family breakdown and looking for somewhere to belong again. We need glue of different kinds because if the bonding breaks down in ourselves, all the threads that were stuck together to make us what we are ruptured. We are stuck with the early beliefs instilled in us by our early family life.Nationalism, patriotism, class and religion hold us all in bondage.A marvellously well constructed book with a good ending and such fun! Members, a piece of borrowed advice; if you are looking for a man, try B&Q because he will come with a complete toolkit!
Not everyone liked the book which made for some good discussion and of course, we went off track on other topics.

25th September
Did you catch up on the Love Food, Hate Waste campaign report in the national press? Apparently this campaign which the National WI helped to run has resulted in a cut of food waste by more than 250,000 tons over the past year. You remember we were asked to use up leftovers in intelligent ways, not to buy too much food and to ignore some best before dates. There was also a 4% reduction in packaging waste per food item according to WRAP another scheme supported by WI. So we are not crying in the wilderness. Let's see how the swishing sessions work in this programme to act sensibly with our resources and reduce landfill too.

23rd September
A group of us from the Bucks WIs' subcommittees met this morning to be introduced to the new Bucks Website and to learn how to publish information on it.We need to be able to update items about forthcoming events organised by our committee members and keep the WIs informed on what has happened too. We also need to attract outsiders to come to some meeting and be drawn in to become a member.However it is not just the non-member we need to inspire but also the member who has not bothered to consult the website and has not felt she wants to communicate with other members electronically. Yet these same people are quite happy to join Facebook, blog or Twitter and many use Scype to keep in touch with relatives at a distance. Why not exchange views and ideas with fellow WI members? So let's hope, when this new website is launched very soon, there will be a surge of interest.
Our Web-mistress has set up an attractive home page and established many links which are easy to contact. We certainly enjoyed finding our way around the site and you cannot wreck the thing by experimenting. Actually one has to be very knowledgeable to be able to cause lasting damage to a website. Please, when this is launched, spend some time during the bad weather months looking at it and we can all learn together. It might be amusing to write up your adventures with modern technology because I think there is a rich vein of humour in some of the situations in which these clever machines throw us.