Happy New Year
December: Vice Chairman, Andrew Carver (in the Chair), welcomed 22 Members, Wives, Partners and Friends (40 in all) to our 2023 Christmas Lunch. Plus our guest speaker Eleanor Redshaw and her husband Tony. £80 was raised for the Chairman’s Charity, South East Cancer Help. The Christmas Lunch was a great success and a gratuity was presented to the staff.
Our Chairman, Tony Farrell was welcomed back (though not officiating) and also our Quizmaster, Dennis Evans. Both have been seriously ill. Philip Kent had to take his wife to hospital, so his induction was postposed to January (today). Ian Cullen continues to deteriorate both cognitively and physically. He does however have glimmers of positivity (from daughter Jo).
Outings/Events
Terry Ribbens wishes us to let him have any outings suggestions.
Lunch changes by 10.30am the prior Tuesday to chris@moniz.co.uk T: 020 8660 6063.
Member News to Welfare Sec., Bill Ainsworth T: 020 8660 0399.
Please email vincent@fosdike.com with articles/news for the Newsletter.
Speaker today: Gaye Illsley: ‘Lasting Power of Attorney’
1st February: Steve Bird: ‘The Dutch in the Medway’
December Speaker: Eleanor Redshaw
‘My grandmother was a suffragette’
Eleanor is the granddaughter of Eleanor Higginson a suffragette (1881-1969).
A suffragette was the more militant form of the suffragist being inclined to violence and damage to property often in the vicinity of the Houses of Parliament. Eleanor Higginson was from a very poor background to the extent that she seldom had adequate meals and indeed the only person in their household who got to eat meat was her father who sadly spent a lot of his earnings on drink as many seamen and dockers did. Perhaps some of the motivation for Eleanor to fight for votes for women came from her background in which women had very little status. The Married Women’s Property Act allowing a woman to retain ownership of her own property when married had only come into being in 1882. However this was probably less relevant to people of Eleanor’sclass who would not own houses or have large inheritances.
Eleanor went all out for getting the vote which women did not have. This not only involved general publicity by use of the print media but marches which could result in clashes with the police and arrests and also confrontations at public meetings with speakers such as Winston Churchill and Asquith who were unsympathetic to their cause.
As tensions rose arrests could lead to prison and force-feeding which Eleanor suffered. In order to avoid deaths, the “Cat and Mouse Act” of 1913 would release prisoners for 8 days and then re-arrest them to finish their sentence. In 1913 Mrs. Pankhurst sent Eleanor to a protest likely to result in just such treatment. So Eleanor asked her G.P. if she was fit enough to endure it and was told only for a week, she went ahead and became so ill she had to be hospitalised.
The movement as a whole engaged in very extensive violent and non-violent activity but was paused during the Great War. After which the Representation of the people Act was passed in 1918 allowing women aged over 30 to vote if they owned land or had paid rent in their own name for at least 5 years. The full franchise was given to women in 1928 on the same terms as men.
Eleanor went on to be a local councillor and a Magistrate and so by her death in 1969 had seen vast changes in the status of women achieved largely through legislation which changed the constitution.
We were privileged to see many items which Eleanor had handled or owned, such as a sash bearing blood stains, medals awarded for undergoing hunger strikes and original letters and documents written at the time.
Our speaker remembers her grandmother well and it was inspiring to meet someone so closely related to our social history and handle the actual documents detailing the events underpinning it.
Our thanks go to Eleanor for such a heartfelt talk.
‘The Kindness of Baristas’
by Vincent Fosdike
Which of our local cafés knows us best? My wife and I regularly visit three establishments during the course of our early morning walks. Apart from the coffee, they provide an incidental service which easily rivals the assessment that our G.P. can also offer but which is not instantly available in the same way that café X is. Neither the surgery nor the café has a cure if their observations are not encouraging, so as the saying goes: “you pays yer money and you takes yer choice”.
It goes like this: commence walk to café or surgery 0.7 miles in both cases (herein after marked BC meaning both cases where applicable).
Join queue (BC). State your preferences clearly e.g. Coffee and a yellow Puffin or Early onset Dementia check! A confusing request to the receptionist will score quite badly if they are given in the wrong establishment. Whereas the Barista will quickly realise that you mean a yellow Muffin or just “your usual”, but this request accidently given to the G.P.’s receptionist may fast track you to a specialist appointment.
The kindly Barista sorts it out and because it is raining and cold outside and she takes pity on the old couple, she even brings the order to our table where we are running a small book on which number bus will come next. At the next table, a young girl with a huge airport style wheel case is studying her phone for bus times, my wife seeking an advantage over our little bet asks her what the next number of the group of buses will be. Obligingly she tells her and then continues to gaze distractedly out into the rainy high street. Two buses pass one of them for Heathrow Airport but she does not move. My wife looks askance at me and then her as the bus moves away into the gloom. Just at that moment our kindly Barista hurtles out of the café in full uniform heels clacking on the pavement but unprotected from the rain and carrying a large take-out coffee. She just reaches the bus queue in time to thrust it into the hand of a teenager and then runs back in spattered by raindrops. She passes us and I congratulate her on the excellent customer service. In a cheerful eastern European accent she calls back “only for my son”!
Another airport bus is boarding passengers. My wife looks quizzically at the girl next to us and ventures to ask if she should get this bus. Snatching a breath and smiling foolishly she rushes for the door putting her case into a tail slide in a time creditably close to the existing record of four seconds (swing door to bus door).
Well, how are we doing on the early onset dementia test? O.K lose one for asking for a Puffin but recover the score on spotting the traveller’s absent mindedness not to mention contriving to win the bus bet by opportunistic intelligence gathering. Pity we let her miss the first airport bus but you can’t win them all and we are getting on a bit, take off half a point for slow reaction or dithering.
The caffeine and the excitement are having their effects and so I walk over to the loo and put in the door code. No luck (possible memory failure) and disconsolately return to ask my wife for the number – she gives a different one which also fails. Of course I could ask the Barista who is managing a large impatient queue but the information would be classified. Bona fide customers only. She would not call it out for fear that we might be killed in the rush of those just sheltering from the rain until their bus comes. Dementia is gaining, did we both mis-remember the vital number? Well, I don’t even try to remember mobile phone numbers but my wife knows some and her national insurance number. But neither of them will get us into the loo. Some more intelligence is required. How is this number disseminated only to the right people? There are no helpful notices or concealed clues amongst the adverts. Perhaps the number has been changed after a security breach.
Once again our faithful Barista, always alert to what she may consider her more challenged customers had noticed our short walks to and from the comfort station. With the intuition of consultant in pre-dementia assessment she waives a receipt over the heads of the thirsty queue whilst never spilling a drop of the special she was pouring.
In a medical test you would be allowed a certain time to interpret information in a slightly concealed form. I am not sure if we would have passed this one as we both thought we had forgotten to pay. Until a memory fired up. Yes it was memory, not logical deduction. The problem had been solved a few weeks ago by a friend telling us that the code is on the receipt at the bottom of the receipt. Fortunately my wife is of a neat and tidy disposition, and had folded ours and retained it whereas I would have crumpled it into a ball before playfully aiming a shot at the nearby waste receptacle. That is the definitive and conclusive difference between male and female and one of the last unexplored areas of wearisome debate over gender identity. The printed number was faint and required two permutations to gain entry. But it gave great relief!
All in all I think these little challenges would have produced a similar result to a G.P. assessment.
N.B. The café has a notice to remind users to close and lock the door! ‘Train toilets often open spontaneously’ “midstream”.
N.H.S. establishments are non-comital.
DOCTORS RECOMENDATION: Re-test before next driving licence renewal or sooner if more than one medical appointment missed in six months. Patient should attempt to memorise phone numbers or bus routes.
BARISTAS RECOMMENDATION: Add extra shot of caffeine daily and smile at your Barista.