REPORTS |
Another year has flown by – so what happened over the last twelve months? At this time last year our membership stood at 51. It is currently 56, so we have grown by approximately 10%. I think it is fair to say that the majority of new members these days contact us after seeing the website. And things are definitely getting more digitally based; we now only send out two newsletters by post, the rest are issued by e–mail. This has changed relatively quickly. Two years ago it was 12 letters.
Although we only had 8 takers for our trip to Annecy in France, weekends away generally appear to be very popular – despite the need to sleep in dormitories. Eleven went to Lulworth where the weather contributed to a very memorable trip and the realisation by some that coastal cliffs can be as challenging as other hilly areas. Seventeen went to Brecon recently and we have 14 booked for this Easter and our booking of 19 for Exmoor in June has been over subscribed. We have only 9 booked for the trip abroad this year to Slovenia, so we would be interested in feedback on whether we should abandon our foreign trips to concentrate on trips within the British mainland. Our trip to Brecon was memorable as we were able to do the waterfall walk which is a club favourite and then on the Sunday in sunny conditions a walk up Pen y Fan.
I would like to raise the issue of driving distances. Now that Stuart and Graham are coming on fewer walks, we have lost two drivers who were happy to drive the distance to the Peak District. A number of regular walkers have stated that they would not want to drive further than about 40 miles. Others have said their cars are not available. The average distance away of this years walks is 80 miles. This means that driving will fall more and more on a small group of drivers. How do we tackle this? I have added this as an item to the agenda so that we can discuss it later.
Also with Stuart and Graham walking less we have fewer walk leaders, so we need to find more people willing to lead walks. We also need more walk leaders so that we can more frequently split into groups of differing abilities so that everyone feels that they can get a challenging walk.
We have arranged some first aid training this year. The sessions are spread across four evenings in the hope that everybody will be able to make some of them. I do hope you will try and come to as many as possible, not only from the point of view of increasing our expertise on walks but also to give some acknowledgement to Dylan who voluntarily gives up his time to do this for us. The first session was last Wednesday and 10 people came which was pleasing so I hope you can keep it up. The next two are on Wednesday 27th May and Wednesday 24th June.
Socially, we have had a meal at the Shah Jehan in April last year, the beer by rail in July, barbecue in July, beer festival in August, and a meal at East in November. We had an alternative type of Christmas drink this year at my house and this had a very good turn out. The annual meal was at the White Hart at Ufford and eight people attended. We recently went dog racing and we had six attendees half of which were from the committee. We tried a couple of what we classed as “social” walks last year and there was limited take up of people who don’t normally walk, so it would be useful to have any feedback on whether we should continue with these.
As always, I would like to thank the committee members for all the effort they put in during the year as otherwise the club would not be as successful as it is. This year, Bev is relinquishing her post as transport co-ordinator and my thanks go to her for the input she has had over many years.
That concludes what I have to say, except that I hope you share my anticipation of another enjoyable year of walking.
- Chairman – Alan Parsons
- General Secretary – Angela Jones
- Treasurer – Andy Williamson
- PR Representative – Cathy Hunting
- Transport Co–ordinator – Chris Carmichael
- Route Planner – Nigel Arkle
- Special Events Co–ordinator – Judith Neal
- Editor – Alan Parsons
- Membership Secretary – Graham Dear
After much discussion a decision was taken to significantly increase mileage rates. The new rates are:
- Private petrol car – 21.0p
- Private diesel car – 20.0p
- Company petrol car – 12.0p
- Company diesel car – 11.0p
