IT IS NOT long now before we start a new season of Fellowship lunches and the Committee look forward to welcoming old and new members to our meetings. This session we have a combination of our usual soup and sandwich lunches plus guest speaker, the very popular Christmas Dinner, the final Cheese and Wine Quiz night and a new addition to our programme in November.

This we have planned as an outing by coach, probably to Dobbies’ Garden Centre near Stirling when we will have an opportunity to browse around their Christmas displays and have a bite to eat in what we understand is a very pleasant restaurant.  There will more information on this outing at our first meeting.

For your diaries, the following are the dates of meetings up to and including Christmas:-

Monday 20th November:
At 1pm Glendaruel Village Hall. Soup and sandwich lunch followed by guest speaker, Christina Noble on the “Here We Are” Project at Cairndow.

Monday 17th November:
Coach Trip.  More details at the first meeting.

Monday 15th December:
At Colintraive Hall.  Christmas Dinner, when we hope to use the caterers who provided such good meal last year.

Altogether we hope our meetings will brighten up what may well be a wet and dark winter …… so see you all on 20th October!

The Fellowship Christmas Dinner followed a different format from December 2007. For the first time we used an outside catering company and judging from the comments, all our members and guests were most supportive of the change. It was generally agreed that not only was the meal, with its wide range of choices, delicious, but it was also good value for money. So widely held was this view that we have already had an number of requests to arrange a repeat for Christmas 2008.
Of course, an added bonus was that the Committee was able to enjoy the occasion too, without having to worry about the cooking and washing up!
We have also been asked about the possibility of arranging an outing in lieu of one of our  regular monthly meetings, perhaps in November,  and if this receives sufficient support it will certainly be considered. Let us know your views.
In January we welcomed as guest speaker Barbara Campbell, Captain of the sailing ship Tenacious. Barbara is employed by the Jubilee Sailing Trust, a charity offering disabled people the chance to participate as crew members on sailing ships which venture as far as the Caribbean. It was impressive and inspiring to see crew members, often in specially adapted wheelchairs, hauling in sails  in sometimes difficult weather conditions.
Ken Colville, our guest speaker in February, described a different sort of challenge, the 600 km Camino de Santiago. This is a pilgrimage on foot, which starts on the French side of the Pyrenees and finishes in the Galician mountains of Spain at the shrine of Santiago de
Compostella. Ken’s talk was enlivened by slides of the route and
Spanish music and provided a very interesting afternoon for us.
Our final event of this season’s meetings will be our usual Wine and Cheese Party, a report of which will appear in the next edition of the Newsletter.
The Raffle is now a permanent feature of our meetings and has proved very popular. Thank you to all those members who contributed prizes.
In addition to subsidising the cost to members of the Christmas Dinner, we have been able to make donations of £100 each to the Church Fabric Fund and the children’s charity C.H.A.S all out of our own funds.
Again, a big thank you from the Committee, to all our members for their continued support and we look forward to seeing you all at the beginning of the 2008/9 Session next October.

Jill McLuckie

The 2006-7 session started in October at Glendaruel Hall with a talk by Sadie Dixon-Spain on the future of Dunans Castle.

She gave a brief history of the building from when it was owned by the Fletcher family, up to the disastrous fire which reduced it to a burnt out shell. (more…)