Tuesday, 15 December 2020

My faith in humanity is somewhat restored this morning by a true act of human kindness

 


I am in bits this morning. I just read a tweet that made me cry and with the sun shining, has made the world seem a better place. Let me tell you the back story. I used to manage a band in the 90's called The Sway. The bad boy of the band was a guy called Paul Hogan (not the Aussie comic!). Paul had serious problems with alcohol and he won't mind me saying he wasn't always a pleasant drunk. Having said that I had a soft spot for Paul, he was a good guy who was I always felt kept the band together and ticking, although he was perhaps the least musical. After many years of problems, Paul kicked the booze a few years ago. He realised that it was damaging his family and ruining his life. He retrained and got into teaching to put something back. Paul got into running and despite growing up an Arsenal fan, on moving to Watford, found a new love with the Hornets, which he bonded with his son Aiden over. I am immensely proud of how Paul has turned himself around. His wife is the daughter of a friend of my Dad's, Vic Evans, a gentleman who originated from Burma and ended up a stalwort of the Mill Hill Community. 

A couple of weeks ago, Vic passed away. Paul has recently been hit by health issues (nothing to do with alcohol). He was getting back on his feet when this awful blow struck. Normally I would have paid my respects to Vic, but this was impossible. Just as Paul was coming to terms with this blow, his mum passed away. 

Paul posted this tweet

In these times there is little we can do to support our friends in these times, other than post a few messages of support on Facebook. However, there are some who can do a little more, they don't have to, but they can.

 One such man is Troy Deeney, the inspirational Hornet legend. To Paul and my surprise, he posted this

 

That in itself brought a tear to my eye, but the messages of support that followed are amazing. Hats off to Troy. I hope Aidy gets along and Watford smash it tonight. One day, a long way off in the future, Paul and Aidy will still be recalling Troy's kindness at their darkest hour. This is perhaps the best Christmas story you'll hear this year!

Update - 

The even better news is that both Paul and his wife Jenni went with Aiden and for a couple of hours, their problems were lifted, as the picture shows. Hats off to Watford for laying out the red (or should I say Yellow) carpet

-

Here is a video we made back in the day when Paul was a rockstar. I love the song but I love the family man Paul has become even more. 

This is a great song featuring Bass guitar by Paul, from 1994, we made the video as a sort of art house short film. It features the amazing vocals of Helen Terry on backing vocals. He is a talented bloke. And hats off to Troy!


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Monday, 14 December 2020

Running a business in Covid times is impossible

Last night I had a rotten nights sleep. I woke up at about 3.30am and simply couldn't get back to sleep. The reason? I'd heard yesterday that London would be going into tier 3 this week. I run a business and the situation simply gets worse and more difficult. I employ 14  people and I feel a strong sense of responsibility to them. They are facing a Christmas not knowing where we will be and I feel responsible, even though there is little I can do other than ride the storm.

Let me explain what it has been like for us. As we run a physical business, many of our costs are fixed. Mortgages/rent, insurance, water, electricity, maintenance, do not go away. There is no furlough payment for most of our main fixed costs.

Our business has four areas of operation. The Recording studio. This year our turnover on this side is down 60%. The business was closed during the first lockdown. None of our clients seem to have the cash or desire to spend money on recordings, without shows to sell merchandise at. There is no need for demo's because there are virtually no gigs. We were lucky to have a major TV project, that saved the day.

Then there is the rehearsal side of the business. This is also down by 60% for the same reasons.

Then there is the equipment hire side of the business. As this is only busy in from April-December and is based on supply of systems for live gigs, it is down by about 95%. 

Then we have our shop supplying musicial equipment. We actually had a brilliant start to the year, with sales up 100% on the previous year in January and Feb, although these months are small beer in our annual turnover. The music equipment industry normally sells about 50% of its annual turnover between November and December. We ramp up for this in July and August, by buying in Xmas stock. We didn't bother this year. We were early adopters of online sales, but took the decision to not push this area of sales, back in 2008. This sector of the market relies on huge volume and small margins. We offer a bespoke, personal service. Until this year, this has paid dividends. But this year has been a nightmare. In late November, we had a difficult decision. Do we rush out and order a stack of Xmas stock or do we conserve our cash? We had heated discussions. As a bulk buyer there are some very good deals to be had, but we faced the risk of a third lockdown or London moving to tier three and sitting on dead stock for a year. This weekend was frustrating. We had several customers looking for gifts and we smply didn't have the products to sell. Every time a customer comes in and is disappointed, we feel as if we have personally failed. Should we see a second lockdown or tier 3 this week, our decision will be vindicated. Should we stay in tier two, then we will have a very frustrating weekend next week as customers turn up but we may not be able to supply what they want. Many of our customers are also small business owners and they have said the same thing. One guy bought £100 of accessoriesjust to be supportive (we still have plenty of strings, drumsticks and leads etc). He wanted a beginner package for his son, but we simply didn't order them this year. There was no point if we couldn't be sure of being open.

The current situation has turned running a business into a gamble. Do we buy stock on the basis that other people won't and we'll be in a good position? Do we hunker down and save our cash, hoping to survive? We are lucky in as much as with the furlough scheme, other assistance and our previous robust position, we are not in trouble. If things start returning to normal in April, then we should be well placed. We are taking that punt. Many have thrown their hand in. I see other businesses in the estate where we live having all manner of challenges. 

I am not entirely sure that there is sound logic behind the governments strategy at this time. I don't see how "non essential shops" such as music shops are more risky than supermarkets for customers. . Personally, it would seem to me that there is far less risk in a music shop where there are relatively few customers per hour than a supermarket. I get why 500 sweaty people in a small room pogo'ing to a punk band may be risky, but many shows can have their risks mitigated. I understand that the government has difficult choices. I understand the need to keep young people's education going, even though the schools seem to be driving up the infection rate. Surely the logic would be for a ciurcuit breaker lockdown nationally over Xmas, when they are not at school? Few people I know will be having a normal Xmas. If the three week Xmas holiday was used as a lockdown to limit transmission, to buy us time as the vaccination programme was rolled out, I don't thik too many people would argue. 

If London infection rates are 'through the roof', then the government is failing. If they know this is driven by school based transmission, then they are negligent if they don't address it. My worry with regards to tier 3 is not that it isn't needed, but that as a business owner I have no idea how long it will last. The thing most businesses need to thrive is stability. Studios and shops require a lot of investment to function. Buying stock without a clue what the situation will be on Friday, let alone in February next year is impossible. It used to be that I could tell you to the day what stock we would be ordering on for the whole year, unless new products came out. Now even going to the cash and carry to order teabags and loorolls is hard to plan. I just don't understand why it seems that no one in the Boris Johnson cabinet seems to understand this.

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Sunday, 13 December 2020

The Tweets of the week in the London Borough of Barnet - 13/12/2020

 So we are hurtling towards 2021 at a rate of knots. This week is Chanukah, in a couple of weeks Xmas and then a week later we will be there. I'm not sure too many will miss this year. But this week has seen a few signs that the human spirit of our community will prevail! Here's our pick of the best tweets. Some great stuff out there.

1. Great community spirit here.


2. Mill Hill saw a rather snazzy looking train yesterday, reviving memories of a long lost service that used to run in the early 1960's


3. Some great stuff at our fave independent cinema!


4. Have you donated to your local foodbank yet, it is much needed as we approach the holiday season


5. Lyndhurst Park looking lovely earlier this week


6. The Pogues are always on the radio at this time of the year, but did you know that front man Shane MacGowan helped build Brent Cross?


7. This is my snigger of the week. Classic North London humour at its best


8. But tell me honestly, did you know the car park at Brent Cross was so glamourous?


9. This definitely the tweet of the week "things I didn't know that I didn't know" item,m this week. Thanks to Ian McGreevy for a truly fascinating insight into our past


10. If you like a bit of proper Brit Funk, this will be right up your street!

 

 

That's all folks.

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Friday, 11 December 2020

The Friday Joke - My Dad's first job interview

 


Back in 1933, my Dad was a sixteen year old applying for his first job. He wanted a job with prospects and the opportunity to travel. As a young Aussie lad of 16 living in Charters Towers, Queensland, Australia, the gateway to the world was the Railway. He was delighted when he saw that the local Railway company were advertising for a trainee signaller. He knew one of the perks of the job was free rail travel and he saw it as a gateway out of Charters Towers, which for those of you unfamiliar with Australia, is in the middle of nowhere.

He had long harboured dreams of working on the railway as a steam engineer or engine driver and it was clear to him that this was a good way to get a foothold. He was a bright lad, unlike his youngest son and swotted up on signalling.

He was told to meet the local railway inspector at the signal box.
The inspector starts by asking 

"What would you do if you realized that two trains were heading towards each other on the same track?"
Dad replied: "I would switch one train to another track."
The inspector then asked "What if the lever broke?"
Dad answered "Then I'd run down to the tracks and use the manual lever down there,"
The Inspector then asked "What if that had been struck by lightning and was fused closed?"
Dad, gave it some thought and said "I'd run back up here and use the phone to call the next signal box to see if they could stop the trains"
"What if the phone was busy?"
Dad was stumped. maybe he could stop one train, but both needed stopping and he could think of no way to avert the crash. He then thought and said "in that case I would run into town and get my Uncle Henry".
This puzzled the inspector, so he asked "Why would you do that?"
"Because he's never seen a train crash."

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Thursday, 10 December 2020

2020 - The year of living miserably

 T

his week sees an important anniversary in my life. It is 40 years since my band, The False Dots, performed our very first gig. When the band started, nearly two years previously, we had no idea just how difficult it would be to get to a point where we could do a gig. In hindsight, not being able to play a note was a far bigger impediment than we realised. We were a punk band, we wrote our own songs, so we had no real idea of just how awful we were. To be honest, that was the least of our concerns. Todays wannabees dream of getting on the BGT or Pop Idol and reaching the stars. We wanted to be an underground band, not a bunch of sellouts. Like the Clash, we wouldn't go on Top of the Pops, this was a principle, but unlike the Clash, it was unlikely that anyone would ask us. At the end of the first year of the band, we had a  big punch up. It had gradually dawned on us that we were complete rubbish. Having lived, breathed and dreamed of nothing but the band for a year, the rude awakening that we were simply no good was a bitter blow. We stopped playing and I stopped talking to my co-founder. This persisted for about three months. We'd been mates since we were four, but our friendship exploded. 

I decided to be realistic. I had no idea what I wanted to do, but playing a set of rubbish music was definetly not what I wanted. I did other things for three months, then I had a chance meeting with my co-founder. We went to the pub, drank too much and he said "Why don't we give it another go?". I said "The songs are rubbish, it's pointless". He then said "Why don't we dump them all and just write one at a time and not move on until it songs great". Previously, we'd churned out banal lyrics and simply put a few chords on top. We decided to work on the songs. They would have a story, the songs would have a hook. We'd get better musicians around us. We'd learn to play better. We did all of these things. We then recorded a demo. In the first incarnation, we'd invite mates round to rehearsals, that would be more like parties than serious rehearsals. This time, no one came. We'd become a standing joke amongst our mates, but the demo was unexpectedly good. We'd done our homework. The songs sounded powerful and interesting. Armed with the demo, we set about getting gigs. This proved harder than we thought. Then disaster. My co-founder got a girlfriend and decided to quit. I couldn't believe it. But I knew we had a great band and good songs, so I recruited a mate from school to replace him. Our guitarist, Paul Hircombe, who was only 14, switched to bass. Our new recruit sang and played lead. He was a talented guitarist. Frustrated by the lack of interest from promoters, I decided to set up our own gig at The Harwood Hall in Mill Hill. Then to my shock, my old mateand co-founder announced that he wanted to come back. As the band had sounded musically better without him, it was agreed that he'd come back on vocals and Paul, who was a talented musician would stay on bass. 

40 years ago, we made our way to the Harwood Hall, with two other bands and a big crowd of mates. We charged a quid to get in and paid the other two bands £20 to play. To my horror, my best mate and co-founder never showed up. But we agreed to do it anyway. In truth it wasn't great, but it was a great night. Even better, I made a profit. We immediately decided to do another one in January and do it properly, sharing singing duties. Sadly, my friendship with my best mate never recovered. 

Fast forward 40 years. At the start of the year, I started planning to do a 40 year reunion and memorial gig for Paul. He played with the band for 28 years, before moving to Portsmouth then dying in 2012 of cancer. We've been recording the songs for a number of years and the idea was to release the album and do the gig this week, reconnecting with as many people as we could from the years of the band. and then......

It became clear to me in April that it was not worth planning anything for this year. In July, with "Eat Out to Help Out", it appeared that maybe things were improving, but that misguided scheme simply set us back to square one. Yesterday, I got to thinking about that night at Harwood Hall 40 years ago. The music scene has changed beyond recognition. Vinyl went and bizarrly returned (well not so bizarre to us vinyl nuts), it may well be that grassroots gigs are almost a thing of the past as venues are driven to the wall by the covid crisis. Back in 1980, getting on telly was almost impossible even for established artists, except for shows in graveyard slots (such as the Old Grey Whistle Test) on BBC2. Now any wannabee can get on the reality TV talent shows, usually the worse they are, the better. Sadly though bands that want to follow our route and write their own original material and play their own instruments are still unwelcome.

I think the last gig I went to this year was Judy Collins at the Union Chapel in early March. This will be the year that I've been to the least gigs since 1976, before I discovered music. So what for 2021?

I've been thinking about what 2021 holds. I just hope that the UK population buys into the immunisation programme and the government gets it ramped up quickly. I hope that 2021 is a year of holidays, gigs, pubs, friends, football, and just living with joy. 

I hope that we see the back of Donald Trump for good. I hope that my dire worries about Brexit are not founded and that I am totally wrong. I hope that there are enough small venues left standing to allow some sort of resumption of  grassroots music scene. I hope that we can meet friends in the pubs and clubs as we please. I hope that we can have some decent holidays. But most of all, I hope my friends and family stay healthy.

This was the year of living miserably. I will follow the advice of the nuns at St Vincents when I was a kid there. If we had suffering, they'd say "offer it up for the Holy Souls". I hope that the Holy Souls can do their stuff and spare us any more of this.

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Tuesday, 8 December 2020

The new normal and what I miss most from the Pre covid world

What would you most fancy doing right now, that you would normally be doing in an ordinary December? I don't know about you, but for me there are many small rituals. Some I enjoy and are big events, such as the Pogues/Pogue Traders Xmas show and the Barnet Eye Xmas party. But it is the little things that I really miss, the almost casual Xmas catch ups. This time of year I have a list of friends who I try and catch up with. Around now I'd normally be meeting with Frank the Scouser from Reading for a long and boozy lunch at The Artillery Arms near Finsbury Square. We used to share an office up there and on a Friday have a couple of pints of Fullers Seafarers beer and a lunch. When we moved on, we'd meet up a couple of times a year to maintain the tradition. The Artillery Arms is just one of the many great pubs in London, that you'd probably never know unless you worked there. It was briefly famous in the 1960's as the Kray brothers nototiously 'conducted some business' there. These days it is a tad more sedate (or it was last Xmas when I was last in there). I would typically meet Frank for a late lunch and then adjourn to meet other friends who worked in the area. Sometimes, perhaps rather inadviseably, I'd bump into a friend at Farringdon or on the train and have another pint. The Three Compasses in Farringdon was often the venue for these impromptu mini sessions. If it was not too late and I was not too full from the late lunch, it wasn't unknown to stop in the Mill Hill Tandoori and either collect a take away or if with friends have a sit down meal. Sadly, as London is in tier two, I can't meet with Frank, as there is no outside dining. I can't thenadjourn elsewhere for a few beers. I can't nip into the Compasses if I meet a friend on the train. I can collect a takeway, but I can't eat in with a friend. 

I do wonder what this crisis will do for the genre of films that deals in disasters and pandemics. Whatever your opinion of covid, the thing that is most shocking is just how boring a pandemic is. There's no flesh eating zombies chasing us, no requirement to hack the heads off those infected. In horror movies, a srious sounding President or PM makes sober announcements. Instead we have had Donald Trump advising us to inject bleach and Boris sending his advisers off for a spin to Barnard Castle to check their eyesight. It makes you e-evaluate everything. If aliens were to land in London in 2020, the chances are that they would be boring aliens. They would not have Gerry Anderson style UFO's that glow and fire lasers. They would probably land in a car park in Slough and stock up on own brand orange juice from LIDL (other brands are available). We would probably have Boris on telly advising us to steer clear of Slough as there was congestion and reminding us to wear facemasks and wash our hands if we met any aliens. 

The awful truth is that if an asteriod was going to hit the earth, it would be terrible, but a new terrible. There would be no toilet roll for weeks before the impact and we'd have Donald Trump telling us that it was fake news as the Earth disintigrated. Maybe in 140 million years, a new race of super intelligent dinosaurs will uncover the remains of our civilisation and start speculating how we met our demise. They will speculate as we did about asteroids etc. I wonder if it would ever occur to them that we simply died of boredom.

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Sunday, 6 December 2020

The Tweets of the week in the London Borough of Barnet 5/12/2020

To quote Moby Grape, from back in 1969 " I love hearing people say, it's a beautiful day today".  Yestrday was truly a beautiful day, especially in the morning. I enjoyed my first post lockdown Saturday immensly. I was back at my favourite local football team, enjoying the sunshine, then the cold glare of the floodlights. But what have otehr tweeters of the London Borough of Barnet been up to?

All is revealed here, in our round up of the very best tweeters in our local Borough.

< 1. I thought we'd start with a Christmans connection! I think everyone in Mill Hill has a soft spot for St Joseph and his college. For those that dodn't know he is the only Christian Saint who was never a Christian (for those unfamiliar with the biblical story, he's the stepdad of Jesus and a carpenter by trade). He's also the patron saint of workers. This is one of the finest pictures of the building, glorious light

2. Fancy helping restore the Burnt Oak Brook? Doing work for the community is a great way to spend the day

3. Regulars will know we love a good map and a good query. I was intrigued, did Herts try and invade Southgate back in the day?

4.If there's one thing I like more than a a good map and that's a tasty menu. It seems that the pupils at Mill Hill School were rather well fed back in the day! I'm quite tempted to serve this up for dinner tonight, sounds delicious. I foolishly believed that the poor souls were fed on gruel and tripe back in 1920, how wrong could I be?

5. This is deffo my van of the week. Brilliant!

6. A local retired milkman was reaquainted with his round this week> ITV News featured the story, we thoroughly enjoyed it!

7. The Kingfisher is one of my favourite native birds. I always think it looks impossibly sophisticated for our could climate. Thanks to our unofficial wildlife correspondent Samuel Levy for this amazing picture.

8. As mentioned earlier, we were at Hadley FC on Brickfield Lane for the FA Vase. It was a great perrformance.



9. Mill Hill Wines have been recognising community heroes in a rather fitting way, with a bottle of the finest plonk! Well done to all!

10. Don't forget, your local small business is for life, not just for small business Saturday!


That's all till next week folks! Have a truly fine week. Here is my fave tune right now to entertain you, what is yours?

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Friday, 4 December 2020

The Friday joke - 3/12/2020 - a cheesy tale


There was a recent rush of panic buying of hard cheeses after an announcemnt that the chemical composition of hard cheese effectively prevents covid infections. In one cheese shop, there was a mini riot and the shop ended up looking like an Earthquake had hit it. All that was  left was de brie.

As tomorrow is Small Business Saturday, we thought cheese was an appropriate topic. Back in 2010, when my local Conservative MP Matthew Offord was running for office, he famously told locals "I want to make Mill Hill Broadway the type of High Street where people want to start new businesses. I want it to be the kind of place where people would open a cheese shop". Sadly we are still waiting for our cheese shop. Much as I have teased Matthew about this, I would love to see a cheese shop on the Broadway!

Have a great weekend, don't forget that tomorrow is small business Saturday, so please support your local businesses.


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Thursday, 3 December 2020

A year is a very long time in the Covid world

It has been a very, very difficult year for everyone I know. In December, I usually have a round up of various things from the year. Around this time, I start reading through blogs posted in the intervening 12 months, trying to work out what sort of year its been. Today I took the first tentative steps towards putting those blogs together. I thought I'd start by looking at the blogs from early December 2019.  I started with the blog from this very day last year. It seems odd that back then the story was the election, Jeremy Corbyn and whether the Lib Dems could oust the Tories in Finchley. Both the Lib Dems and Labour have new Leaders as a result of the election. I was told by someone who works at the hospital where Boris was treated, that the Tories also nearly got a new Leader due to Covid. Some have cast doubt on how ill Boris really was, imagining a conspiracy to boost his ratings, but from what I've heard, if anything his illness was underplayed rather than overplayed. I think that in hindsight it is a massive loss that Luciana Berger failed to take Finchley and Golders Green from the Tories. It may not have changed the maths of the general election by much, but I genuinely believe that she would have done a far better job of representing the local people than Mike Freer MP ever will do. The local Labour Party, which was never warm on Corbyn, should hang their head in shame that they did everything they possibly could to prevent a Tory loss in a seat they simply couldn't win. But that seems a long time ago.

We now have Ed Davey and Keir Starmer running the Lib Dems and Labour. I genuinely can't make my mind up about Starmer. One has to admire the way he forensically dissects Boris Johnson on a weekly basis. It has got to the point where Boris Johnson has seemingly given up even trying to win. He simply trots out fairly mindless slogans such as "Captain Hindsight". This may be effective if Starmer hadn't predicted the problems in advance. If he called him "Captain Smug Bastard Know it All Mc Told You So" it may ring truer. It puzzles me why Boris doesn't pick Starmer up for his smugness. If I were Boris, I'd take the tack of saying "it's all very well standing there looking smug just because you occasionally get something right, but I've got a country to run". It would also help if Boris bothered to do his homework. If just once, he learned all of the facts and figures and actually answered a few questions properly at #PMQ's it might actually cause a problem to Starmer. My big problem with Starmer is that he looks exceptionally good at shooting dead haddocks in a barrel. I have struggled to work out my reticence to like Starmer and I think part of it is that I have a very British urge to support the underdog, even when it is a complete knob like Johnson. I'd actually like to see Johnson do a bit better so we could see what Starmer was really made of. My worry is that he's Tony Blair MkII. A man who always is assured at the despatch box, a man who commands a very good team, but also a man who believes in nothing at all. As my blog from last year recalled, the problem with Jeremy Corbyn wasn't that he was a Marxist ideologue, ruthlessly prepared to do whatever it took to get his hands on power. The problem was that he was a rather like a radical left wing geography teacher, who had his head in the clouds and no clue how to run a party. Like a radical lefty geography teacher, he would obsess on his pet causes in far flung parts of the world, whilst his own party and campaign fell apart. A ruthless Marxist would have sacked anyone who stood in their way and made sure they controlled the levers of power in their own party. Corbyn did none of this, which is why his own team undermined and destroyed him.

It always seemed to me that the threat posed by Corbyn to anyone was massively overstated, because with all of his lack of organisational ability, there was no chance that he'd ever win anything. Many were spooked by the result of the election where Theresa May lost her majority, but there was never the slightest chance that Corbyn would be Prime Minister without an unmanageable rainbow coalition, that would never have done anything, apart from pork barrel the Nationalists in Ireland, Wales and Scotland. 

I fully expected Boris to be a disaster as a PM. Sadly, as none of us foresaw covid, I didn't expect that the depth of the disaster would be 60,000 deaths within a year. We are less than a month  from Brexit with no idea whether there will be a deal. As a business owner, for the first time in 41 years I look forward to a New Year not knowing if my business will still be around in a years time. By my maths, if the current situation of lockdowns and restrictions on live music goes on much beyond April, then carrying on as we are will be impossible. What that means I don't know, but you can only carry on with a 50% drop in turnover for so long. When we start having to pay rates again, we will see a crunch. We are not the only business in that position. I know of several studios that have cashed their chips in now, whilst they still have cash in the bank. The sad truth is that if there is no live music, then few musicians will be able to justify the cost of paying for rehearsals. I was talking to one professional drum tech today, who was telling me that he's got a 'proper job' for the first time, selling insurance for new kitchens. I asked him how it was going. He replied that it was OK, he had finally managed to get a mortgage. A sad reflection on our society. Don't get me wrong, I won't go down without a fight, but a business is only a business if it has customers. The only small ray of light, and it is not one I say with any joy, is that many of our competitors have closed, so we are getting new customers from all over London, who have lost their regular studios. I suppose if things come back by April, we may even have our best year ever, but I won't be placing any bets on that.



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Wednesday, 2 December 2020

Covid isolation and a lesson in friendship

 On Sunday, I had a bit of a wake up call. You think you are doing the right things, then you get a rude awakening and you realise that you've been living in a happy bubble and that many people, some good friends, are in a very different bubble, a bubble that is neither happy or easy. 

Let me explain. I am the deputy group leader of a group which operates under the auspices of a charity, which most years takes a group of people with disabilities to Lourdes in France. Most of the people who need assistance are what we designate for the purposes of covid "vulnerable". This year, as luck would have it, we were not going. We normally have a break every third or fourth year and this was our break year. This spared us a lot of wasted work. The whole idea of such a trip is simply unfeasible in the current circumstances. In a normal break year we may have one or two group reunions. These, too have been impossible. About a month ago, I suggested a virtual get together, using Zoom. I offered to host the get together. The invites were sent and last Sunday was the day. 

If I am being 100% honest, I wasn't looking forward to it. I have always disliked 'virtual meetings'. I understand the necessity, but my experiences of them over the years has been one that has lead me to develop an aversion to the process. In the business environment, I always felt that it offered far too much scope for people to hide, who did not wish to be productive. I was also concerned about people not being able to join, given the issues some of the group face. It was important to me to ensure that the people who most needed the get together were not excluded. The group leader made a lot of efforts to ensure that this happened. 

Much as I had feared, when the meeting started, some key players had issues joining. But all in all, 28 of the group participated and we did iron out the problems, so everyone got on in the end.  About half way through the get together, it hit me that for some of the group, it wasn't just a nice little get together. They had been looking forward to this for weeks, and even in the difficult medium of Zoom, it was something that they not only enjoyed, but needed. People shielding as they are at high risk have had virtually no social contact outside family members for the best part of nine months. Just the act of seeing friendly faces on a screen and having a bit of banter etc gave them a massive lift. I've been working since the end of the first lockdown. My business is allowed to operate and I've seen the friendly faces of customers  old and new on a daily basis. Some of the people in our group are confined to wheelchairs and have only seen carers for the whole period. The meeting gave them a little glimpse of normality and it was also a demonstration that we cared. 

In normal years, people in such a position still have a social life. They get out, they go to the pubs, see friends, etc. This year none of that has been possible. When I'd been discussing the meeting, I'd envisaged it as I envisage the normal reunion in a year off. But this year, it had a very different significance for many in the group.  For some, it was perhaps the first tenuous link with normality for almost nine months, beyond the mundane rituals of daily life. It was a reminder that we will get away, we will see each other and we, as a group, haven't forgotten anyone.

One helper, who's mum has been a very long time group member, was telling us of his mums struggles. She has dementia and is currently in hospital (non covid related) awaiting a care plan to return home. He told us that whilst coming to terms with her dementia has been difficult, he has come to realise that their relationship now has no side, no edge. All of the silly things we bicker about no longer matter and everything he takes from the relationship is good. They just laugh, joke, watch films and listen to music. He told us that once you can reconcile to the fact that you are living entirely in the present, it is something that you can take enormous positives from. 

It was suggested that we have another pre Christmas get together, to sing some carols etc before Christmas. It was clear that there were people who this really would make a difference for. 

The reason I chose to write a blog about this is because I am sure we all have friends and family who at the moment are feeling forgotten. We have the technology in this day and age to address this. The meeting gave me a lesson in friendship. It is a two way thing. We put our efforts in, but we also get much out of it. When the meeting finished, I felt uplifted. I got several messages after to tell me that people were extremely grateful that we'd put the effort into pulling the whole thing together. 

We really all should think about whether there are any friends who would benefit from a phone call or friendship groups where a member might enjoy a bit of banter and a Zoom call. I'm glad I had a reminder of what we should all be doing. 

One final thought. One of the key members reminded us that the people we help are looked after by professional carers. Back in Lockdown one,  we were out clapping them every Thursday. Now, in the second lockdown, the government have told many they don't deserve a pay rise. That can't be right, can it?

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