London Open House - celebrating architecture, buildings

I decided to volunteer for this as I haven't volunteered for anything recently. You volunteer online and then they send you the Open House "catalogue" of places open to the public for free on that weekend. I decided to volunteer at the Brunel Museum in Rotherhythe on Saturday afternoon as I am interested in Brunel; and the Herbarium at Kew Gardens sounded really great too, (and I read about it in my "Plants from Roots to Riches" book) so signed up for Sunday morning. It was quite easy to get to the Brunel Museum on the Jubilee Line, (and you can also go on the East London line), and the Museum director, Robert, was glad to see us as he really needed the help of volunteers to man the shop/café, buy milk, take money, put the rubbish out and generally be there to talk to people. I went to Robert's talk in the morning and read all the signs and then I was pretty well-prepared to answer questions. My fellow volunteer was an interesting American who had moved from California to the locality (why?) and was looking for something to do since she had retired from research into ?finance/ markets???

It was the devil of a job to get to  Kew Gardens on Sunday morning, I went all the wrong way. There was a choice of jobs. I stood in front of the Open Weekend sign for the Tropical Nursery and tried to entice visitors to it. This is where propagation and care of the Tropical plants takes place, and of course the staff can nurse plants up to be looking fabulous and then pop them into the display in the public greenhouses. Unfortunately it is placed right in front of the small children's play area so most of the people there were concerned with toilets/nappy change and the café rather than seeing the botanical care going on. I was lucky to be standing with a horticulturalist called Lorraine who worked in the Tropical Nursery and specialised in cacti and succulents. I asked her all sorts of questions about the plants and what she does all day! It was lucky she was so nice because I was standing there for a long time. In the end I didn't get to see the herbarium at all, and it is only open once a year. I hope it is open next year, and I will definitely go. I did walk around Kew in the afternoon, (free entry for volunteers) and I will post about what I saw.

There are quite a few attractions at Kew for children; it has changed in that respect. There is a sculpture exhibition at the moment - brilliant for the older ones.

Christmas fundraiser for Save the Children

When I started teaching English at the Maybury Community Centre I inherited 2 volunteers from my predecessor. They are both remarkable retired women, had been volunteering for some time and are very helpful. V. continues to help me at Maybury and Ginny (aged 80+) stopped and helped me at Bellfields instead for a while, where I had a large class and needed some support. Then Ginny had an operation on her feet, so couldn't come, and then said her hips hurt so much she couldn't get out of bed. Suddenly her G.P. went into action but the specialists found that Ginny's body is full of cancer and she hasn't got long to live.

Until she got diagnosed, Ginny played the accordion and keyboard in a Barn Dance band, and also looked after their bookings. She had been a primary school teacher - hence she has nice clear writing - and she had 7 children of her own. She was the sort of person you can trust with your worries. I did, anyway.

Now she can't get out much, she is trying to raise money for Save the Children by selling cards. I think you'll like the designs: they are really cheerful. Have a look here! There is also a great picture of Ginny. She is now knitting squares as well. She hates not to be useful.

See Ginny's cards here - it's a website where you can order.

Taking up the poppies at the Tower of London

I enjoyed my morning pulling up poppies. There are armies of volunteers - so we have made a good inroad into the work, and because of the recent heavy rain the moat is becoming very muddy and slippery. The poppies are on metal rods that are starting to rust, and trying to pull off the rubber fixings is slow work. I spent most of the time filling boxes with the ceramic flower heads, which have been sold. We agreed these look more like Tudor roses than poppies, and some of them are a shiny red but most are a rusty red. These are going back to ??Derby to be washed and put in presentation boxes. Some of us had to make up loads of boxes, some had to sort out 3 lengths of metal rod. These had to be bundled, which I think must be the worst job. We were supervised by a young female equivalent of Sergeant Wilson, awfully well-spoken but ... not an organizer by nature, and vague in the extreme. Maybe she has learned by now that every work party finds their own way of doing things and she lets them get on with it.

Some of the poppies have fallen over probably because of the rain and wind and some are damaged, and I think this makes them more moving really, because they are individual and fragile, and they fall down in the mud ... it will be a morass before they are all taken up.

this is what I was doing most of the time

the volunteers were not all English - some were American and I also heard German spoken.  Great, huh?

Teaching again

It all went pretty well last week but I am worried about Maybury, where I have a class of only 7, and only 3 of them are level 2, and one of the Level 2's is going to struggle horribly with the reading and writing exams. Bellfields, my supposedly disadvantaged class of mums with children in the creche, was popular and fun, and well-attended, I got a good buzz from that class, and I have them again tomorrow. Routes into Work was a small class - a group really - but we had a funny bunch, with M from Turkey who is young, handsome and cheeky, and S from Iran who is older and has strayed from dementia towers without quite knowing why, and 2 ladies from Iran and from Spain who have no particular problems, but must be wondering what on earth they have got into. Luckily I have a volunteer for that class, who really helps me to manage them. My level 2 class is a huge roomful of 18 young adult students who are all (nearly all) very fluent in English and have plenty to say. They can be great fun (they barrack each other) and the thing is to get to know them as individuals (not easy with 18 of them) and at the same time keep the lesson moving along. No volunteer; and I have never taught that kind of group before (3 hours) so I hope to get a bit of advice from my colleague Sue on Tuesday.