A to Z Events Review
Well, it took two and a half years but we finally made it to the end of this alphabet marathon.
We started way back with "A is for Archaeology". Myself and my husband are both members of the local Manshead Archaeological Society, we talked about basic local archaeology and a little about the society then some hands on pottery idenfication. We rounded off the evening at a local Chinese restaurant. After getting the A to Z off to such a flying start I only needed to fill in the other twenty five letters remaining and we'd be home and dry!
The next event was "B is for Baked potato" at our house. Basically I supplied the baked potatoes and salad and Mensa members turned up with various fillings, this turned out to be a real ice breaker for people who hadn't tried the social side before.
The "E for Entertainment" was especially fun. It was a chance to do your party piece in front of your new friends, not that this was compulsory as we needed an audience as well. We were entertained with a Stanley Holloway monologue, someone else played the trombone, there were some folk songs from Lincolnshire, magic, poems and an especially clever young man wowed us with his conjuring tricks.
Country walks seemed quite popular and we had a good time walking round the nearby village of Aldbury, Ivinghoe Beacon, Kensworth Quarry and Dunstable Downs.
When I first started this someone said to me arrange things around food and drink and you won't go far wrong. Well, that has more or less worked and we have had many entertaining evenings in various restaurants and pubs in the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire areas sampling all kinds of fayre including Indian, Italian, Chinese, Thai, good pub grub and real ale!
As something different we had a special trip on the Leighton Buzzard narrow gauge railway, in fact one Mensan used to be a volunteer fireman with the railway and for people who didn't need to head home early there was an impromptu behind the scenes tour.
One of our number had a special birthday (I'll spare his blushes and not say which one) but this too was worked into the alphabet and a very good evening was had in one of the Café Rouge restaurants, where 16 Mensans dressed in red to help the birthday boy paint the town red !!
What can I say? At times it seemed like I would never reach the end of the alphabet but of course I did. Some events were more popular than others and sometimes if it wasn't for the hardcore we knew would come along we'd have been sitting by ourselves and I'm grateful to all the Mensans who came along and helped everyone to have a good time! The prize draw at the end saw Les Draper Eames winning the "Hungry Horse" vouchers, Andy Eames winning the cinema tickets and David Onyett taking home a bottle of bubbly (OK Asti not champers!) I'm stepping down as LocSec for the area now but I'd encourage all members to support their LocSec and try things out. You never know you might just enjoy yourselves!
By Tara Morgan