President's Report, August 2005Our first meeting this month was a real treat during which Athol Hepburn in a faultless presentation took us through his working career. Athol seems to have packed more into one working lifetime than most. His final achievement of running the Occupational Health concerns of the entire military establishment plus all the Ordinance factories made most of feel very inadequate. Our Friends Meeting ran to a very a very different format. Martin Bell and John Oblein hosted a computer-based quiz in which six teams comprising friends and Rotarians competed over a range of six different subjects. The lead changed throughout the evening, but in a very close finish only four points separated the top four teams. We cancelled the lunchtime meeting scheduled for the 17 August in favour of encouraging members and their partners to attend the evening dinner the following day at our Charity Golf Day. The latter was a tremendous success and much to our surprise we surpassed our target by raising £6500 on the day. More details on the days events are given elsewhere on the website. The Business Meeting held on the 24th was largely dominated by a review of the achievements and lessons learnt from our involvement in the previous week's charity golf day. Geoff Donovan gave a clear PowerPoint Presentation which lead to the structure for the 2006 Event. Specific Rotarians have taken responsibility for all the key activities necessary to ensure success on the day. Members also endorsed the grant of £1000 to the Life Education project, which seeks to make schoolchildren aware of the dangers of drugs and other dangers. The first joint meeting of the new Rotary Year with our ladies featured an illustrated presentation by Ivor Manley of Farnborough U3A. He ably described where the movement came from and likened it to Rotary in that each U3A is autonomously run. In view of the current age range of our Rotarians his presentation was well timed. Jannette Hartley, President of Heathrow Rotary, provided an update of the uses to which the huge sum of money collected at Heathrow for their Tsunami Appeal had been put. She described expenditure on Community Centres in Aceh in Indonesia, fishing boats and motorcycles for Sri Lanka. Jannette said it was surprising how far a little money went in the East when well directed. Alan Penny |