We've done it!

Well done, Old Buckenham
This plaque, presented earlier this evening, says it all.

Lots happening in October

Diary dates for October


Friday 1 Crib drive, Village Hall, 7.30pm

Saturday 2 Table Top sale, Church Rooms,2pm to 4.30pm

Sunday 3 Wargames club, Village Hall, 2.30pm to 6pm

Monday 4 Monday Mardle, Church Rooms, 2.15pm to 4.15pm

Tuesday 5 Coffee and chat, Church Rooms, 10.30am to 12 noon

Tuesday 5 Allotment Society meeting, Church Rooms, 7.30pm

Wednesday 6 Women's Fellowship, Methodist Chapel, 2.30pm

Thursday 7 Parish Council, Village Hall, 7.30pm

Friday 8 'One Stop Bus' outside Village Shop, 10am to 12 noon

Friday 8 Pop Quiz, High School, 7.30pm

Friday 8 Netgamers, Village Hall, 7pm to 9pm

Saturday 9 Roadside textile collection from 9am

Saturday 9 Open Parish Council meeting, Village Hall, 10am

Wednesday 13 Luncheon Club, Village Hall, 10am to 2pm

Thursday 14 Breckland Flower and Garden Club, Village Hall, 2pm

Thursday 14 Social and Wine Circle, Church Rooms, 7.45pm

Friday 15 Village Quiz, Village Hall, 7.30pm

Saturday 16 Garage sale at 'Karmel', The Green, from 8am

Sunday 17 Village-wide garage sales

Sunday 17 Harvest lunch, All Saints Church, 12 noon

Sunday 17 Wargames club, Village Hall, 2.30pm to 6pm

Monday 18 Monday Mardle, Church Rooms, 2.15pm to 4.15pm

Wednesday 20Request Songs of Praise, Methodist Chapel, 7.30pm

Monday 25 Village hall car park closed throughout half term

Wednesday 27 Luncheon Club, Village Hall, 10am to 2pm

Thursday 28 Women's Institute, Village Hall, 7.30pm

What a day for a coach trip

Luncheon Club visit Ranworth
Old Buckenham Luncheon Club had an outing to Ranworth on the Norfolk Broads today. And it rained nearly all the time..

Unbrellas were needed just getting fom the village hall to the coach. Not really the weather to enjoy looking at all the cruisers and yachts at their moorings at Ranworth so it was straight into the local hostelry for the pre-booked meal. Two people escaped to walk to Ranworth Church for a quick look round and a trip up the church tower but the view from the top was rather murky.

Then it was back on the coach for a sightseeing tour of the local narrow lanes and back to a damp village car park.

Out a few days early

October newsletter
Pick up your copy in the village now.

Play for tonight

Kidz and Kronies
If you want somewhere to go tonight and have six quid to spare then the editor can recommend "Kidz and Kronies" at Old Buckenham Village Hall starting at 7.45pm.
Old Buckenham Players are putting on two one-act plays - 'Teechers' byJohn Godber and 'Sunnyside Up' by Richard Crawley. If you are youngish you will be reminded of all those things that you got up to at school and if you are more elderly (like the editor) then you can see what life is really like (?) in an old people's home. Plenty of laughs and lots of enthusiastic actors, both young and old, to entertain you.

Find out what the Parish Council has been doing

Quiz your parish council
A Special Parish Council meeting will be held on Saturday 9 October 2010 at the Village Hall at 10am.
There will be an update by parish council members on various village projects and this will be followed by an open forum for residents to put forward their ideas and opinions.
It is also intended that the Parish Council will hold a meeting in the Village Hall at 7.30pm on Wednesday 13 October on the forthcoming precept.

A quiz of note

Pop in for quiz

There will be a Pop Quiz on Friday 8 October in Old Buckenham High School Hall. Organised by the Friends of OBHS and hosted by Hugh Lynch, this quiz will test your knowledge of music from the 60s to the present.
Teams should be between two and six people and admission is £1 per person on the night. All family, friends and people of all ages are welcome.
Please bring your own food and drinks.

Normal for Norfolk

Famous local people

It was an entertaining evening at Old Buckenham Social and Wine Circle when one of the regular speakers, Chris Weston, came to talk about “East Anglian sons and daughters”. It was amazing to hear about local people who became famous and did great things.
There was Robert Bond who opened a drapery shop in Ber Street, Norwich, in 1879, claimed to have sold a thousand hats on just one Sunday’s trading, whose shop was bombed in 1942 and has now become John Lewis.
George Formby was someone with a love of the Norfolk Broads, lived and sailed near Wroxham and reputedly was paid £3000 a week at the height of his career.
Sarah Glover was born in Norwich in 1786. In trying to teach music to children, she hit upon a system of notation she called 'the Norwich Sol-fa'. It came to the notice of John Curwen, who made certain alterations to it, and his Tonic Sol-fa gained wide popularity - not least in The Sound of Music!
Richard Lewis Hearne, born in Norwich during 1908, was an English actor, comedian, producer and writer. He was famous for his stage and television character Mr Pastry. Some of the audience at the meeting could remember him putting on entertainment in Old Buckenham during their youth.
Eminio William Louis Marchesi, who died in 1968, founded the Round Table, a fellowship and community charitable organisation for young businessmen which now exists worldwide..
On August 25, 1804, York racecourse hosted the first know horserace to feature a female jockey competing against a male jockey. This was Alicia Meynell, who also came from Norfolk.
Most local of these famous people was Lionel Robinson, born in Australia but who lived at Old Buckenham Hall and installed the cricket ground that once hosted the famous game between an English XI and the Australian team.
The October meeting will be about local history with Cliff Amos of the Attleborough Heritage Group coming to talk about Attleborough fire station through the ages. Why not come along to the Church Rooms at 7.45pm on Thursday 14 October for an entertaining and educational evening.

Keep clear of car park during half term

Repairs are going to happen

Everyone will no doubt be delighted to hear that the Old Buckenham village hall car park is to be repaired during the schools' half term holiday - the week starting Monday 25 October.
It is absolutely essential that no cars at all are parked there during this period because any delays to the work will incur extra expenditure. Please try to get up to date with depositing your toy, paper or glass recyclables in the banks by Sunday 24 October, or hold on to the materials until the work has been completed.

Nearly quiz time again

Exercise your brain

The Autumn Quiz will be held in the Village Hall on Friday 15 October starting at 7.30pm. This time the questions have been set by Old Buckenham Women’s Institute who were the winners of previous quiz. Entry cost £4 for a team of four and the cost includes light refreshments. Entries can be notified to Jill on 860551 or just turn up in good time on the quiz night. Teams can be from organisations or groups of friends. Come along for an enjoyable fun-filled evening.

Preliminary works

Starting to grow
The first work has started on clearing the site for the allotment plots in Old Buckenham.

Flotsam and Jetsam

Breckland Flower and Garden Club

A recycled lampshade from a railway station, a rescued urn from an antiques shop, tree bark and driftwood were all incorporated into Nick Grounds’ designs when his demonstration entitled 'Flotsam and Jetsam' took place at September's meeting of the Breckland Flower and Garden Club. As well as colourful flowers Nick also used carrots, lettuce and aubergine to add impact in one arrangement; another was created from a supermarket 'mixed bouquet'. Together with tips, quotes and anecdotes he proved very entertaining as well as creating some lovely raffle prizes.
In the flower arranging competition the Old Hands category was won by Ursula Jackson with Shirley Penfold second and with Sylvia Briggs and Pat Wells joint third. New Hands was won by Susan Thurlow who also won the trophy for best use of colour. Janet Skidmore was second.
In the Table Show competition for an item harvested from the garden, first was Sally Westrup (tomato), second Shirley Penfold (sunflower) and third Janet Skidmore (turk's head squash).
Next month's meeting will be held on Thursday 14 October at 2pm at Old Buckenham Village Hall when Alison Cushing’s demonstration will be entitled 'Seasonal'.
The competition title is 'Autumn in a Copper Container' with a trophy being awarded for the best exhibit. The table show will be for three stems from your garden with autumn colour.
If you have an interest in flowers, flower arranging or just enjoy growing flowers then why not come along to one of the meetings. The Club offers a varied programme including speakers, demonstrators (visiting and in-house), tutorials and outings
Further details can be obtained from Pat on 457305 or Sally on 788712.

A busy day at the show

Produce and Handicraft Show
Old Buckenham held its annual Produce and Handicraft Show on Sunday 12 September in the Village Hall. This event, organised by Old Buckenham WI, was even more popular than ever and attracted hundreds of entries both from the village and from various exhibitors in the surrounding area. The produce and handicraft items were displayed around two rooms in the hall and the judges were kept busy during the morning deciding on the best exhibits.
There was some serious competition in many of the classes, particularly the preserves, cookery and vegetables, and this provided plenty for all the visitors to see in the afternoon. Some inhabitants of Mill Road continued to have their own challenges, particularly in the men’s cookingwith nine entries in the rock cakes class, which brought some added spice to the competition.
The trophies and other prizes were presented by Ron Brewer, the village newsletter editor. It was a good afternoon for Olive Shickle who collected the prize for the flower classes with the pot plant award going to John Frost. Debbie Thomas from Stacksford came top in the preserves and won the prize for cookery. The wine prize was shared between Peter Gedge from Stacksford and John Brand from Attleborough. It was very competitive in the vegetable and fruit classes with Ray Snow from Banham managing to score the most points and also taking the award for the best tray of vegetables. Betty Stacey from Attleborough won the trophy for the handicraft section with Shirley Penfold from Attleborough collecting the cup for the flower arranging classes. Pat Shearing won the shield for the Art section.
The children’s classes were very well supported, particularly by the local primary school, and produced some imaginative, interesting and colourful entries. Martha Richardson won the section for children under 7 with Natasha Askew taking first place for those between 8 and 11. Megan Richardson was successful in the over-twelve category while the special award for the best exhibit in all the children’s classes went to Toby Richardson for his Lego model.
This year the overall winner of the cup for the most points in the whole show was Ray Snow with 61 points, closely followed by Stuart Barker on 51 points.
Thanks to the generosity of many of the entrants the prize-giving was followed by a enjoyable auction of produce conducted by Mike Barlett. This provided many laughs, great bargains as well as raising useful funds in the process. The large raffle draw came next and the proceedings ended with Old Buckenham WI’s president, Susan Hunter, thanking all the WI members and others from the village who had worked so hard to ensure the event was both enjoyable and a success.

Blog milestone

400 up
This will be the four hundreth post on the Old Buckenham blog. It started at the beginning of October 2008 as an experiment to see if material from the Old Buckenham village newsletter would work in this format. There has been a post roughly every two days throughout this two year period and the audience has grown steadily.
The number of readers is still very small compared with some of the sites out there in the blogosphere. This site is just about getting 500 hits a month. Nearly 80% are from the UK and 8% from the USA. The rest are from all over the world, at the last count this included 95 different countries (including one of our regulars from New Zealand who has been known to to be telling his friends in Old Buckenham the local news before they knew about it).

Replacement board

Have you noticed?

There is now a new notice board on the grass outside the Old Buckenham village shop.
Thanks are due to Colin Phillips for replacing the notice board (the original one was damaged by a falling tree) and to Brent Hibbert for erecting it.
This board is intended for posters advertising village events and postcards advertising anything that is being given away for free, not sold. Anything being sold must still go on the notice board inside the shop.
Posters and postcards for display can be left at the shop or put through the door of the Old School House on the side of the Green. They will be left up for up to a month before an event. If there are too many to display all of them at once, some may have to be up for a shorter time.
If you have any queries please phone Alison on 860692.

More images of the Fete

The Fete in pictures, part two
The Kenninghall Morris dancers had a smashing time, many books were recycled at the book sale, a small traction engine toured the car park and then there was the inevitable clearing up...

All the fun of the Fete

The Fete in pictures
The weather was kind so lots of people from Old Buckenham and the surrounding area came along to the Village Hall. The resulting Fete was good fun for all.
These photos aim to give an indication of how well the afternoon went. There was the Punch and Judy, barbecue food, plenty of stalls including roll-a-ball and the lady drummers from the Dead Goat Appreciation Society.
Another batch of photos will be posted about mid-day tomorrow.

All the fun of the fair

All set up and ready to go
The fair is now ready for business on Old Buckenham village Green and will be open over this weekend.

Pick up the September issue

Another newsletter
The September issue looks like this and there are copies at various places around Old Buckenham where you can pick one up.

The history of your cuppa

All about tea

At the August meeting of Old Buckenham Women’s Institute they were taken on a journey into the history of tea. The speaker was Christine Rooke and her talk was entitled “From Tea Bowl to Tea Bag”.
Tea as a drink, was discovered, by accident, in China nearly 5000 years ago. The inventor, Shennong, happened to be sitting beneath a camellia sinensis bush when a few of the leaves dropped into his bowl of boiled water. So began the history of tea drinking.
Dried tea leaves did not arrive in Europe until the early seventeenth century, brought by Dutch and Portuguese traders. Until this time coffee and chocolate were the fashionable drinks in European cities. It took a royal marriage to publicise tea drinking in the British court and to establish it in the salons of the aristocracy. It was the wife of Charles II, Catherine of Braganza, to thank for the love of that daily cuppa.
Tea remained very expensive, leaves being used again and again in poorer households. Eventually Twinings opened a shop in the Strand in London and gradually consumers gained access to both black and green tea.
Tea of, course, was served in china. This pottery was imported from China until English potters were able to replicate the fine porcelain of the Far East. Tea bowls were replaced with cups and milk and sugar crept into the brew.
Eventually tea plantations were created throughout the British Empire to supply the ever-growing demand of the home market. It took the Americans to invent the tea bag a hundred years ago, rendering the tea strainer obsolete.
Tea is still the most popular drink in the UK and a vast range can be found to choose from on the supermarket shelves. It is no longer so expensive to buy that it is kept in a locked tea caddy and there is, remarkably, a tea plantation in Cornwall.
The Chinese tea ceremony eventually became, over the centuries, the British institution of afternoon tea.
The next WI meeting is on Thursday 23 September in Old Buvkenham Village hall starting at 7.30pm and the subject of the talk will be ‘Jack Juby and his life with Heavy Horses’.