Today was the village children’s Christmas party. We all arrived in plenty of time to put the heating on, check the toilets hadn’t frozen, and wash any mousey footprints off the crockery. In all this rain it wasn’t the cold we had to worry about but a leak that had developed in the roof.
I’ve written before about the difficulties of trying to improve the hall, which you can read here. What we’d love is a new hall but instead we can only get funding for projects on the existing hall. Hence we have a brand new heating system fitted on a building that has gaps in the walls big enough to see out of. I could imagine a scenario where all that is left of the original structure is the walls (once we’ve replaced the leaky roof) but this piecemeal approach doesn’t allow us to make the most of this valuable community resource. Before we understood about how funding for this kind of thing works we dreamed of a well-insulated hall run entirely on renewables. It would also have office space, which we could have rented out to local businesses or community groups making the hall’s funding more sustainable. Instead we have to fundraise like mad to pay to heat inside the hall and outside it!
Anyway, ranting aside, the party went very well. Our new Father Christmas was perfect. It was unfortunate he managed to sit exactly under the leak to give out the presents but that was soon remedied. We also only noticed too late that one 18 month little girl had found her way into the sack of presents and was busy unwrapping them all!
By the way, the curlew has nothing to do with this post except that I drew him this week and I thought you might like him.
