Well these are indeed strange times to be living through, not only is there a real and present danger to our lives, but we are also isolated from the ones we love keeping friends and family at a distance when we may need them the most. The pain doesn't end there as for many of us we are also trying to work out what life will be like after this is all over and the impact of Covid19 on our financial stability... some of us may be furloughed, some struggling to get benefits, mortgage holidays and government funding for their businesses... altogether this makes for a very worrying time.
The Broadbridge Bombshells WI has always been a place to meet like minded women from the village, bringing together both Old Broadbridge Heath and New (Wickhurst Green) in one cohesive, friendly and supportive group... we also have members from the wider Horsham area so we are not exclusively BBH. In normal times we meet every last Tuesday of the month at 8pm at St John's Church Hall in BBH, we have been doing so since the creation of our WI around two years ago. We have enjoyed meetings with speakers demonstrating cake decorating, a luxurious home facial, belly dancing and quantum meditation, we have had speakers from the Metropolitan Police, Horsham's nature reserves and a real life witch. We have learned crafts all the way from greetings cards, christmas wreaths, Easter Pinecones to book folding. We have had a stoolball evening, wine tasting, hilarious quizzes and two fabulous Christmas parties. But most of all we have all had fun and found friendship that we would not have had if it weren't for this lovely group of women. A selection of pictures showing some of our meetings follows:
So what do you do when you can no longer meet up because of social distancing and lockdown? Well you plan a virtual meeting of course! Our indefatigable president Rowena made the scary leap into technology to find out what we could do in order to meet up virtually, and we also decided to launch a Facebook Group exclusively for our paid up members - if any members have still not joined up, this is the place where we can keep in touch, offer each other moral support, exchange ideas and information and to just have a laugh with funny memes etc. so please, please join even if you do nothing else on Facebook, this is a great group!
So last Tuesday evening armed with a glass of wine and our laptops, ipads, mobile phones etc we all got together to have a face to face meeting on Zoom. After a quick catch up and a few technical conversations... here we were chatting to each other from across the village. Rowena had planned a family quiz so along with the WI members we had husbands and children playing and even the odd cat and dog making an appearance. The Zoom format works exceptionally well for things like quizzes and we all had a lot of fun trying to answer the questions... there were rounds on History, Food & Drink, Netflix and Music which included a 'name that tune' section. Of course there was lots of pontificating and a few clues from the quiz master (Rowena's husband Dan) but mainly lots of laughs. The quiz lasted an hour or so and there was a clear winner in Mary and her husband, second place was Vicky (her history degree student daughter Louise was pretty invaluable on the historical questions) and then third place myself who scored a big fat zero on the Netflix round as both cats were no help whatsoever! Having said that though, I think we were all winners for (a) working out the technology (b) for being able to put our brains into action so late in the evening and (c) for managing to keep the alcohol consumption to a respectable level!
So we have proven that not even Coronavirus can keep the girls down and we will find a way to meet come what may. Our next meeting will hopefully be taking place in the same way on Tuesday 28 April and as the quiz was so successful, it is likely that we will do another one!
Book Club will be holding their monthly get together tomorrow on Zoom to discuss the book they are currently reading. I can personally thoroughly recommend The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, but at six hundred odd pages, you have run out of time for this month... Next month we will be reading The Mitford Scandal by Jessica Fellowes, so if you are short of something to keep you occupied during lockdown, please join us.
Watch the Facebook page for more information and let's hope we are back to normal very soon indeed...
Much love from the Bombshells xxx
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