8th December 2019

Dear All,

We were on street patrol again last night and it was reasonably challenging. It did not start well as the guy who was on last week forgot to pass on the church keys so we had to go via Waterbeach to collect them. Then the security company who provide the bouncer for the café said they could not guarantee that he would turn up so the café was cancelled. However, the police did turn up for a briefing which has not happened very often recently. It was a fairly busy night with many office Christmas parties in town, then it started to pour with rain about midnight. As usual the last 2-hour shift after 2 am was most demanding. We were called to Vinyl, the most recently renovated club where a girl out with the Cambridge United staff Christmas do, was convulsed and not responding well. It took nearly an hour and a half and she was still not fit for a taxi so her friend’s father was roused from his bed to collect her at 3.30am. We were just returning to base to clock off when we were called to the taxi rank where a lad of Portuguese extraction was having palpitations and behaving oddly. His mates were in a club that was staying open until 6 am. We eventually wound up at 4 am and bed at 5 am – hence the delay in producing todays epistle!

The penultimate session of “Just Vegetating” was “Minor Crops b” – Artichokes, Cardoons, Sweet Potatoes, Okra etc. One more session to go.

On Tuesday I had a visit from a man keen to sell improvements in the solar panels. It did not start well as the man on the phone who arranged the visit claimed their rep had another visit in the village, the efficiency would be improved by 33% and it would cost around £500. In fact there was no other visit nearby, the efficiency would be improved by 25% and would cost £6000!

We visited a couple of garden centres on Wednesday to implement a little Christmas shopping and purchase some autumn fruiting raspberry canes.

Our Thursday outing began in Godmanchester and skirted Huntingdon and crossed Hinchingbrooke Park – so no ploughed fields this week!

Hinchingbrooke Park

 

River Ouse at Huntingdon

Godmanchester

It was my turn to present a biography this week and I had chosen “Jack London”. It did not start well as there was no one to let us ibn the Friends Meeting House where we hold the course and we had to decamp to one of the member’s home which was not idea for a PowerPoint presentation – but it seemed to go well. Jack London only lived to 40 but packed an enormous amount in that time including being an Oyster pirate, seal hunting, bumming rides on trains, a spell in prison for vagrancy, an adventure gold mining in the Klondike, covering two wars as a journalist and sailing half way round the world. He wrote 23 novels, 46 short stories, 3 autobiographies, 50 non fiction essays, 3 plays and 113 poems.

 Jack London aged 17

Yesterday was along day starting with a Men’s Breakfast and taking in Over 1 v 1 Great Shelford before bed at 5 am.

With love

Mike & Kate