Christmas party

We were delighted to hold our Christmas Party at the Ivy Hill Hotel this year after having to hold last year’s online. It was attended by Club members, their spouses and other guests. The guests included Freda Mountain PHF and former member Don Hilton. We were also pleased to welcome our Honorary Member and Past President Brian Collings.

We enjoyed a traditional Christmas meal, with salmon for those who preferred fish. After the lunch we moved briefly to some formal business, including instructions for those who had volunteered to collect at Morrisons in Melbourne and the Chelmsford Star Co-op in Danbury. President Peter announced that John Watkins has agreed to replace Andrew Vince as Attendance Officer when Andrew steps down from that role at the end of the year. However, Peter also mentioned that the Council was holding an emergency meeting the following Monday evening to decide whether to continue with physical meetings or revert to online meetings pending further advice from Rotary International in Great Britain & Ireland and the government.

We were then entertained by Paul, a magician. He is about to retire, so we were lucky to be able to book him.

He performed a number of tricks, keeping up banter all the time. He did the three-card trick with very large cards; that ended with him showing all three cards he had in his hands were all the one we were looking for (Ace of Clubs). We had “Guess which metal beaker the ball is under”, where it kept appearing under one you wouldn’t expect. There were large cards with dots on them, which kept moving about the cards as Paul showed us each side, and a set of six “ordinary” cards, which were always six no matter how many times Paul removed three of them.

There were other tricks as well. The photograph shows President Peter amazed at the most perplexing of them, when Paul managed to “read Peter’s mind” and work out which word Peter had picked out at random in a random page of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. (Hmm. It was actually the word “random”. Perhaps there was some influence going on there.)