Margaret Stonehouse, current President of the Allendale Lions Club, asked me to light the fire this year, to my great delight and slight queasiness. What if the thing took off with a whoosh and a roar, and I was still…
Category: Community
Bonfire Night!
The Allendale Lions haven’t seen a better photograph of the annual bonfire and fireworks than this one, but who knows, tonight’s event may yield up another. But it was a wet miserable day yesterday to be finalising all the details….
The things we share . . .
. . . keep us together Television is great fun as a shared experience. Throughout most of the last half of the 20th century, television was a shared family experience, but now in the 21st the sharing seems to be…
Building the bonfire on Baynes field
I’d never have believed it, if I hadn’t helped out on the work in previous years, what a long and laborious procedure it actually is to create the Bonfire Night. But usually I’ve started to help with the shifting of…
A word, or two, about meetings
I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve heard, or heard of the phrase: ‘I’m happy to do something, but I won’t go to meetings.’ And then the listener nods sympathetically, and wonders, silently, “Well, that’s fine, but how…
Rave on again!
Tonight it’s specifically the turn of the under-18s to experience the rave dance scene. The concept, developed I believe between Anna Harrison and David Porter, has followed on from August’s successful DJ-driven disco. Arriving as the half term finishes out,…
Pat Ashton-Smith, Textile Artist
Pat Ashton-Smith writes in to chat about her life on a hill above Allendale over the past decade. Pat runs bi-weekly embroidery courses at Catton Village Hall, and other workshops by advertisement, in addition to her own artistry endeavours in…
After the auction frenzy, the long dispersion
It was such a long day at the auction yesterday . . . we left at about 6:00pm (with a few more bids for various desiderata left in capable hands), but there were still a couple hundred lots left to…
The Charity Auction!
By Friday evening, Allendale Village Hall was filled to the gunwales with everything that’s anything under the sun. It felt like more amazing stuff than ever, more than the last couple of years certainly. Some decided treasures, some dross naturally,…
The Community Bank
It used to be Tynedale Community Bank, but as I discovered, as Christina at Fawside was busily proofreading the latest iteration of the Allendale and Allen Valleys Pocket Directory, it’s now joined forces with the Credit Union for South-East Northumberland…