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VINEYARD TOUR

On a glorious May morning, a group from Ferndown Probus Club thoughts turned to wine.  Nothing unusual in that I hear you say, this however was a bit different.  We were at the absolutely gorgeous English Oak Vineyard just outside of Poole.

We were greeted by Andrew and Sarah who were not only going to guide us through the tour, but were also the creators and owners of the Vinyard,

The day started with Andrew explaining how they came to determine that this was to be their future, having been involved in other businesses, and the various steps along the way into making it a reality.  This involved amongst other things in finding a site, researching the industry and the learning of new skills.

Sarah, who is very much the green fingered part of the partnership, then took us on a walk through the Vinyard, explaining the growing and care processes involved in growing the three varieties of grapes that they use to create the sparkling wines they produce.

It was then back to a classroom type environment to learn more about the actual wine making process from grape to bottle.

Finally we were invited to taste four of the wines that the Vinyard produces, all very different but all exceptional wines.

A fantastic trip, enjoyed (I hope) by all.

For me the one thing that really stood out was the love and great care that Andrew and Sarah put in to not only produce a truly great product but also a fantastic environment, thank you.

Dennis

FERNDOWN PROBUS 24

CONSTITUTION

1. Title:

            Ferndown Probus 24

2. Aim:

To promote friendship and fellowship amongst retired and semi-retired ladies and gentlemen.

3. Membership:

3.1       The club shall be run on a non-profit making, non-political and non-sectarian basis. Membership shall be open to all gentlemen and ladies who have either semi- retired or  retired from their occupation

3.2       A person applying for membership will be invited to attend at least one meeting of the club before their application can be considered by the committee.

3.3       Honorary Members may be elected at the discretion of the committee. Such membership is in acknowledgement of service to the club.

3.4       Associate members may be elected at the discretion of the committee. Such membership to include members, who due to age or ill health cannot attend regularly.

3.5       All members should be encouraged to serve the club.

3.6       Club members personal details will be stored and processed in line with the latest General Data Protection Regulations. (GDPR) as per our Privacy Policy document.

4. Officers and Committee:

4.1       The officers of the club shall be a President, immediate Past President, Vice President(s), Club Secretary, Treasurer, Speaker Secretary, Lunch and Social Secretary, Membership Secretary, social Events Secretary, all of which roles are fulfilled on a voluntary basis. The committee shall have the authority to add additional members. A minimum of four shall be required for a quorum.

4.2       In a normal year the President shall retire on completion of one year in office and will ideally be succeeded by a Vice President. The retiring President shall automatically become a member of the committee for the following year and will undertake the duties of Welfare Officer.

4.3       An Independent Accounts Examiner shall be elected at the Annual General Meeting. They shall not be a member of the committee.

4.4       In the event of a force majeure, the committee are authorised to make the decisions      necessary to protect the future wellbeing of the club.

4.5       Club Rules may be altered only at an AGM or EGM for which three weeks notice has been given to members by the Club Secretary together with indication of the proposed alteration.

4.6       A majority of those present and eligible to vote shall be required to make the alteration effective. In the event of a voting tie the President shall have a second  or casting vote.

4.7       Copies of the Club Constitution shall be posted in the members area of the Club website.

5. Meetings:

5.1       A lunch meeting for members shall normally be held on the second Wednesday of each month. A coffee morning for all members, partners and friends will normally be held on the third Wednesday of each month. Other activities for the mutual benefit and enjoyment of the members may be arranged.

5.2       The Lunch Secretary must be informed and payment made by 9am on the preceding Monday morning.

5.3       Unless special circumstances prevail, an Annual General Meeting shall be held during the April meeting each year, at which officer reports will be received and the election of Officers and Committee shall take place. Nominations for the officers and committee members must be notified to the Club Secretary prior to the March meeting.

5.3       The examined Financial Report for the previous financial year will be presented at the AGM.

5.4       An Extraordinary General Meeting shall be called by the committee whenever they think it necessary, or at the request of not less than one third of the current membership. No business shall be conducted at an EGM except such as stated in the notice convening the meeting.

5.5       Voting at all meetings shall be by a show of hands (or ballot if so required) by a majority of those present and eligible to vote. In the event of a voting tie the President shall have a second or casting vote.

5.6       Gentleman Members to wear smart casual.

5.7       Committee meetings to be held 3 – 4 times a year.

6. Subscriptions and finance:

6.1       The club financial year shall run from 1^st January until 31^st December.

6.2       The annual subscription is payable by each member and is due on or before the February meeting. Members who have not paid the annual subscription by the date of the AGM in April shall be deemed to have resigned.

6.3       Honorary and Associate members do not pay an annual subscription but retain full membership.

6.4       The committee shall have the power to vary fees, subscriptions etc as and when deemed necessary.

Date  March 2025

 Charles Rees

 During lock-down over a year ago I started writing a book.  It started from the anecdotes about my patients which had been in my head for years intertwined with the changes in Family Doctoring which I had experienced. I called it the Life and Decline of the Family Doctor and this is what I wrote about it and put on the cover.

This book comes from my experiences as a family doctor in a small town in Dorset England for 38 years covering 1972 to 2010. During most of that time being a Family Doctor was more than being a General Practitioner.  I have tried to explain the changes that occurred without trying to extol the virtues of a golden age which never existed. The process of computerisation, advances in medicine, change in the family, de-skilling of the doctor, training of GPs and the rise of the ‘portfolio’ doctor are covered hopefully without over-doing it. I hope I have explained how doctor and patient became distanced and why. All through this period the control by Government extended. The Doctor now works for the Government and not the patient.

Since I retired from the Practice 10 years ago the concept of a patient having their own Doctor for decades or generations has largely gone. What I have tried to do is to explain the changes and why they happened and to do it through the people I lived along side and cared for. They were sometimes hard work, sometimes irritating, often chaotic and occasionally terribly funny. But in the end they were my patients and I was their Doctor.

Whilst trying to get it published I realised that having been a medical student in the 1960s and a junior doctor in the 1970s there was another tale to be told. I called the first part ‘I was not a good medical student’ and the second part ‘Blunt but Good’

The result was a trilogy starting with a young man having lost his mother at age 11 wanted to make a difference. It plots the course from an 18 year old who had discovered the freedom of being a student away from home, the years at medical school, through the truly hard time of being a junior doctor in the 1970s to being a successful Family Doctor and GP Trainer. After 48 years of work and at least 300,000 patients (seen face to face!) later it was mission accomplished.

The final book is called Mission Accomplished and is available by googling Amazon or Author House Bookstore and searching for Charles Rees or Mission Accomplished. There are 247 pages of pithy, easy to read dialogue which may jog your own memories of the past and certainly some things you never knew about East Dorset!

The comments from my old medical student friends has been gratifying but this is my favourite:  It was a most enjoyable read, in fact quite a page turner. You write well in a conversational style, almost like being entertained over a pint in a pub. There was nothing I found uninteresting, and many stories were fascinating, which merely confirms the notion that the colour of Medicine is not so much in the illnesses that come your way, as the surprising situations in which they do and the impact they have.  I enjoyed it so much, I read it twice.(Retired senior anaesthetist Leeds General Infirmary.) 

About the author

Charles Rees is a retired GP who spent 38 years in one East Dorset Practice and worked as a doctor in the NHS   for 48 years. He was involved in Training GPs for over 30 years. He was made a Fellow of the Royal College of GPs in 2006.

My wife , Dot has read Charles’ book for a little relaxation whilst undergoing dialysis and the read didn’t cause her a setback. In fact she found it quite enlightening and amusing and she still seems to be improving as far as the dialysis is concerned indicating that the book is a good read.

Alan Stevens – Working in Asia

Inspired by Rod Woodworth’s article about his visit to the Taj Mahal, it brought back many enjoyable memories of the time I spent working with OXFAM as Fair Trade Director, during which I spent quite a lot of time in Delhi and also had the pleasure of visiting the Taj Mahal.  Two of those memories are recalled below.

Fair Trade organisations are in place throughout Europe and their aims are to ensure that small scale producers are provided with support to develop the necessary business and production skills to generate self-sufficiency, a distribution network through which to sell their products to the market and to promote the concept that producers are paid a fair rate for the goods they make.

OXFAM was a leading member of the European Fair Trade Association and at the time my job for 4 years was as Fair Trade Director.  That mainly included representing the company at Fair Trade organisations in the UK and Europe to help develop a coordinated approach to promoting fair Trade, acting as a Board Director of Café Direct, and taking management responsibility for a small team of 9 staff working overseas on capacity development in the poorer areas of the world plus a 100 strong business team and distribution centre in and around Oxford. 

One of the nine overseas team was a guy from Bangladesh named Mohammed Islam.  Mohammed grew up in a very poor household in Dhaka and in his childhood sold matches on the street to help generate income for his family.  He stood around 5’6” tall but was a larger than life character with a big deep voice and a hearty laugh.  He was very kind to my oldest son Nick who was at the time a trainee teacher.  He organised a month’s summer work experience for Nick in Bangladesh where he lived in the villages and travelled around evaluating the effectiveness of an OXFAM teaching project, which culminated in a published report and a concluding presentation to OXFAM management.  The following Spring Mohammed visited the UK, so I invited him to stay with us in Maidenhead for the weekend.  We decided that he might be interested in a surprise visit to the nearby Windsor Castle, thinking it would be a new experience for him.  Towards the end of our visit we were walking down to see the chapel, when he suddenly looked up at a building on our left and announced that he had slept in the room we were looking at.  I first of all thought he must be joking, but it turned out that the daughter of the Chaplin of the Windsor Castle chapel worked at OXFAM and had invited him to stay during an earlier weekend.  Who would have expected our man from Dhaka to have been so near to our British royalty, and modest enough not to let on and spoil our surprise visit.

Another member of the team was Retno who lived in Jakarta, Indonesia.  In 1999 Sue and I visited China on holiday and booked a week in Bali on the way home.  One of our producer partners was the Lombok Pottery Centre from whom we purchased good quality products to sell in our OXFAM shops.  With Lombok located just off the coast of Bali, I invited Retno to come over and to join us and organise a day visit for us to see the Lombok potters in action. 

Select individual pictures to expand and scan around other pictures in the group.

The member potters of the Lombok Pottery Centre are women who work from home using handed down skills from earlier generations to produce pots that are then sold by the LPC in both local and export markets.  The women are paid a fair price for their pots and also benefit from an annual profit share, all of which helps them to provide their children with a better education to equip them with the qualifications to achieve a better life, plus essential health care when required.  When we visited, our producer (above) was working on her front step.  Her husband was asleep as he had no work at the time and her children were at school. The house she lived in was largely built from the proceeds of her pottery work.

The production process is a very simple one, but it takes a lot of skill to produce a good quality finished product with the limited materials and equipment available.  The terracotta pots are made at home from locally sourced clay and then fired in bonfires of dried rice stalks.  The popular black pattern is achieved by adding rice husks during the firing, which when burned add the black coloration.

An example of the style of the Terra Cotta pots produced by women in small villages in Lombok and sold in shops like OXFAM all around Europe.

It was very rewarding for us to see our OXFAM Fair Trade operation at work first hand and when we returned home, what we had learned from our visit provided strong motivation for our UK based team to continue their good work.  All in all, this visit provided me with one of the happiest memories from my working life.

Dhaka is the capital city of Bangladesh, in southern Asia. Set beside the Buriganga River, it’s at the centre of national government, trade and culture. The 17th-century old city was the Mughal capital of Bengal, and many palaces and mosques remain. American architect Louis Khan’s National Parliament House complex typifies the huge, fast-growing modern metropolis.

Hi fellow Probus Club members, we are all part of history and we want you to recognise your ability to develop our interest in things historical or older. It has been suggested by Gerry that we could contribute to the website with our respective historical interests. 

I suggest you write something. I know you are all clever people, but you may not have thought about writing about history. Why not? Everyone else does!

I have written tons of stuff to do with my own historical interests and I do not want to hog things but perhaps I could stimulate your interest a little. What I found out when investigating almost anything historical is that there is nearly always an angle which no-one else has come across.

For instance, Saving Private Ryan is a great film of the Americans storming Pont du Hoc on Omaha beach D Day. I went on two D Day trips and then led my own party. Simple research demonstrated that not only was that event not typical of D day, but it was also not typical of Omaha beach much of which was taken without casualties. The Americans knew it would be difficult to take but their preparation was poor. They dropped 30,000 bombs on the beach none of which hit anything. The battleships Texas and Nebraska bombarded for 1 hour whereas the British ships, Warspite, Belfast and Roberts bombarded all day and 2 days later after re-arming were requested by the Americans to shell behind Carentan. Their troop carriers were dropped 7 miles out whereas ours were taken as close as possible. Some of their tanks with their hapless crews were dropped straight into the sea whereas ours were on the beach when the infantry arrived. This sort of sloppy preparation makes a poor film and takes nothing from the heroism of the ordinary soldier, but it happened. The record is all there – if you look. 

Interestingly the first few frames of Saving Private Ryan show Abraham Lincoln writing a letter of condolence to a Mrs Bixtby on the loss of her 5 sons fighting for the Union. It is said to be one of the most beautiful letters ever written in the English language. But – a bit of research reveals Mrs Bixtby from Boston Massachusetts was a Confederate sympathiser and hated Lincoln. Not all her sons were dead, and some had not even fought but were claiming compensation. Oh, and Lincoln may not have written it anyway!

So, what did I find that no-one else has mentioned? The timeline reveals that the letter was written in the summer of 1864 when the Union casualties were so bad such a letter was the last thing the public wanted to hear about. It was buried until November when the fall of Atlanta made it politically acceptable! 

Have I whetted your appetite to write something interesting on your favourite subject? Writing is very therapeutic. Stopped me going mad anyway! 

So, try something. Surprise yourself. Surprise us.”

One of my friends gave his own contribution. He was a pupil at boarding school in 1957 when the Asian flu came and has compared it with 2020 and COVID-19. Its history. We can all do it. 

Best wishes Charles

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