by Calne Town Mayor - Robert MacNaughton
Hi Everybody, Happy New Year to you all. I am not sure if I have seen the sun yet, but it will appear after the storms have finished battering us. Calne is a wonderful place for community groups.
Over the Christmas period around 100 of our residents were given free Christmas dinners.
This is a picture of Terry, and guests in Calne Central on Christmas Day. We were preparing the Mayoral dinner at the same time but I wanted to go to Calne Central to wish them all Happy Christmas.
This is Mary and Ian Wakeham preparing a dinner for their community on the Friday before Christmas. Ian is a very good cook, and was doing all the work by himself; he had calculated 8 brussel sprouts per person which impressed me.
Mary was mainly looking after their guests while Ian was slaving away. They said they were preparing another, smaller lunch on Christmas day for their volunteers: around 12 people.
This is a picture of Chris Gray, from the Lions, who helped me enormously on Christmas Day along with his wife Sara, and their truly amazing sons, Edward, Thomas and Max, who worked non stop.
The cooking was led by Luke DeBoer, whom I had only met a few weeks before. He told me he liked cooking, so I said 'how about 30 ish people on Christmas Day?'. He hesitantly agreed, and came with me to Sainsbury's to collect the food we needed. I had sent an ingredient list to Julie Jackson at Sainsbury's, and she had it all ready for us. Sainsbury's donated a lot of what we needed, and the Calne Community Charity had given us a donation to pay for the rest.
The turkey we needed was donated, cooked and sliced by Robert Merrick at Calne Catering Company. Sharon Blyfield had contacted me a few days before Christmas asking to help. She explained she had lost her husband earlier in the year, and wanted to be volunteer on Christmas Day. She was brilliant. She worked seamlessly with Millie DeBoer downstairs, serving all the food, and then doing all the washing up.
The other members of our team were Sarah Gibson, and her husband David. Sarah is standing for MP in the next election, so you will be seeing a lot of her, and others, in leaflets, over the next period, before that madness is concluded later in 2024. We hadn’t met before, but became a team very quickly. Chris Gray also drove the Calne Community bus, which collected people before the meal, and then dropped them off afterwards.
Those attending the Christmas dinner were gifted shoeboxes filled with goodies which had been collected and made by the Community Christmas - Calne organisation, thanks to Karen Lewis and her team for making this possible.
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