INTRODUCTION - START HERE

Hello I'm Brian the Swansea U3A Groups Coordinator as well as the 'Oldie Backpacker'. I belong to the Swansea U3A (University of the Third Age, an inappropriate title which leaves many of us cold). You may be pleased to learn there are plenty of opportunities here for, discussion and socialising, thought and laughter, starting new interests or continuing others, making new friends, but no formal tuition and no exams! Perhaps the innuendo in the blog's title gives a better feel from one who 'intends to grow old disgracefully'. I have just been cajoled (arm twisted, in the nicest possible way, by Chairman Bob) onto the committee and now find myself in employment again.

Our U3A meets collectively on Wednesday afternoons at Swansea University for a wide ranging series of lectures, but also at regular intervals in special interest, self financing, groups. There are currently around thirty of such groups with memberships between five and fifty people, some meeting weekly others monthly, in members' homes, community halls and hotels as appropriate. One of my roles is to help new groups get started, another, which I shall enjoy, is to maintain contact by visiting group sessions. I intend to publicise these activities via this blog.

If you want to find out more than I can possibly tell you ATTEND the
U3A GROUPS OPEN DAY at the DOLPHIN HOTEL Swansea on 8 OCTOBER between 10.30am and 3.30pm
where each group will set up stall to recruit new members.

If anyone already has ideas for a new group would they please inform me on Swansea 424702 before the Groups' Day, because that would be an ideal event at which to gauge interest.

NODDY GUIDE TO USING INTERNET and BLOGS
Chairman Bob has persuaded me to give up the ego trip and use the About Me section on the page which always appears first to provide some simple instructions. Here I have the space to expand a little and to layout my thoughts easily. So here goes. Please skip to the paragraph heading GROUPS if you don't need elementary guidance.

Internet
You wouldn't have got this far without typing in the Internet address and actioning
http://muses-of-an-ageing-groupie.blogspot.com
The first thing to do is to click 'Favorites' (on the second line at the very top), then 'save this page'. In future all you have to do is to click on Favorites with the up/down arrows scroll down the list to highlight the site of today's choice and click. Thus avoiding any address typing to access your favourite sites. Use Favorites for all your favourite web sites.

Blogs
A Blog is simply a series of letters published on the Internet to which only those, like you, who know the site address can access. Pat Herbert should think of this blog as Letters from Mr Bloggie, with apologies to Alistaire Cooke. A Blog has its own web site this one is held on Google's computers. I can edit it as I am doing right now at any time. You, the reader can leave comments - please do so and leave your name, but please only to contribute to further discussion about groups. Be warned, I can cut you all off, or limit it to a select list of authorised well behaved contributors if needed.

The first page after entry is always the start of the last letter written. On the left just below a picture of me is a short set of instructions. There are several ways to move about ('navigate' in the jargon), PCs are like that there are always a hundred and one ways of doing the same thing. To get here you probably jumped on the link INTRODUCTION _ START HERE. If so there's a gold star in the post!

To read down the letter ('scroll') a line at a time use the Down Arrow cursor control on your keyboard. To move back then use UP. To move by much larger steps then use 'Page Up' and 'Page Down' keys in the same way.

More sophisticated ways of navigating a blog are to click on the 'links'. Firstly find your way about with the mouse and look for links, they are the points on the screen where the cursor changes from an arrow head to a hand. If the cursor shows as a hand and you click you will jump on the link. In a blog most of the links are simply to another part of the same document. There are two main areas of interest. the ARCHIVE at the top left of the screen which gives a list of the letter headings grouped by the month of original issue. Using these you can jump to the head of the requisite letter ('posting' in the jargon). At the end of each posting there are links on keywords. If for instance you are looking at a posting with a keyword 'read' it will include a paragraph about a reading group, if you click on the keyword 'read you get all those postings in the whole blog with the keyword 'read'.

Very importantly at the end of each posting there is a link which jumps you to another page where you can see any comments already entered and leave a comment of your own. Since for the moment I have allowed entry by anonymous subscribers do include your NAME and GROUP as part of your message. Since this is a private blog it cannot be found by search on the Internet not even by Google, therefore it's a reasonable presumption that only U3A members or their close friends will access this blog.

If you want to know more about me then click under About Me. If you want to start a blog of your own then sign up via Google for a Google Blog. It is free but you will have to open a Google Account - the same as you would do to use gmail. It provides you with a cut down set of the facilities you would find in Word. I found it a wonderful way of keeping people at home in the picture during our lengthy travels, internet cafes are never far away, as well as providing me with a diary to aid memories. You will find links to my two travel blogs under 'more about me' - sorry about the spelling in these earlier blogs, but then spell checkers in Mandarin or Spanish are not very useful!!!

Jump about by links and remember that you can always go back a step, or forward a step, by using the green highlighted arrows at the left hand end of the Internet line, three lines down on my screen.


GROUPS
I start this blog with a brief introduction to the four Swansea U3A groups I already know about from personal experience.

BOOK GROUP 1

On first joining the U3A I decided to join what was then the only Reading Group. It has been run for several years by Mo Ellard. My motivation was simply that I had not read for pleasure since my early twenties and knew I was missing out on an ideal activity for the retired. At work I read only, slowly and very carefully, or by extra high speed scanning looking for needles in haystacks, and in consequence found it difficult to memorise or maintain concentration on a complex story line. Five years on I have speeded up a bit and am beginning to enjoy reading again, but still find it hard to memorise plots.

Five years later there are three reading groups in this U3A and I am told they are all different. How they differ I intend to find out. Each summer we make an annual choice of the reading program for the next year by a semi democratic method. This year's authors are Maggie O'Farrell Blake Morrison, Ann Patchet, Sam Selvon, Donna Tarrt, Ernest Hemingway, Sarah Waters, Edith Wharton, C J Sansom and Susan Fletcher. All but three are new to me and that's after reading a novel a month for five years.

We meet monthly at the Hall attached to St. Paul's Church Sketty. At our last meeting before the summer break Mo announced that she and I had just been elected to the committee, boasting that our group was now particularly well represented.

DIGITAL MEDIA (Having Fun with Digital Photography)

Mo's boast was squashed when I went to one of their meetings only to find almost all that Group belonged to the committee. Chairman Bob, thinking I was already trying out my role of Group Coordinator, immediately plied me with coffee and scones covered in lashings of butter and strawberry jam. I will be expecting similar over the top welcomes wherever I appear!

In fact I was only trying the group out with the thought of joining and in particular of getting my wife involved in the tedious task of making sense of our lifetime backlog of film and slide photographs. I intend to return to meet group leader Anthony Hughes, guru in the dark arts of falsifying photographs to disprove the idea that 'the camera never lies'. He will be back in October to dispense me advice on more basic 'photoshopping' aimed at making the best of reality in my archive of travel photographs.

It helps if you can bring a laptop PC. They meet at the Vivian Hall Annexe at Blackpill.


ARMCHAIR TRAVEL

This group now run by Brian Davies coincides with my continuing interest in exploration of the less developed world of Asia and South America, although I am currently grounded for health reasons. It meets once a month at which there is a slide/power point/verbal presentation, usually by one of the group members. I shall be talking in the Spring about a trip to Guatemala, though wife Joan is going to muscle in on this one.

They also eat in exotic sounding restaurants. So the preliminary meeting is at China-China for lunch on Friday 3 October.

They meet at the Sketty Park Evangelical Church Hall, where there is a built in digital projector.

GEOLOGY

Not strictly a Swansea U3A activity but one carried out by the U3A Network in South Wales. The group organised by Nigel McGraw uses a variety of excellent guides, often from the universities, museums, or national parks of South Wales. There are visits to sites of geological interest across South Wales about once a month, except for the coldest weather. By happy coincidence geological interest appears to coincide with wonderful scenery, be the interest be in the stones in St David's Cathedral or a castle, to the cliffs of Gower. Glamorgan. Monmouth or Pembroke. There is lots of gazing and theorising, and, plenty of walking but scrambling is optional. They are all day visits with lunch in a pub, if there is a convenient location, or else by picnic.