Summer Break, Research Group and European Elections

This is the 29th and final posting of Brian's Blog this U3A year, the next will be heralded by the usual Update email probably in September. I have enjoyed doing it, and believe it has made a difference. The pleasure expressed by so many at the crocus and daffodils of earlier posting encouraged me to use the diary to keep a record of Joan's lovely flower garden.

Thanks for all the words of support I have received during the year, the latest from Susan Hodge, at their second home in Brittany, who says The Smugglers at Port Eynon 'is a favourite place'. Unfortunately Steve still has some health problems and I am sure his friends from the French Class and other readers of this blog want to join me in wishing him well. Susan would have liked a trip to Wells and enthuses about the embroideries on the walls of the Nave, so don't miss them!

Internet is a wonderful thing as far as communication at least. I first started blogging to keep a diary of my travels in China and then Chile/Argentina which had the additional advantage of letting friends in the UK know what we were doing and thinking as we travelled. All you need, anywhere in the world, is a computer with Internet access, say an Internet cafe or your own laptop and wi-fi access. E-mail is OK but Blogging is better if like us you otherwise kept a hand written diary. If anyone wants to try blogging then sign on free at Google for your own blogspot (a rather long winded pain but the main issue is to choose the type of blog( either a private blog which is accessible only by those to whom you release the address (like this one), or a blog accessible to every-one via an Internet search engine like Google. Once set up a blog is far simpler and thus easier to use than say Microsoft Word - which is too clever by half for the likes of me.

BILL MASSEY
We all wish him well as he prepares to celebrate his 80th birthday, little dreaming of the kick in the tail.












BEWARE OF DEVIOUS AMAZON
Joan has just been taken for £47.97 by Amazon in payment for a Prime Membership which she didn't even know she had asked for.
It appeared on the monthly bank statement with the following unhelpful details

10 April Prime Member Fee 8002796620 £47.97
(Recurring Visa Transaction)

Not even a whisper of which company it had come from. Nationwide (any bank) could not help and because it was a Visa transaction, so we would have to contact the firm issuing the authorisation, but Nationwide at least could point out that the number was a contact telephone number when you added a leading 0. It turned out to be an out of date number for Amazon but the recorded message gave the modern number. Yes she said it could be cancelled and we would be sent details by email. That email gave a web link top Amazon's Prime Member site where we discovered that there was absolutely no way it could in fact be cancelled, though they did say that had stopped the charge recurring in future years.

We could not even find an email to register a complaint, though we did lodge one on an irrelevant order number - probably futile.

UPDATE 18 MAY (one day later original posting)
In response to the email complaint we were sent a link to details of Joan's Prime Membership and apparently given a second chance to cancel and a refund if the service had not been used, clicking 'cancel' led to the same old page asking 'do you really want to cancel?' But providing absolutely no opportunity to confirm and thus complete the transaction.

Even worse the offer of a 'month free'was shown to mean she had been given 13 months for the price of 12, from 9 March 2008 to 9 April 2010!! (the first time we realise about the charge was 16 May). SO BEWARE OF DOUBLY DEVIOUS AMAZON. COM, I say.

END of UPDATE

HOW DID IT HAPPEN?
Our best guess that on a recent order, probably 9 April, Joan was confronted with 3 delivery options something like the following

Free Delivery
Another forgotten option
A month's free trial of express delivery

The form would not accept choice of Free Delivery, so she opted for the Months Free Trial. A month and a week later, just a few days after receipt of the bank statement we could not Cancel, even though the few books we had received were obviously delivered by camel!

ADVICE TO READERS
First be very careful on the Internet and remember there is no such thing as a 'Free Lunch'.

You need to be especially careful with so called free software which is often only a free trial. Some like AVG anti-virus have a good free version called 'avg_free', but even they attempt to persuade you to try a unnecessary professional version on a free trial.

More helpful instead of shopping at Amazon go to the book comparison site where you will find listed possible sources for the book you require and will find that Amazon is by no means always the cheapest supplier.
For instance try
http://www. booksprice.co.uk

RESEARCH GROUP
I had a talk with Margaret Hammond about the functioning of this group. All the current work is carried out on the archives in the old Museum by two groups of four under the direction of museum's own researcher. There are currently two vacancies and it would be ideal to get new members in place to ensure continuity of the group so that it eventually passes seamlessly to a new generation. Anyone interested to know more should contact Margaret Hammond on 883680.

They are rightly proud of their achievements. The Research Group was set up in the early days of Swansea U3A in the late 80's at the request of their first President who asked for a team to help Professor Maurice Broady catalogue the archives of Swansea Celtic Studios , manufacturers of stained glass windows from 1948 to the mid 1990's. He had acquired an extensive archive of 1o00 plus files. The documentation of that company, included informative, and sometimes very amusing, correspondence from across the world. In 2000/1 cartoon designs for 450 stain glassed windows for delivery abroad, especially Canada, were added to the team's resources.

Maurice was determined to write a book on the subject, but as some of you may know he is severely afflicted with the aftermath of a stroke. However the cudgels have now been taken up by the County Archivist Kim Collis, who directed the initial exercise, Maurice's daughters Alison and Elsbeth, and Alan Adams who was our excellent stand in lecturer earlier this year on the topic of Stained Glass. It looks as though a book will finally be published.

The research essentially consisted of reading, understanding and cataloguing the interesting information with clear references to the location of the source material. In this they were aided by the first U3A Computer Group led by Roger Knight.

By then fully conversant with the techniques needed to research archives, they were asked by the old Swansea Museum who had as a multi-faceted project to research the history of Social Life in Swansea to choose a topic. They elected to study Swansea Markets using material held by the Royal Institution (museum), University Library, University Archives and Press clippings. That project finished a couple of years ago when they handed over the catalogued information to the Swansea Museum staff. It concluded with the publication of 12 copies of the now structured information and photographs three of which they were able to keep as personal memoires.

The third project was to research and catalogue the history of the Swansea branch of The Royal Institution (the founders of the museum). There were vast archives, including many boxes which had never before been opened, of the proceedings of the Royal Institution of South Wales. Students are now editing of this material.

Research has now turned to the study of Scrap Books mostly dating back to 1880-1920. Marjorie Vanston explained the material as cataloguing boxes of cuttings from newspapers, photographs and documents which had been donated by individuals or organisations to the museum. I keep a few boxes of a similar nature, mostly concerning my interest in non-party politics, world events, travel and sport, which I will bequeath to the U3A if they still have a Research Group!!

There must be younger members who would share their enthusiasm for this type of study, and I do hope they will contact Margaret. It would be a shame to lose the experience of the group handling archive material, which has played - should continue to play - and is recognised by the museum as playing a very valuable role in recording key aspects the history of Swansea.

SMILE TRAIN BARN DANCE
This event was run on her own bat by Joy Gillard. It was not an official U3A event, though perhaps more than half those attending and a large proportion of those helping were our members. The proceeds went to the charity Smile Train who treat patients with hare-lip and other facial deformities in 76 of the less prosperous parts of the world. She collected £800 for the charity by the way of entrance tickets, refreshments, raffle and donations, that is after expenses for the hire of the Ostreme Hall ecetera.

She is to be congratulated on the success of the event, which must be very satisfying considering she had initially been warned of the danger of making a loss.

EUROPEAN ELECTION HUSTINGS
Last Tuesday Gabrielle Suff led the second phase of a discussion on the EU in the Politics and Citizen Group with an excellent exposition of the workings of the EU. Contrast the unreasonable and uninformed hostility, led by virtually the whole UK press, to the European Process. She pressed people to exercise their democratic right to vote, whether for parties intent on co-operation or withdrawal from the EU.

The following discussion was concerned with how to decide which of the twelve UK parties to vote for, which ranged from UKIP to Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour Party, via Conservative, Liberal, Green, Plaid Cymru and The Labour Party. It highlighted the lack of information on the issues, with the press, the main UK parties and the EU itself to blame. I got an amused response when I pointed that in the past few days I had received a flyer from the Liberal Party (the one party apparently unwavering in its support for the EU process), which did not mention Europe at all!

Marjorie Vanston circulated details of Hustings at which the main contenders including UKIP will be represented by candidates. The meeting headed 'Come and Meet the Candidates' takes place at the Swansea Guildhall on 19 May at 7.30pm. Which one hopes will not be drowned by controversy about the current expenses corruption in our parliament. Surely the current expenses debacle, a 20%+ devaluation in our currency, and failure of banking practices in the USA and UK should allow the thought that there may be a better way - maybe there is merit in Euroland after all.

French and German banks and financial firms were largely non contributory bystanders to the banking crisis, but neither they nor other blameless countries of the world have been able to escape the consequences of the banking crisis - a global recession and unemployment brought about by the 'credit crunch'.

The fury which was directed at bankers is now being directed at MPs. These expenses had been treated as an entitlement which came with the job by far too many. I see them as minor (albeit dishonest and wrong) if only because it is necessary to multiply by a thousand or more to reach the similarly 'within the rules' backscratching and tax avoidance by directors and senior officials in the finance industry. Our 'winner take all' society is displaying a lack of moral underpinning. I fear an angry undiscriminating voting backlash which could open the door to increased support for fascist parties such as the BNP, and that could start the sort of popular revolt which led Germany to Hitler.

PAINTING FOR PLEASURE
Mary Lane is starting a new group next year with this title which is definitely not for beginners. She is going to keep it to twelve members and envisages there will be plenty of applicants from her original beginners classes.

This emphasises the demand for painting and the necessity to find other Group Leaders. If you are interested in taking such a role please let me or anyone on the committee know.

WEDNESDAY LECTURE SLIDE SHOW
Nick Hill the Treasurer and the Convenor for the Astronomy Group has agreed to take over from me the production and display of the slide show of U3A activities for the last five Wednesday Lectures in the Grove Theatre Swansea University.

Group Leaders should notify him by of any activities they want to publicise by email
hill_n_j@hotmail.com

BUILDING UP SQUAD of PLAYERS for SWANSEA U3A
By choosing to go on extended holiday I have highlighted the paucity of our reserves. Ideally my tasks should not have to be picked up by hard working members of the committee like our Treasurer and Astronomy Group Leader Nick Hill who has taken over the Wednesday slide show.

What applies to me applies even more to Chairman Bob Hughes, who has recently taken on production/communication by regular printed newsletter for dissemination by the Group Convenors plus the editing and assembly of the Annual Report which will go out before the AGM, on top of his heavy commitments as Chairman. I add too a well deserved recognition of the very dedicated and time consuming work by Pat Herbert (and husband Mal) in her role as Membership Secretary.

People, especially younger members, prepared to commit to assist with some of these roles, outside formal membership of the committee, will become evermore essential as this organisation grows at its present rate.

People with experience in specialist IT tasks would be exceptionally valuable for that undoubtedly is the efficient way forward to ease everything from membership records to pamphlet production. We ought to have a good informative Web Site and the maintenance needed to keep it up to date.

GEOLOGY GROUP
They are arguably the most attractive of the Network groups in South Wales. They have revised their proposals for their June Meeting which will be an 8 mile return coastal walk from Dunraven Bay to Nash Point, leader Tom Sharpe. Meet at 10.30am on Monday 22 June at Dunraven (Southerndown) public car park, Grid Reference OS Sheet 170 SS 885 732. Take a packed lunch.

If you leave your email address with Yvonne Thomas (01554 832337) she will send details of subsequent walks direct to you.

DISCUSSION GROUP
Roly Govier writes to say that the next meeting of the group scheduled for 26 May has been cancelled as St Mary's Church is celebrating th anniversary of the Post War Rebuilding. The next meeting will thus be 23 June, and an extra meeting has been arranged for 25 August.

LOCAL HISTORY GROUP
Bob Hughes sends the following

Local History Group Outing is on 14 July:

Tour & Tasting at Penderyn Whisky Distillery (£3.50).

Lunch at The Glancynon, Hirwaun. Visit Brecon.

Coach £9. Deposits of £5 to Barbara Brimfield a.s.a.p. please.

NICK Please make a slide of this for Wednesday 20 May

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.