Meeting: An Evening of Festive Fun

December 2011

Keeping with tradition, the December meeting saw a range of ‘fun’ entertainments laid on to round up the year. The evening opened with a sequence of photos taken by Colin Sutton at the Wakefield Show, continued with one of Peter Richmond’s fiendish General Acorn Knowledge quizzes, and concluded with a collection of entertaining film clips curated by Club members.

Report by Steve Fryatt

December’s meeting took the now-familiar format of ‘festive fun’, with a selection of entertaining activities designed to bring the Club’s year to an end in an un-serious way.

The evening fell naturally into three parts, with the first being a presentation by Colin Sutton (“the warm-up act”, as he described himself). As I’m sure most members will by now be aware, Colin is a keen photographer and is rarely to be found without a camera somewhere about his person.

This is certainly true of our Club’s annual Wakefield Shows, but in 2010 things went a little awry. Spotted taking photos by the editors of both Archive and Qercus, Colin was asked if he could supply some images for publication: he duly did, but the now-familiar scheduling wobbles meant they never appeared in print (the pages of the Club’s newsletter notwithstanding).

Keen to give the membership a chance to see themselves in action, Colin opened the evening with a ten minute slideshow of ‘unseen’ images from the day in 2010 accompanied by a commentary which was well supplemented by the memories of those in the audience. Although not the actual sequence Colin showed, many of his photos from the event can be seen at www.wrocc.org.uk/show/2010.

After a short break to seek sustenance from the selection of mince pies, stollen and biscuits, we were assembled into teams by Peter Richmond for the Christmas Quiz. With 30 questions, scores ranged from high single figures up to 27 out of a possible 32.

With another break to polish off the remaining food, we all regrouped for the final part of the evening: a selection of short video clips curated by Chris Hughes. The collection included the long-awaited Jeb’s Jobs sequel and an alternative take on the recent Blackberry network problems – bringing the meeting to a close with plenty of laughter.