Emuna has just remarked that young people find it hard to credit that when we started school some of the older teachers had been born in the nineteenth century. It's true. When I was at Southam Junior Boys School the headmaster was Mr Dencer (yes, there were jokes about his name but not when he could hear). He retired in, I think, 1963, so, assuming he retired at 65, he'd have been born in 1899. I don't recall any members of Pink Floyd having attended the school but their "Wall" LP certainly resonated with me regarding schooldays.
I digress. I'm supposed to be writing about our need for a WCBS wood monitor. Firewood monitor would be better really. I call it that because in junior school they used to give a trusted boy (not me) the job of going round each day topping up the ink wells in all the desks. He was the ink monitor.
Through the winter our boat stoves get through a lot of firewood. This comes from various sources, but a major one is the firm of Cargo Packing Services, located near to Portland basin.
They make packing cases and produce handy sized offcuts all year round and are delighted to have people take them away.
The trouble is, too many people know about them. Perhaps I shouldn't be telling you! Anyway, in the winter, when firewood is needed, when you go there there's always somebody's just taken it all. In the summer, nobody wants it. The thing to do is to collect it in the summer and store it up. We have a bay in "Lilith"s hold reserved for this purpose.
For some reason, very few people seem to see the logic in this. Why fetch firewood when you've got plenty? They ask. It's an easy job that really helps the charity, but we struggle to find a volunteer who will reliably turn up a couple of days a week, take a wheelie bin over to CPS, fill it up, trundle it back, then bag up the wood, sorted into different sizes, and put it in "Lilith".
Following the tradition that if no-one else wants to do a job, I end up doing it, it's become one one of my regular tasks. I don't mind, it's just that there's lots of other jobs that I could be doing that somebody else probably wouldn't know how to do.
So, if you feel like volunteering, get in touch.