Note: Apologies for the radio silence but it has been an odd couple of weeks. I have been keeping notes; I just haven’t got around to adding them to the blog. To help me keep track I will be back-dating the posts, so the previous few and next several posts will catch me up to date.
One of my plans before leaving Canada had been to join an Orkney chapter of the Women’s Institute. When I first retired, I joined Milton’s CFUW (Canadian Federation of University Women) and I now have a whole raft of terrific friends whom I would not have met otherwise, and I take pride in all our club does for local girls and women (scholarships, public forums for elections, advocating for the elderly, etc). So I figured I could do the same in Orkney: give back to the community, and make new friends. I should say, despite indications to the contrary, I find things like this hard to do. It’s hard to walk into a room of total strangers, to put myself forward in an unfamiliar situation. My sister and many colleagues find this difficult to believe, given my demeanour and my career, but I do get nervous doing things like this – I just don’t show it (I am a much better actress than people realize).
So I did a bit of online research to find a local chapter of the SWI (Scottish Women’s Institute), but didn’t find any (I have since realized that I didn’t look very hard, and I was using the wrong terms in my search – and with COVID much club activity had died down and was therefore much less obvious). But I was in the stationer’s shop one day in September and I blatantly eavesdropped on a conversation – they were talking SWI! As the one lady left the shop, I accosted her and asked about a local chapter. Bingo!
So off I trotted to my first SWI meeting – it was a group of 7 or 8 lovely ladies – apart from the other newbie, I was the youngest in the room. I won’t go into everything that was discussed in that meeting and the next, but I did find a couple of aspects funny/interesting.
They are a fast-dwindling group so were most intrigued by CFUW Milton’s membership size and growth, so at the 2nd meeting I came with a list of ideas that the Kirkwall SWI might want to implement. (Because, yes, Elaine, that is exactly what people want: a total stranger to waltz in and tell them how to do everything better. Well, they had asked, and I did preface my list with a deferential “these are just some things that worked for us in Canada” speech.) I focussed on social media and advocacy, because they want to attract younger women and that’s what seemed to draw the under 50’s at CFUW. They liked the FaceBook ideas, but seemed much less keen on the Advocacy which, now that I’ve googled ‘Scottish Women’s Institute’, does make more sense – the focus seems to be on maintaining Scottish crafts and heritage rather than on advocating for women and girls.
Which leads to my 2nd experience: at each month’s meeting members are asked to bring in two items for a wee ‘competition’, often something homemade or handcrafted. Last month it was ceramics (so I brought the plate with the levitating hedgehog that I had painted back in the summer), and a handmade Christmas card (which I did not take). The three photos here show: what I tried to make; what happened; and why I’m glad I gave up. The first photo is a card I found on YouTube, with clear instructions. So I went out and bought card stock, ribbon, and glue, and tried to follow the video (I used PowerPoint & my printer to make little cheater stars). The second photo is the point at which I gave up, when I discovered the glue I had bought had a hole in the bottle and the glue had become a single, hardened lump. No, I couldn’t go out and buy more – I was doing this on the day of the meeting. (I’d had a month’s notice, but why do today what you can put off until tomorrow?) And the third photo is what the SWI members had produced. They were stunningly beautiful; thank God I had not finished and produced mine.
Anyhow, back to the club. I have decided not to join the club, as I am more interested in giving back to my temporary home here and have found a few organizations that I prefer to support (more on those later).