Dinner Weekend 2003 - St Albans, 21-23rd February

As usual, the WCSCR dinner tour was organised around the area where the incumbent social secretary was living. With said officer being Percy, this meant we were all off to St. Albans, our second visit in a year given that we had been there for the master's quarter-peal weekend late 2002.

I had expected Friday to be the usual renewal of friendships, catching up on news and gossip and discussing who was running for which office. However, I was busy at work and unable to join the society until the Saturday.

Ringing started at a very leisurely 10:30 saturday morning at North Mymms. Percy's Tea Strainer was attempted, and by all acounts was pretty good. Moer people turned up during ringing and things quickly fell into familiar patterns.

Time was pressing on and while everyone was already looking forward to lunch, there's nothing like a 40cwt 10 to work up your appetite. Unfortunately St. Albans have a 24cwt, but they were excellent and produced some ringing of a generally good standard, including the usual stedman and grandsire caters but also some surprise royal.

With the standard 2 hours for lunch (we don't like to rush things in WCSCR) and just one more tower to go (The very pleasant 8-bells at St Michaels) things were hotting up and I was sure that the lack of discussion about the forthcoming elections indicated that they would be a very close run thing. And so it came to the AGM....

As it turned out, ther was only one candidate for each post (with the possible exception of mascot-keeper if I recall correctly). For the post of Master there wasn;t even that and somebody had to be asked if they would stand. That was me. "But I've done it before", I cried. "Do it better this time" an anonymous voice responded. And so I resolved to do just that. Unfortunately, I have so far taken 4 monsths to write this report and so not realy done very well at keeping that resolution. We had some good ringing on the summer tour though.

On to the dinner itself and Dickon Love was guest speaker where he delighted in embarrassing as many of the younger ringers as possible. Percy was particularly vulnerable to this as his parents were there. I think it had a profound effect on his Dad who turned up for ringing the following morning with a black eye. It turned out it was just a rather minor fall rather than a fight with Percy thank goodness.

The speakers were interesting, the food good, the ceilidh band excellent, and a grand time was had by all.

- MCH