Meeting Reports 2019

2019

Barrow WI Meeting for October 2019

John Martin, a librarian, joined Barrow to give us a very interesting evening on "The Life & Work of Agatha Christie", the "Queen of Crime".

Agatha's favourite author was Arthur Conan Doyle with his famous sleuth Sherlock Holmes. However, she found that  many crime novels of her day where very predictable so she decided to write herself and introduced her iconic detective, Hercule Poirot. After a faltering start, success arrived with "The Mysterious Affair at Styles",  (1920) followed by many others, "Murder on the Orient Express" (1934) and "Death on the Nile" (1937), to name a few.  She also wrote the "Tommy & Tuppence" detective stories and  Miss Marple books. Her books have sold billions of copies worldwide.

She had been quoted as saying "you cannot always believe what you read on a page. The clues are there, but hidden"! We thanked John for his passionate talk on one of his favourite authors.

Pat Moore

Barrow WI Meeting for August 2019

Sally, who works as a Enviromental Waste Technician for Leicestershire County Council gave us a talk on "Recycling".

In the past, once the binmen took our rubbish away from one big bin, maybe we didn't give it a second thought. We had less packaging, returnable bottles, paper shopping bags, & fewer take-aways.  Sally explained how our council deals with the landfill problem.

Defra, guide the councils on how to reduce waste. The contents of our green bins are collected and sent  to Casepak, a Waste Management Co, who specialise in sorting, grading, and selling on the quality recyclable material to global companies.

You can recycle other materials; clothes, books,toys & games can go charity shops, batteries can be disposed at large supermarkets, furniture can be sold on web sites, or given away.

Sally said in the next few years there will be more consistency between councils, returnable goods will be offered money back and food waste collection will be introduced.

This is a huge subject to discuss but our overall conclusion was that we need more clarity on which goods can/ can't be recycled.

Pat Moore