N hal47

May 2014

No 47

Eastrea Village News Jonathan Gamble (in white) with his ju-jitsu instructor Martin Hunnable at the Eastrea Centre.

VISITORS to the new Eastrea Centre have already passed the 10,000 mark. Nicola Brooks, who chairs the village hall’s executive committee, explains that the Trust keeps a note of ‘foot-fall’, the number of times that users of the building come to the hall.

‘Many of these are regulars, of course,’ Nicola explains. ‘For most of the classes these are the same people week after week.

The term ‘foot-fall’ is the way organisations record the number of times someone comes to the building for an event or a class.’

Nicola adds: ‘The Trust originally estimated that, if we were really lucky, we might reach the target of 10,000 visitors during the Eastrea Centre’s second year, but we are there already, in our first year, and after only nine months. It’s amazing news!’

The committee decided that Jonathan Gamble — who was an active member of the trainees’ subcommittee while the hall was being designed and built — should be recognised as our 10,000th visitor. Jonathan is now attending the successful ju-jitsu class that meets at the Eastrea Centre every Wednesday evening.

Contact by telephone: 0845-607 8880

EASTREA VILLAGE HALL TRUST CELEBRATES THE 10,000th V I S I T O R

NEW HALL TRUSTEES BINGO LAUNCH THE VILLAGE HALL now has two new Trustees to oversee its management.

At the 2014 AGM held on 29 April, it was announced that Gill and Pete Sennett were finally standing down. Their help with the village hall was recorded with gratitude by the committee.

The new Trustees are Ann Barrasso and Ritchie Walton. Ann, who lives on Coates Road, is a senior legal administrator with a large local firm of solicitors.

She has been a Trustee in the past.

Ritchie lives in Springfields and is an experienced buildings project manager who does much spare-time voluntary work. He has already carried out some modifications to the hall which needed attention, all without cost to the Trust.

The meeting, in adopting the minutes and accounts, also approved several changes. First, they agreed to use the 1st January as the start of the Trust’s accounting year in future, rather than the financial year on 5th April. A date in April makes it impossible to have accounts audited in time for an AGM held during the same month.

Accounting by calendar year also makes more sense when we are monitoring our progress.

In addition, the meeting agreed to implement permanently our new management structure which has a board of Trustees to oversee the future of the hall with an executive committee who run all the activities.

BINGO was proposed in the first edition of Eastrea Village News back in August 2000. But nothing happened until Di Coulson (above) organised our first session last month. About 60 people attended and all the funds raised go to the charity Di runs, ‘Defibrilllators For All’. They are installing public heart attack defibrillators and one is in mind for the Eastrea Centre.

Di Coulson brought in one of the great local callers, Jim Wyllie, who operates as Jim’s Cash Bingo. He enjoyed it a lot and loved the hall.

Jim is a retired long-distance lorry driver who now spends many of his evenings raising money for good causes. ‘I just can’t wait to come back to your fabulous village hall,’ he says.

Di’s next bingo evening is on Friday 9 May 2014 from 7.00 pm. ‘We may even have fundraising bingo every Friday,’ she says. ’It is certainly popular!’

Email: mail@eastrea.net

May 2014

At last! Optical fibre broadband arrives in Eastrea!

THE CURSE OF THE PHANTOM DIGGER

RESIDENTS were complaining about being inconvenienced when BT engineers dug up our pavements to lay optical fibre many years ago. The village hall had to pay thousands for that cable to be lowered a few inches even though we did not want it on our land — and yet, after all this, villagers still couldn’t tap into the system and reap the benefits optical fibre can bring. The village hall had to wait EIGHT MONTHS for the phone line.

But now the Nag’s Head and the Eastrea Centre can both offer fast broadband access to the public.

The BT advertisements are claiming to offer the new broadband for ‘£8 per month’ but read the small print.

That is only for the first six months.

And you have to add the line rental to the bill. The real cost you’ll pay is some £30 per month, almost four times the cost quoted in the ads.

People don’t realise that, in spite of what people often say, you do NOT have the high-speed optical fibre connecting your home to the phone system — the cable runs to the cabinet standing where the phone box used to be on the A 605.

From there to you, the connection is the same old copper wire. In the latest domestic installations, they are now replacing the copper with aluminium because it’s cheaper.

Typical download speeds in Eastrea homes are rarely as fast as 1.6 Mb/sec, much slower that the ‘up to 20m Mb/s’ that they quote in television commercials. At the Eastrea Centre speeds are up to eight times faster.

Speak to the village hall team or the Nag’s Head staff for details on how to access their broadband wi-fi connection. At last we can access fast broadband in the village.

MOST VILLAGERS will not have seen this massive, monstrous machine — but it became a familiar sight, and sound, all night long for those living around the main road. Council contractors have stripped off the top few inches of the old road surface and have now replaced it with a smooth new, long-lasting asphalt top. The result is an ultra-modern road along which cars travel with far less surface noise than before. The work was scheduled for night time in order to minimise disruption to the daily traffic. Not only did it annoy those living nearby, but it also reduced the head count at the village hall. But there was no alternative: the road had to be done, and we are fortunate to have a Council that prioritises such road works. Many stretches of road across Britain are in a poor state of repair; ours are largely well maintained. The long-suffering people who were kept awake at night have our sympathies — but it was all in a good cause.

FACTS AND FIGURES THE EASTREA CENTRE has had the most marvellous clients. We marked our 10,000th visitor with a presentation after the AGM (right). Of all our users, not one has caused us problems. Our worst month for weekend bookings brought us £295; the best £1,335. We now hold eight regular classes each week and the hall has been financially viable from the day it opened. New ideas under consideration include a meditation group, and martial arts. And we may start weekly bingo on Fridays!

Contact by telephone: 0845-607 8880

Jonathan Gamble of Mayfield Road is given his certificate & gift voucher by Nicola Brooks, who chairs the executive committee of the Eastrea Centre.

Email: mail@eastrea.net