chairman A way forward? “we have formed a sub-group to push around all the ideas/opinions/ experiences and see what an alternative offering might look like...” Chairman’s Comment I’ve been chairman of WRG for many years and, because there is a seasonality to our activities, it naturally follows there is a seasonality to my comments in Navvies. Pretty much every year this edition of Navvies has featured an appreciation of a great summer and a promise that we are planning some great work for the next year. This time however it will not follow the traditional pattern, because although we have looked for positive examples of progress (and indeed many people have been working hard on all those “other tasks” we have talked about), almost none of us have had the pleasure of walking off site at the end of the day with the warm, wonderful feeling that we achieved something. We shouldn’t ignore this loss no matter how stoical we think we should be. No matter how positive our outlook it would be foolish to ignore the fact that this summer, volunteers both new and old did not discover they could lay bricks or operate dumpers. Some people didn’t discover they had the confidence to lead a team of people or the skills to construct some clever concrete shuttering. Possibly worst of all some people didn’t have that feeling of looking round a table in a village hall one evening and realising they had found a place they could genuinely call home. Because to ignore that loss is to ignore what our activities mean to us. In the next few pages Martin’s editorial seeks to reassure that: “…[given a timescale of WRG’s 50 years], a year’s gap in WRG activities isn’t quite the ‘end of the world as we know it’ that it might seem.” He is of course correct: we have faced bumps along the road before and no doubt will again. But in all those times we have all been able to keep doing what we enjoy and this time we haven’t. A lot of people have missed out recently on their ‘WRGie playtime’, and the opportunity to get back to it seems a long way away. Whilst we don’t know the ‘first timers’ we have not met up with over this summer, we do know which ‘regulars’ we would have met and spent time with. Please take some time to keep in contact, drop them a line or a text. If you are missing that mud and laughter, then the chances are so are they. Just as the ‘looking back’ part of this comment is different this year, so it will be for the ‘promise of things to come’. WRG has, generally speaking, always been an optimistic bunch of people and I think it’s true to say that our current hope is that: Whilst it’s going to be tricky to get our traditional Canal Camps offering up and running before next summer, surely by then the whole world must have sorted things out and everything will be back to normal. If that’s the case then we will probably be able to spring right back into action as the planning and preparation was already in place and our vans and trailers are ready to go at pretty much a few days notice. Some camps might not fill up completely but they can still run. We will have lost a whole year of work but we will be back up and running doing what we do best. If, by some happy chance, the pandemic is halted earlier then again - we are ready to go. But right now (a) this looks a little risky as a policy anyway and (b) WRG have always been pretty good at seeing opportunities for change and, at the very least, giving them a good talking about. The WRG committee met a few weeks ago and it seems many people are genuinely
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