When we got there ten minutes before the show the stewards were putting out additional seats round the walls.
The mini opera, Amahl and the night visitors, lasted forty minutes. The event was free, thanks to sponsors, but there was still a lot of money piled on the retiring collection plates. It had been a full house at St Helen’s church. The show was very well performed.
At Abingdon library a new system for scanning books is to be introduced within a few weeks. Most of the books downstairs have a yellow sticker …
indicating they have already been chipped.
Borrowers will put their stack of books down on a reader and it will book them all out, or back in again.
The current system invoves librarians swiping a bar code, and stamping a date inside the book. With the new system fewer librarians will be required.
btw. Last year I always got an e-mail reminder a day or two before books were due back. Very clever I thought, but it did not happen this time.
Age Concern, in Abingdon, have joined up with Help The Aged to become age uk.
And the news from the age uk website today is that …
Workers will be allowed to continue in their jobs after the age of 65 under a Government pledge to scrap the ability of firms to force employees out at retirement age. (If you can a job after age 35 that is.)
The practice of ‘bed-blocking’, keeping older people in hospital because of a lack of adequate after-care, is liable to get worse as council funding gets cut.
The latest newsletter from the Abingdon based architects West Waddy ADP is a history of some of the buildings they have been involved with. As an example …
St Nicolas school – formerly Boxhill Church of England School –
and Ward 1 of Abindon Community hospital were both designed by them about 1930. I am sure they both looked equally elegant when first built.