Dear Members and Friends,

After being ill the week before last week our scheduled speaker, Vijay Iyer could not attend again as his son had an accident and he was with him in the hospital with his phone off. He rang and expressed his profuse apologies to all our members. Hopefully, we will catch up with him in the future.

As I mentioned last week I had to prepare some notes for an article for the local paper so I did get that in on time. They went through it and sent back the draft article to me asking if I was ok with it. I figured as it looked completely unchanged from what I sent it should be good. We'll soon see next month.

Then out of the blue on Monday I got a call from a reporter from another local newspaper that is being financed by the Council to have a bigger coverage than the other paper to say they are starting up and offering our club a free quarter-page ad as long as I got everything into him within 24 hours. As I thought a quarter of a page was a very big area I set about righting what I thought was a fairly comprehensive description of our club. In a small part of it at the end, I mentioned our upcoming meetings including the special meeting we are proposing at the Mercure Hotel on Wednesday 10th March at 7.00 pm to screen the International Women's Day video we have purchased.

Well when he sent me the draft of the ad for my approval that was all that was on it so I asked for a bit of refinement but we'll see if their advertising has any effect

Last night I represented the club at our cluster meeting with Kate presiding and it was good to catch up with my fellow cluster presidents.

Last week I mentioned that we are supporting Lorna Hannan’s idea of hosting a regular morning tea for the ladies in the highrise public housing buildings. It was to actually commence this Friday but that has been postponed for now and I expect that Susan Robb will catch up with Lorna in due course to discuss getting it started..

I have good news regarding PP Marj Hess as she is now responding well to antibiotics and so on the mend.

Unfortunately, our ever-reliable Larry Robb is laid low at the moment so we hope he comes good soon.

Not a lot to report about Sainab though it was good for her briefly to log into our meeting last week. I can advise though that previous speaker Martin Taurins sent me an email to say he had a Rotaract contact in Nairobi which I have passed onto Sainab so hopefully, the family of Rotary might be able to offer her some assistance while she is over there.

She was concerned she was missing the PETS seminar last weekend which was all on Zoom but I liaised with Dale Hoy and he confirmed that the whole seminar was recorded and so she will get access to viewing it.

So I close with our speaker program as follows