Busy General Assembly
THURSDAY, October 1 saw the members 0f U3A Valle de Pop gathering again at El Cid, whilst the municipal halls are unavailable, for a busy second General Assembly of the 2020/ 21 season. We are very grateful to El Cid for making their premises available to us – to accommodate their other events our GA will move to Wednesday for the November and December meetings.
Our first pleasant task of the day was to join Roger Bentley in wishing his wife Barbara, and our Membership Secretary, a very happy birthday.
The results of our first outside activity, the Walking Treasure Hunt around Jalón, were also revealed with the first three teams getting 66 points out of 68, so the result was settled by their guesses of the value of some money in a jar. The winners, on € 1.79 off the correct total were Rosie and Paul Jackson with Dave and Steve, in second place were Janet and Jeremy Duffield with Clare and ( another) Dave, with Chris and Ray Tudor in third place, with Chris accepting their prize,
Condolences were offered to the family of Ken Grant, a founder member of our U3A Group who died recently in England.
Our meeting was concluded by an interesting talk, entitled ' Tales to Tell' from Clive Browning an Environmental Health Officer from the 1970s through to 2008. Clive reminisced on how more personal his work had been before the introduction of Health & Safety rules and the more robust physical defence now put up by some defendants. Also, many more complainants are now referring their case directly to their solicitor rather than the Environmental Health Officer.
Clive recalled visiting a sweet old lady who found when she tried to pour milk from her milk bottle nothing came out. Clive immediately spotted a mouse stuck in the mouth of the bottle and only then realised the old lady was blind. The dairy was taken to court, and in the intervening months the sweet old lady used to visit his office, to bring them a cake and to share a cup of tea - as she was lonely and looking for company.
Clive also visited an unnamed fish & chip shop in a poor area of the city. Superficially everything seemed perfectly acceptable until he saw a man with a bucket of peeled potatoes appearing from the family bathroom. Further investigation showed the potato peeling was on- going whilst a gentleman was using the toilet and reading the paper to the potato peeler.
Sometimes he discovered things were deliberately being put in food by disgruntled employees and that some owners would go to any limit to avoid detection, like the baker who ate the bread with the cockroach inside it so there was no evidence.
Clive advised if you are buying food from a roadside stall always ensure you see it cooked freshly after you have placed your order.
On behalf of the members our President, Bob Welham, presented Clive with a bottle of wine in thanks for his interesting talk.
For further information see website www.u3avalldelpop.com.