"Thats not like you Ern", said my friend Dave on the telephone a couple of days ago. "Being an outdoors man, I wouldn't have thought that a chap like you would ever be catching a cold".
Dave was right, it's years since I've had a cold, especially one as debilitating as this and I'm blaming it all our youngest son Leon. He came home from Franklin College earlier this week with a pounding headache and a nose that was running faster than Seb Coe on steroids and I'm certain that I must've caught it from all of his free flowing nose germs. It certainly wasn't the best of weeks to find myself 'under the weather' and the option of taking any 'duvet days' was definitely not on the table.
Jacquie's not been very well for quite a while now and consequently, she's not been able to contribute towards the family budget, so the burden of earning a living to support our family has fallen squarely upon my shoulders. Not that I'm complaining, I do enjoy my work, but as I'm now approaching 50 years of age, hard, physical labour and working outdoors in all weathers does sometimes cause the thrill of being a maintenance gardener to lose a bit of it's shine. Being self-employed certainly has its pitfalls, especially when it comes to having a few days off through illness.
It hasn't been all hard physical work this week though. I had 24 hrs of almost non-stop meetings and talks on Wednesday and Thursday. On Wednesday evening, Jacquie and I travelled into town from our home in Caistor, to give a talk to the Scartho Methodist Wives Group about our role in the Grimsby in Bloom Gold Award winning campaign. On Thursday morning we travelled back to Grimsby where I took 32 WI members on a guided heritage tour of Great Grimsby town centre, before dashing hot foot over to the Second Avenue Resource Centre on the Nunsthorpe Estate, to deliver a vegetable gardening workshop to a group of 10 ladies and gentlemen from infant schools and children's centres throughout North East Lincolnshire. We then travelled back home to Caistor for dinner, before returning to town a couple of hours later to give a report, as Chairman of the Heritage Committee of the Grimsby, Cleethorpes and District Civic Society, to its executive committee.
As you can see, that was an awful lot of travelling, 6 journeys between Grimsby and Caistor in one 24 hour period. From floral community building to historical guide, to vegetable consultant, to civic pride advocate all in 24 hours.
I've decided not to do anymore talks about the Grimsby in Bloom campaign though. It turned out to be the most of difficult of the whole day. I've been successfully giving talks on Grimsby in Bloom to scores of groups over the last few years, but after a lapse of only 6 weeks since my unexpected resignation from the position of Chairman, I truly felt, for the first time, as though I didn't even recognise the corporate minded adult which appears to be growing from the community based infant which Jacquie and I created all those years ago.
"During the first year of the Grimsby in Bloom campaign we decided not to enter the town into the regional East Midlands in Bloom competition because we wanted to take things slowly. As a group we chose to walk before we tried running. The worst case scenario, we all agreed, would have been to enter Grimsby into a gardening competition which we had no chance of winning. It would have utterly deflated our voluntary committee with one fell swoop", I told the ladies of the Scartho Methodist Wives group last Wednesday evening.
I did have one of the recently appointed officers of the present day Grimsby in Bloom committee at my side throughout the talk and we were working together quite well, building up a picture of our campaign all the way through to the present day as well as entertaining our audience with a little light-hearted banter.
"In our second year we entered the regional competition and set about choosing a route on which to take the judges. The route can only be 3 hours long and it would be impossible to cover all of Grimsby in that time, so the voluntary committee decided to change our judges route on a three year cycle. That way we could cover every community and every neighbourhood throughout Grimsby, eventually bringing 'The Bloom' to every part of town (and not just the prettier, more affluent parts of it either).
What I didn't want, as Chairman, was for anyone to accuse our voluntary committee of "Never coming to their part of town!" Apart from that more obvious reason for changing our route every year, there was also the added bonus that came with a change of view and a change of focus."Every year we let those good people at NELC know where our route will be travelling and every year they would 'deep clean' all of the areas that the judges would see. By changing the route every year, a different area of town would get a thorough scrub down every 3rd year at least ".
"And this year, that is if the Grimsby in Bloom committee are still going ahead with these plans", I told the ladies of the Scartho Methodist Wives group, " The organisers will be bringing the East Midlands in Bloom judges for a tour around the horticultural heartlands that are your very own, Scartho village".
"Err....no, Ernie, I don't think that we're going to do that anymore. We haven't decided on whether to continue with that previous plan or not and I haven't heard back from North East Lincs Council about which route they wants us to take this year", my colleague added.
In 2009, Great Grimsby won a Gold award and the coveted title of 'Best Small City in the East Midlands' with a score of 47 out of 50 for community participation, this was a very special achievement. The Royal Horticultural Society, who organise the Britain In Bloom competition, very soon after the event contacted us to say that it was the first time ever, in the whole history of the competition that any town, city or village from throughout the UK has ever won a Gold Award and topped their category with a first time entry.
There has to be a reason why Grimsby had that unusual unprecedented first time success.
We had previously been warned of the fate of the last Grimsby in Bloom campaign, which disbanded in the late 1990's, a few years ago, when the Civic Society, the Rotary Club and the North East Lincs Lions set up Grimsby in Bloom in 2007.
"That committee back in those days were almost solely funded and directed by council officers and members", we were told. "When public money became tight towards the end of the last century, the first thing that the Local Authority decided to cut back on was Grimsby in Bloom", they continued. " Without proper community funding and without an arms length approach to the local authority, the original GIB fell at the first hurdle. Keep your independence and retain your autonomy otherwise, if Rome falls, we all fall with it!"
"Anyway, pass me some more tissues will you please Jacquie....and would you heat up my hot water bottle, I don't think I'm quite feeling well enough to do it myself just yet".
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