Together We Rise

NOW!

My friend Helen designed this lovely logo for my community group when I launched it back in 2020.

We were just about to start doing more local events when lockdown came and so everything went online for a bit.

Next we got some funding and started a community garden and also a walking group 3 times a week It was great.

What started with baking bread (the metaphor of being knocked back to rise again can apply to life as well as to bread dough) morphed into quite a few activities and this had to be reflected in the logo too.

When summer came I got Helen to add some flowers….

We used to have a great time at our weekly gardening sessions. Magic Sam used to bring his guitar…

and we’d make a fire, do a bit of weeding and planting but mainly sing and be merry :)

This is Sherwood Forest after all.

I loved those Monday afternoons. We had our core of regulars but you never really knew who would turn up and when. Sam for one would just appear from the trees it seemed. He’s proper old school. He doesn’t ever use his mobile phone, in fact last time I spoke to him (on his landline) he’d lost his mobile.

Sometimes he’d get the bus to the abbey¹ gates and walk the rest of it through the forest, a good few miles, with his guitar on his trolley no matter what the weather. And then you’d hear him singing in the distance as he approached down the winding path and past the willow and hazel trees. Just like a minstrel of old.

Sam’s best friend was Andrew, both around the same age…late 60’s when they met (even though Andrew was always “42 on a good day”). This was a friendship formed at one of our many community bakes that happened before the dark days of “covid”. Andrew would do anything for his friend Sam - he used to take him shopping, fix things, - he was always there. And sadly Andrew died a couple of months ago.

He was also one of my greatest cheerleaders and encouraged me so much in all my many pursuits.

In Andrews’s memory we are holding a community event for Loneliness Awareness Week. It’s a week tomorrow here in Nottingham. All are welcome.

I know he would have loved this kind of event as he loved taking to new people and understanding what made them tick. He worked as a teacher all his life and it would seem he was much loved by many judging by the amount of people at the service after his funeral.

Here we are doing flash mob singing at Nottingham Railway station (Andrew is on the far right of photo)

1. Newstead Abbey - ancestral home of Lord Byron