Transition Towns meeting

Gosh, they're being busy!
I went along to Kilverts really just to take notes and publicise what they're doing, and it was quite impressive.

Hay Festival has agreed for the Transition Town volunteers to re-design the boggy bit of pond near the entrance as a Community Garden. Dave said that everything he needed for the job seemed to miraculously appear - they needed 3 tons of woodchip, and he met someone who could provided it, and now he's after enough hazel to make a 70 metre fence, done as trellises and woven together, and it looks as if that will come his way as well. They'll build a herb spiral, and need bog type plants like meadowsweet and yellow flag iris, and Glasu are giving them some funding.

The new thermal imaging camera has been in use, to show where energy is leaking out of buildings. They've done the school and several houses, and are about to look at the council chambers and the library.

Something else that's taken on a momentum of it's own seems to be this September's Transition Day. Last year it was all about bicycles, and other forms of sustainable transport. This year they want to close off Castle Street for a street party. They've also been looking at schemes for 'sharing the street', where cars and humans can co-exist without humans getting squashed. Apparantly it's been very successful in Holland, and traffic accident statistics have gone right down. Les who runs the Market is keen to get involved, and there was some talk of getting a pavement artist, or letting anyone create their own pavement art. Other suggestions were a giant game of hopscotch down the middle of the street, or long rope skipping. The date they want to do all this is 25th September, so they can have a virtual link to Hay Festival's daughter festival in Seville, possibly via the Booth Bookshop Cinema (if it's ready by then - or if not in the temporary cinema that they're already using). They were also talking about involving the Globe, possibly with street art, and maybe a lecture. There would be sustainability stalls, and the bicycle repair again. All they need now is the licence to close the road.

An associated project is to raise awareness of Transition issues, and one idea to do this, as it's Hay, was to have a writing competition. The winner would be announced at the street party, and there could be a reading of the winning entry. This is intended to be a 500 word story.

An Art exhibition involving all the local schools also seems to be coming on apace, with the Buttermarket already provisionally booked to show the art for Saturday 17th July - the day after the schools break up for the summer holidays.

One of the ladies at the meeting works part time at Cartref, the local nursing home, and Cartref has an under-utilised garden at the back. The Co-op are offering help to do something with it, possibly providing seeds, and they're starting to look at a polytunnel type greenhouse that's accessible for people with zimmer frames and wheelchairs, and raised beds, possibly to grow food. As it's outdoors, at set times and with staff present, there seems to be no problem about CRB checks for volunteers who would be needed to do the heavy lifting.
Over the year, Marches TV are making short films of what's happening with the Transition Towns group, and it was felt that it would be a good idea to interview some of the residents of Cartref about what life used to be like in Hay, and get the results on film. At the beginning of August Hay will be visited by a lady who is walking around the country, collecting 'Transition Tales', and this is just the sort of thing she seems to want to get involved in, too. Jayne at the Library is keen for her to do a story telling session there, too.
It was pointed out that the allotments are just next door to Cartref - I think one of the people on the waiting list rather had his eye on the garden for an overflow allotment area.
There are 20 people on the allotment waiting list, and some of them have been waiting for five years, so it was good to hear of progress on the Allotment site/Community Garden planned for the field just across the river. The next step there seems to be to get all the people waiting for an allotment together to see whether they want their own allotment, or whether they would be prepared to go in with a community vegetable garden which would be shared.