Hi everyone,

The next HBWI meeting is on Monday 16th February and doors open at 7-ish for a 7.30pm start. Guests welcome for £3.

Hilly Fletcher of The Halifax Friends Of Palestine is our guest this month with a varied and delicious presentation about the work they do with Jameela’s Kitchen, a women’s co-operative in Gaza. We’ll get to watch authentic Palestinian dishes being assembled and then get to taste them, which I’m sure will be popular.

Hilly explains what she has planned:

“We will start with a short film about Jameela’s Kitchen followed by a slideshow accompanied by some information about Gaza, then the cookery demonstration. After that we will have two very short films of Palestinian women poets. We also have a photographic exhibition and Linda Clair from Manchester PSC will come along with her stall of wonderful Palestinian oils, dates, soaps, textiles and crockery.”

Hilly also hopes to have a third print run of their cookbook available for £5, so bring a bit of extra cash if you’d like to buy something.

Obviously Palestine is a sensitive subject but Hilly reassures me that their group does not tolerate anti-Semitism and that “any comments made about Israel are carefully judged and are firmly supported by international law, the Geneva Conventions and UN resolutions.”

Annual Subs

If you haven’t already paid, the annual WI subscriptions are due now and it’s £36 for the year. Cheques should be made payable to Hebden Bridge WI. You need to pay by March or we have to remove you from the WI system and the Facebook group.

Which means that I need to remember to bring my cheque book this month after embarrassingly forgetting it last month – what a fine presidential example that was!

Other News

New website

As you can see – because you’re reading it – we have a shiny new website, lovingly created by yours truly. I’ve moved our existing blog from Blogger to WordPress, updated some of the pages and added some new ones. It’s not quite finished – the front page and several other areas still need work – but I hope you like what I’ve done so far. Please comment below if you spot any mistakes.

Women of the WI

Our week on the Women Of The WI twitter account was also a great success. If you missed this, it’s an unofficial WI initiative where a different WI hosts the account for a week. We got in nice and early on Week 3. I heard from the organiser and we had 29 thousand views of our tweets, with 230 retweets and 287 favourited tweets. Pretty impressive stats. It was a lot of fun to do and I learnt a lot from it –  including that it’s not a smart idea to sign up for a week of intensive tweeting all by myself!

Race for life

Jeni Wetton is running the 5k Race for Life in Halifax on Sunday 19th July and is looking for other runners to join her and possibly train together. If you’re interested, have a word with her at Monday’s meeting or on our Facebook group.

book group

Book group is on Monday 23rd February at 7pm at Old Gate pub. We usually meet upstairs. Bring along books you’ve read and tell us what you did or didn’t like about them and then we swap books. As with anything to do with HBWI, it’s very informal.

committee meeting

Our monthly committee meeting is on Tuesday 24th February, also at Old Gate but at 6.30pm. If you’re interested in joining the committee we could do with one or two more members. Any HBWI member is welcome to attend and see what’s involved.

OK, that’s it for this month, I hope to see you on Monday…

Kirsty Hall
President of Hebden Bridge WI