SOMETIMES, the monthly meetings are merely informative, at other times they are purely entertaining and sometimes they are they both.

The speaker for March was Colin Bell, paying a return visit to entertain on his amazing keyboard, the sound deriving from a Steinway grand piano.

However, Colin is not primarily a musician, having worked as a space scientist in the USA during the development of the space shuttle programme.

His music was therefore interspersed with anecdotes relating to his space years.

It was while he lived in America that he met and befriended Henry Mancini and Colin played a selection of his songs.

The WI listened enthralled as he played songs from the musicals, film scores and other light music mostly at the group’s request (he knows over 1,000 pieces) and then it was the group’s turn to sing along from the songbooks he had brought.

Colin’s fees are sent to Cancer Research and he also plays at Memory Cafes, an idea which featured in WI Life this month, where dementia sufferers are helped to regain some memory by listening to tunes from their youth always played in a minor key, which seems to have a beneficial effect.

The skittles team are going from victory to victory and have now completed the first round of the County Skittles Championship without losing a match.

They are waiting to hear whether their scores were high enough for a place in the semi-finals. The final will be on 14th May in Worcester.

The group has been asked to contribute a page to the history of the WI and has been allocated the period 1980 to 2018; rather a tall order.

Beatty Denning was congratulated on the beautiful arrangement of daffodils on the President’s table and the meeting ended with tea and a talk.