Business meeting

Sadly, as expected the reports from some of our committees were simply “Nothing to report”. One exception was the Club Administration Committee, which reported that attendance at our weekly online meetings had been good. All meetings up to the end of the end of the Rotary year have now been planned, with the expectation that President Jan will be able to host her President’s Dinner at the Ivy Hill Hotel on 24 June. Our Attendance Officer has booked the hotel for all weekly meetings, except for a couple of evening meetings, from the beginning of July to the end of the calendar year.

There had few bank transactions but the Club did agree that sums raised from the weekly raffle should be transferred to our Trust Funds.

Although there was no formal report from the Membership and Public Image Committee, the Chair did tell us that she is in contact with some potential members.

The latest report from the Better Lives Foundation on the project we had sponsored in Sierra Leone had been circulated to members before the meeting. The Chair of the Foundation and International Committee said he would prepare a financial account for the project and submit this to the Rotary Foundation before applying for further funding for our Nepal project.

After the formal business meeting our member Keith Dabbs gave us a short talk on his three favourite films. They were Casablanca, The Third Man and Stagecoach. What they had in common were interesting subsidiary characters that lifted them out of the ordinary.

Keith told us that if we went to Casablanca we would be able to visit “Rick’s American Bar”, which was made famous in the film. However, in reality there had been no such bar. The film was shot entirely in California and the bar built on the back of one of the film lots.