Forthcoming Summer Season

With snowdrops and crocus plants in full flower, Mother’s Day passed, and longer days, spring feels imminent, and the summer doesn’t seem quite so far away.  Planning for the G&A summer season is well underway starting with the appointment of a team of interns who will be helping us to run Green and Away this year.

Each winter Peter, our chair of Trustees and myself as coordinator, advertise, then select and interview candidates to join our internship program. This is the fifth time we have run the programme and each time we are astounded and humbled at the talents and range of experiences of the applicants.  Some of them have packed more into 20 years of life than most 40 year olds and are an inspiration.  They are sure to be the leaders, movers and shakers of the future and we are proud to have them working with us this year.

This season we will be expanding into new areas.  We are hosting The Pantaloons for two outdoor theatre performances and having seen them twice before we can definitely recommend putting the dates into your diaries.  Our smile and laugh muscles hadn’t worked so hard in years when we saw them perform all 40 Canterbury Tales in one evening.  This time they will be performing Sherlock Holmes on 17 July and  A Midsummer Night’s Dream on 11 August.  Tickets available from their website at The Pantaloons and later from our office on site.  We have limited tickets so do book well in advance for performances that will have you laughing and chuckling all the way through and then sending away with a feel good factor of 10 out of 10!

One of our quirky breakout spaces

We are hosting 5 conferences and events this season too.  Details are on our website.  We aren’t quite fully booked so if you are looking for an unusual quirky venue that has a lot to offer, then look at our website page Hiring Green and Away for more information.  Not only are we different, we have a lot to offer including a professional service, beautiful site, home cooked organic food, homemade cakes and bread, charming conference spaces and all at a very reasonable price.

The reason we can offer such good value is that all of the staff are volunteers including our trustees, managers and the coordinator .  They all work for Green and Away because addressing issues around climate change are essential if we are to avert the worst effects scientists are predicting, and we passionately believe that it is time to stop polluting and desecrating our home, the Earth – and because what we do is fun.  The way forward is to build strong communities, support  and respect each other, be adaptable and flexible.  This approach does not bring a smugness from having a low-carbon footprint, instead it gives us something most of us have lost – a sense of belonging and connection to each other and to the earth.  Many people have commented that spending time with us brings a shift in their perception and that there is so much more to business and life than ‘the bottom line’!  Working together in a way that takes account of nature and being in harmony with it is not hard but brings its own gifts of beauty, appreciation and friendship.  We hope more people will come and experience the magic of Green and Away…

We hope we won’t see this much water again in summer 2013

Coping with severe weather Summer 2012

What a wet one!

We have coped with rain and mud before but never on this scale.  During the summer it was not just the volume of rain but the fact that it rained nearly every day that caused so many problems.  The previous wet year was 2007 where torrential downpours caused flooding all down the Severn Valley from Worcester to Gloucester, but there were several days of sunshine between the rain showers and this allowed everything to drain and dry out.  This time there really wasn’t much of a let up – it was relentless.

We have the good fortune to have the most beautiful of fields with a large variety of unusual trees and shrubs, but we also have the misfortune to have a heavy clay surface that doesn’t drain well.  Despite careful management of wheeled traffic it wasn’t long before the major walkways were getting churned up.  We knew we were in for a wet summer and that the problem would not go away of its own accord so it was a question of how best do we manage the situation.  We pride ourselves on our flexibility and being able to adapt to whatever nature throws at us so this was just a challenge to rise to.

Our first solution during set up was to make a ring road round the village green area with coconut matting. We called it the ‘M25’ and made everyone use it and walking on grass nearby was forbidden.  This worked really well and the site stayed relatively green and mud free. The most heavily trodden area was treated to a walkway of pallets, and the obvious name for this was ‘cross-rail’.  We extended the coconut matting to the other major paths and this worked until the first conference when the shear numbers of people walking on the matting drove it into the mud underneath.  More pallets were ordered from the ever benificent plant nursery next door and more walkways were made until all the major paths were covered by over 200 pallets and coconut matting.  The site still retained charm but of a different sort than before.  We carried on hosting conferences despite the weather.

Some of our delegates found the situation more difficult than they expected but picked up on the ‘Dunkirk spirit’ of our volunteers and had a positive experience. There were moments when we thought perhaps we should cancel the events but that seemed like giving up and a bit of a cop out.  It would also have ruined our 100% record of delivering our service of outdoor events.  It is something we are proud of.

There are also other considerations.  The extremes of weather we are now experiencing

The River Teme burst its banks – again

are being caused by climate change – probably man-made or at least with human factors exacerbating the problem.  According to even the most optimistic expert, the situation is likely to get more extreme. The River Teme has burst its banks 3 times during the last 5 summers, something it only previously did occasionally during winter. If we had decided to give up and give in now – how are we going to manage to cope with greater extremes in the future? We are all going to have to find new ways of living, operating and adjusting to the unfolding situation. Flexibility, cooperation and strength of character coupled with a can-do approach is going to become ever more important over the next few years.

You would think that being outdoors in all that rain day after day would have caused severe depression amongst our volunteer workforce.  While there were times when some of us were fed up, the majority seemed to thrive on it.  There was a strong community spirit that bound us altogether and carried us through.  Our volunteers were amazing, often getting covered in mud and doing horrible messy, wet jobs to keep things going, but still smiling.  They even wrote and performed a song about it called ‘It rained’  If you click on this link you can see what life was like for the volunteers during set up and the wonderful smiling faces.  Thanks to Tom of Norfolk for the filming and to Tom of Wood for the song.

Despite having coped well this summer we really do hope that next year we will have a dry summer!

 

The only feasible fashion for summer 2012