Salisbury Shakers August meet-up
Salisbury support group organiser Sheelagh reflects on the Salisbury Shakers meet-up held on 30th August.
The Salisbury group met in August
Twelve people attended our meeting today and it was good to catch up with each other after the summer when so many people were unable to attend. We were so pleased to welcome Dave D back, with both legs intact after 8 weeks in plaster.
There was much to discuss. Most members were able to report on events in their own shaky journeys – meetings with consultants, doctors, neurologists etc. Or, more commonly, waiting for such meetings!
Sheelagh told the group she had been invited to attend the Parliamentary ‘drop in’ day next Tuesday and the discussion turned to how important it was to raise awareness because so many people don’t know about ET and local doctors are unaware of the support available from NTF and also our group. This is mainly because surgeries will not put posters up, for some reason.
We talked again about how to raise some funds for NTF and discussed further the idea of a second book. Rather than ‘tips’ this could be about ‘living with ET’ highlighting difficulties faced, humorous shaky disasters, poems (we have a poet in the group). We might ask Julian Fellowes, who wrote the foreword for the previous book, if we could use his recent article in the Times and maybe we could ask for a contribution from Rob Mallard.
Sheelagh could put it together and we could have it printed in similar format to the previous book by the Salisbury printers who were good to us before.
It would be good to have illustrations. Sadly, the lady who produced the cartoons for the first book has now died but Sarah thought she might know of someone in Warminster who we could ask.
We were hustled out of our meeting room rather speedily as it was required to be used as a fire exit for a wedding later that day. A concert was due to take place immediately after our meeting and some members stayed to enjoy that.
Here is a lovely note on which to end. At the meeting, I was handed an envelope on which was written, ‘A donation for this wonderful group,’ and inside was a lovely card and £50. The donor suggested that perhaps we could use this towards the printing costs for our new book. Wasn’t that amazing? And so heart-warming.
Next meeting: September 27th, same time, same place.
Sheelagh
