the social whirl

The garden club annual supper was very fine, and very well attended.  The members of the committee must work like stink, and next year I suppose I shall find out more about it, to put the whole thing together and manage to lay on a hot main course plus salad for members without charge, while guests pay a fiver.  There is a well-supported raffle, which must cover the cost of the ingredients, and members bring puddings, but it is still a magnificent effort.  The AGM which is mercifully brief is slotted in before the meal, and there is nothing like offering people a free supper to boost attendance at an AGM.  People I spoke to congratulated me on my appointment as treasurer and did not seem to mind that I did not live in the village, and the stand-in barman, actually the manager of the village hall, told me regretfully that they were looking for a treasurer for the hall.  People would not volunteer for things the way they used to, he said.

I dutifully bought a strip of raffle tickets, and won a prize in the raffle, a gigantic amaryllis bulb.  It will have to go on the kitchen window sill for the winter, since there is nowhere else warm enough in the house.  The Systems Administrator received the news with equanimity.  I try not to turn the kitchen into a plant hospital, but last winter there was a rooted Impatiens cutting that I didn't dare leave in the conservatory.  My gardening club friend's ticket was drawn further up in the raffle, and so she got an orchid.  The ritual of village club draws is often that the holder of each winning ticket picks the next one, and as I went up to collect my bulb the third woman on our table tugged my elbow and said I had better choose her ticket.  As I turned back around from the prize table I found that I had, though she had to make do with a pair of gloves.

I wondered what the chances were of three of the winners in a raffle that was not rigged all coming from the same table?  There were about eighty people at the supper, most on tables of six and some on tables of four, while raffle tickets were sold either singly or as a strip of five, depending on how generous you were feeling.  I didn't manage to work out the answer to my question even assuming that all tables had the same chance of winning each time, and then began to think that it would be slightly more complicated than that, since whether people bought one ticket or five or none at all was probably influenced by what their neighbours were doing, and friends sitting together might tend to have similar attitudes to spending.  I gave up, but I was pleased with the amaryllis bulb.  It was donated by a local bulb merchant, who warned me that it did not want to have its roots wet and would really like to live in a mixture of John Innes and grit, not multipurpose compost.

Today I went to a talk on Treasure Hoards of East Anglia followed by a two course lunch.  I am starting to feel rather well fed.