Mainly good news this month but also something to moan about!

The really excellent news is that we have heard that we have been given a grant of almost £20,000 by the Football Foundation to undertake the re-furbishment of the pavilion. This is subject to some conditions about coaching etc. which the football club will have to fulfil but we can now proceed with the building work once the appropriate contracts have been signed. Our thanks must go to John Vanderpump and Mike Reynolds for all their hard work in negotiating with the Football Foundation and achieving a successful result.

Joyce Weeks retired at the end of December and we are all very grateful for the many hours of service which she has put in to caring for the hall over the years. We wish to make a small presentation to Joyce and hopefully we will be able to do this at the pantomime in February so that is a really good reason to book your tickets well in advance. We have been very lucky to secure the services of Sheila Fleming who will take over from Joyce and will be responsible for the cleaning initially for three months but hopefully permanently thereafter.

          On the subject of cleaning the showers in the pavilion area have been left in an extremely dirty condition on at least three occasions recently and I suspect that someone has unauthorised access to the pavilion and is spreading mud around from their boots in the shower area. This behaviour is totally inacceptable and we will be putting new bolts on the door in the near future to prevent anyone getting in to the pavilion without authorisation.

On the fund raising side the recent coffee morning with flower arranging was very successful and a report about this event appears elsewhere in this Gauntlet. Our next really big event will be the Clay Pigeon shoot on Friday May 13^th for which there already some entries so like last year  this promises to be a fantastic event so book your team in for a super day!

We have a couple of working groups who will meet soon to discuss  both the village hall rates of hire as well as how we may find space and time for the proposed pre-school group. I hope to report on outcome of these meetings next time.

The next meeting of the VHMC is on 3^rd February and the VHDC will meet on 24^th January.

Terry Mackintosh (Hon.Chairman).