Etchingham

Put your old clothes to good use and raise funds for Etchingham School. There is a textile recycling container in the Bistro car park, the school get paid for every kilo of clothing collected from the container. You can put in any men’s, ladies or children’s clothing, handbags, bags, shoes, ties and belts. Do not put in any carpets or rugs, pillows and cushions, table linen, blankets, curtains, workwear or soiled and wet clothing. Put your items in a black sack or carrier bag and secure before placing in the container. Good quality clothing is sent to developing countries and low quality textiles are recycled into industrial cleaning cloths. More details of the scheme are on the village website, or go to the Rag Bag website www.rag-bag.co.uk

Community Speed Watch, we are in the process of getting a Community Speed Watch group organised in Etchingham, at the time of writing 15 people have expressed an interest in taking part, ten of those have registered as group members. Speed Watch is operated by volunteers from the community, equipped with speed monitoring equipment, they record the details of vehicles exceeding the speed limit, the details are passed on to Police who send out warning letters and where appropriate take further action. Full equipment and all the necessary training will be given by the Police. If we can get a reasonable number of volunteers, then no one will have to do it very often. If you want to find out more about how Speed watch works go to the village website www.etchinghamvillage.co.uk, follow the Speed Watch link on the left, or visit the Sussex Police website www.sussex.police.uk and put Speed Watch into the search box. If you are willing to be included in such a useful and necessary scheme please ring Jill Copland on 01580 819321, Colin Boylett on 01580 819532 or email [email protected] . You can now also register directly on to the system, go to www.communityspeedwatch.co.uk go to the button labelled ‘System Access’ from the drop-down menu select ‘Register as Group Operator’, change the group name to Etchingham, fill in your details and register. You will get a confirmation email and the Etchingham Group Admin will contact you as soon as your details appear on the system Updates on the progress of starting a scheme will also be posted on Facebook www.facebook.com/etchinghamspeedwatch

A member of a village organisation asked if a calendar could be put on the village website www.etchinghamvillage.co.uk where residents could find out about future events, and organisers could check what is already planned by other organisations to avoid clashes of dates.

This has now been set up at this location www.etchinghamvillage.co.uk/calendar there is a link to the page near the top of the website Home Page and another at the bottom of the menu on the left of every page. Full instructions are on the page, but adding entries is very easy, any authorised person can add details, but alterations later can only be made by an admin.

To avoid the risk of unwanted spam/prank posts getting into the calendar a password is needed to complete the entry, I have sent a password to a lot of people who will want to add entries. I have probably not included everyone, so if you are a member of a group or organisation, or individual and need to add entries, contact me for the password if you have not received it.

The idea is that all entries are added to the calendar by village residents, so that I do not have to spend time adding information, and only need to edit errors and changes, hopefully all village organisations will make full use of the calendar and find it useful when planning events.

It is possible that there may be someone who wants to add an event to the calendar and not have internet access, in this case ask a friend or neighbour if they can add the details, if that is not possible contact me with the details.

Etchingham School Bazaar will be held tomorrow (Saturday November 23) at the school from 12 noon to 3pm. Father Christmas will be in attendance, there will be lots of stalls to buy Christmas gifts, a BBQ and café will provide refreshments including mulled wine and mince pies. Attractions such as tombola, guess the weight of the cake and face painting will be going on during the afternoon. Raffle tickets will be on sale soon and will also be available on the day. All very welcome with fun for all the family.

For maximum publicity of all your Christmas events in this column, get the details to me as soon as possible, also, if you are planning fund raising events for Children in need get the details to me as soon as possible.

Get information for this column to me as soon as possible, if you have a diary of events planned for the year let me have the dates and I will put in a list of village events for the year so that people can put the dates in their diaries. There are several ways to get your info to me, but email is preferred because there is less chance of errors during copying. I need information by 10pm on Monday to be sure it will be in time for inclusion, I can sometimes add extra items on Tuesday morning, but this cannot be guaranteed. Just a little reminder, I get plenty of information about events that are taking place, but I get very little follow up information, after your event try and remember to send me brief account of how successful your event was, it can be as simple as a thank you to those that attended and how much money was raised etc. You can deliver to 2 Park Farm Close, telephone 01580 819532 or 07941 786244 or email [email protected] .