Hey everyone. I hope you’re all well and are in good mental health. Today, I’m going to talk to you about what we’ve been getting up to with our Burgh Castle Almanac group. We have Zoom meetings every week, and I’m going to show you some of the arts and crafts we’ve been doing during these calls, as well as share with you one of the member’s archaeological finds.

When we meet up on Zoom every Tuesday there are about ten of us, including our resident artist, Ian Brownlie, who joins us and sets us challenges, which we have to post by 6pm the same day.

The task this week was to draw the mindfulness walk we regularly do around the Burgh Castle fort. This proved quite a challenge for me, as I know what I want to put down on paper, but don’t know how to draw with my pencil; I don’t know if any other people in the group feel the same way. When we finished, we had to make a ‘ding’ sound, so I got on Youtube and used a doorbell, while some of the others had little bells which sounded great. The drawings where all unique, telling everybody’s individual story of their walks. We were also given three materials that we had to make something with, but weren’t allowed to start until we’d finished our chat.

I thought I’d share some facts about the BCA group. Thanks to the organiser Laura Drysdale for providing me with this information; I’m shocked that it’s been this many times that we’ve met up!

1. In all, we’ve met 58 times in person.
2. We’ve met 7 times online.
3. Average online attendance is 11 people. I think that’s pretty similar to meetings before lockdown, though it may be a bit more .
4. Around 45 people all together have taken part in BCA sessions, excluding experts and artists for one-off events.

In a few weeks time, I’ll look at all the data we’ve assembled across the whole BCA experience so far.

I use to work with one of the participants over ten years ago, and he would always talk about the archaeological finds that he found from doing digs on the beach. His sister is a part of our Facebook group and she posted pictures of a piece of amber he found which he gave to her. This member has been coming to Burgh Castle since he was 14 and says that in that time, he’s found loads of pottery. Quite recently, he found a Roman coin and the transcription read ‘The return of happy times’, which is what we called our first exhibition, held at the Time and Tide museum in Great Yarmouth. I think the whole of our group now look at mole hills in a different light, as this is where our friend finds his treasures.

This week there were around 11 of us on the Zoom call, and we were sent some more arts and crafts materials in order to make a wire ball. First, we had to to put some rice in a freezer bag and make it the size of egg. I tried to do this, but the blooming freezer bag popped on me and the rice went all over the floor and my table. A few choice words were said, ha ha.

So I couldn’t make mine in the end, but some of the other members made some and they looked really good. We’re also looking at producing a BCA t-shirt design, and there are loads of ideas floating around from everyone about what it should look like.

Once again, I wish you all good mental health and thank you for reading.