WHAT'S ON

Thursday 12 September — Computer/Tablet/Smartphone Drop In Help Session: another of our regular drop in help sessions. Come along for a one-to-one session with one of our 'experts', or 'helpers', to get your query or problem resolved. Starting from 1.30pm. If you want to come you need to let us know and book a 30 minute slot by sending an email to Isabel here. She will then let you know location, etc.

Open Day: Based on feedback from Group Coordinators and the Membership, we are looking at different ideas for an Open Day this year. All that can be said at this stage is that we will NOT be holding an Open Day open to current members and the public at RfL in October. If you have that date in your diary you can remove it. We are instead currently considering other ideas to attract new members and this will be sometime in January or February.

Tuesday 08 October — Outing to Margate (led by David McPhail and Cressida Jupp). The purpose of this trip is to visit the Turner Contemporary Gallery during the period of the Turner Prize exhibition. The gallery is built above the harbour on the spot where J.M.W Turner stayed. The Turner Prize is an annual prize for contemporary art which takes place at the Tate, or outside London, in alternate years. 2019 will be the first time the Turner Prize exhibition takes place in Margate. For details of this Outing see the pdf here. To register for this Outing please fill in the form here.

Wednesday 09 October — National Museum of Computing, Bletchley: we are organising a trip to here (more info here) including joining a public tour at 2.00pm which costs £15:00 for concessions and which includes the entry fee to the museum which is £5:00 for concessions. The tour lasts about 2 hours and you can visit the rest of the Museum before and/or afterwards as there is a lot to see beyond what the public tour covers. There is a limit of 16 places in total for the tour and currently (12th Sept) there are 13 places still available on the website for the tour on Wednesday 9th October. We plan to travel by train. A Super off peak day return ticket from London Euston is £15 (or £9.50 with a Senior Rail card), leaving on 10:54am train and arriving at Bletchley at 11:42 am in time to look around museum until 2:00 tour after which people can travel back in their own time. (This was the cheapest ticket when checked a few weeks ago but please check yourself when buying a ticket as timings or prices may have changed since. An Oyster60/Freedom pass may also possibly reduce costs depending on route used).
If you are interested in the trip, please book yourself onto the tour for Wednesday 9th October via the website here and let Brenda Hood know so you can be included in plans for meeting up etc.

Monday 28 October — Group Coordinators' Meeting: details issued by email to all Group Coordinators.

Thursday 28 November — Annual General Meeting: all members are invited. It will be held at 10.00 before the Monthly Meeting. At the AGM the Executive reports on its work over the year and the new Executive Committee is elected.


Future iU3A Outings
Our programme of Outings for 2019 so far is:

• Windsor boat trip (possibly September),
• Margate (Tuesday 8 October) — see above for details,
  
• Christmas market (December).

Further details to follow on all of these.

Hopefully we will also have some others to fill in the year's schedule. Like all iU3A activities it will depend on whether we get people willing to organise future Outings. If you are willing to organise an Outing or just have some ideas for Outings, please send them to our Outings Coordinator here.
  
Monthly Meetings
Our monthly meetings feature Monthly Talks and a Second Subject (and plenty of time to meet and chat to other iU3A members). For the Monthly Talks we always have an interesting and entertaining speaker. Strictly members only (though you can join at the meeting), they are held generally on the fourth Thursday of each month but there a few wrinkles this year. The specific dates are: 19 September, 24 October, 28 November. Please note: from the September meeting onward the Monthly Meetings will start at 10.00 (with registration opening at 9.30). This will then allow the '2nd Subjects' to start at 11.30.

They are always at Resource for London, 356 Holloway Road, N7 6PA (next to the Nags Head Waitrose). Please remember to bring your membership card and (if you've got one) your plastic badge holder.

DATE	MONTHLY MEETING PROGRAMME — TALKS & 2nd SUBJECTS:
August	No meeting
19 September	TALK — Valerie Iles, who has worked with the NHS for over 40 years — she set up one of the first Health Masters Degrees in Business Administration in the 1990s, ran the national leadership programme for the Royal College of General Practitioners, taught leadership at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine as a visiting professor, and has been a Non-Executive Director of a large NHS Trust, as well having a wide range of coaching clients — The NHS is 71: is it time it retired?  It isn’t just money that the NHS, our ‘national religion’, needs: it’s a complete rethink. Solutions from both political Right and Left could each work, but we’re stuck between them in a system that is the worst of both worlds. Let’s explore what a healthy health system would look like — and what we can do about it.
	2nd Subject — A Computer Tutorial by the 'Computer Lads' (a recent change): Cookies Back ups Queries from the floor
24 October	TALK — Sebastian Balfour, Emeritus Professor of Contemporary Spanish Studies at LSE,  The Catalan Crisis — An International Perspective. The focus of this talk is on the Catalan dimension of the Spanish crisis. It will look at the processes that led to the abortive declaration of independence on October 27 2017 and then examine the Catalan crisis from an international perspective. A central question is to what extent is the crisis symptomatic of a much broader process combining globalisation and sub-state nationalism.
	2nd Subject — this will be an interactive session on "New Groups". We're looking for members to stay for this session and provide suggestions on what sort of new groups we need in iU3A and how they can be created.
28 November	Our Annual General Meeting plus lots more: TALK —  Alec Forshaw, the former Conservation Officer for the London Borough of Islington, where he worked from 1975 – 2007,  and the author of many books on London’s history, Smithfield Market — Past, Present and Future. Originally a ‘smooth field’ outside the City walls, a livestock market was established at Smithfield soon after the Norman Conquest. As London expanded, so did the market, until its size and central location became intolerable. The removal of the livestock market coincided with the advent of the railways and the construction of a new dead meat market at Smithfield, which has survived, through many ups and downs, to the present day. Its future, however, is once again uncertain as the City Corporation looks to move the meat market, together with the New Billingsgate and New Spitalfields markets, to an as-yet undisclosed new peripheral location.
	2nd Subject —  Paul Gillett of IAM RoadSmart, a national road safety charity that relies on a national network of volunteers to improve road safety by (amongst other things) providing a "better driving" course. Paul was an IT specialist in the Civil Service, then a primary teacher, specialising in music; you'd be surprised how much overlap there is between music and driving!
December	No meeting

Our iU3A coffee mornings are a popular way of getting to know other members. They take place around the borough, are always at 11.00 on varying days of the week and are free to iU3A members. In order to provide opportunities for all our members to attend, we limit attendance to a maximum of three coffee mornings per member per year (1st January to 31st December). The next coffee morning will be on:

• Wednesday 14th August in the Canonbury area
  

Our coffee mornings are now organised by Sally Fox. To book up for any of the above coffee mornings please email Sally here. She will then advise you that you are booked, or if there are no spaces that you have been put on a reserve list. If you can't attend a coffee morning you've booked for, please let us know by emailing Sally (same link as above) to say you can't now make it.