Joint Secretaries' report for 2007/8

Mark Erickson and Sara Bragg

Clare in the community

Cartoon by Harry Venning, with the kind permission of 'The Guardian'

Standing down this time

By Sara Bragg and Mark Erickson, NLCA joint Secretaries

Some thanks

First we'd like to thank everyone who has helped the NLCA keep going this year - not least simply by coming to meetings and contributing your presence, ideas and comments on our work.  Please let the officers know what you think of meetings, whether they can be improved, and any suggestions you have for speakers and topics. Anybody can ask to receive email minutes and go on doing so as long as they would like, so please sign up for them if you can - the paper minutes are more restricted for practical reasons. The email list is also occasionally used as a forum for debates and further information about relevant meetings or events.

Thanks also to everyone who displays our posters about meetings in their shop or house windows, which helps keep up the NLCA profile.

Speakers

We are always grateful to those who give up their time to give talks at our meetings. This year has included, as ever, many local council officers - we are always struck by their willingness to come along and share their expertise: Stuart Croucher on car clubs; Annie Sparks on the Council's noise service; Tim Nicholls on the licensing hearings; Bev Ditch on trading standards. Jack Latimer from MyBrightonandHove came to talk us through plans for the fabulous new NLCA website currently under construction. [This is it!] John Bristow talked to us about 'transition towns'. Local resident Francis Clark-Lowes regaled us with stories of his adventures walking to Cairo in the 1970s. The Lord Nelson pub continues to host our post-meeting drinks.  For the second year running, David Sewell of the Pavilion Gardens Café hosted a wonderful free tea event in September.

Street parties

We were involved in organising a street party in Tidy Street - swapping inspiration with Elly Hargreave, who organised the one in Over Street. The NLCA provided resources and support for these ventures. Our thanks to all those involved and all the local groups, individuals and businesses that provided facilities and equipment. We hope that this type of event will become an annual, or even more regular, occurrence.

Invaluable support from a wide variety of people

As ever, support from our network of Street Reps has been much appreciated - their job, in welcoming new residents and delivering the North Laine Runner, is hugely important in helping the North Laine continue to feel like a 'community'. We are grateful to our local Councillors, especially Ian Davey,who has worked hard for us and for local residents this year, as well as Keith Taylor, who has also attended meetings.  We also thank Kevin Daly, who has stepped in to take the minutes when we were too busy.

We are grateful to the Brighthelm Centre, the venue for our meetings, and the Pensions Regulator in Trafalgar Place, who sponsor the photocopying of minutes - Alistair Elliott always copies and delivers extremely promptly and efficiently, which is a huge help to our work.

Our farewell as secretaries

We have now reached the end of our four-year term as secretaries, and it is with some sadness that we step down. We genuinely feel it has been a privilege to serve our local community in the small way we have, even though we would have liked to have done more. The post has offered real rewards and satisfactions in helping us feel more connected to the environment and people where we live.

Improved attendance at meetings

We have been pleased to see that over these last four years, attendance at meetings has been steady - or even grown - and is around 25 people each month.  Quite an achievement for an organisation in its 31st year!  Many people are committed enough to have come regularly for many years already, but we are also delighted to have seen some new faces become familiar ones. We now have a fairly substantial email list for minutes, of nearly 80 individuals, and hand-deliver minutes to about 40 more.  This represents a good number of people prepared to interest themselves in the more mundane aspects of an organisation's activities, whilst we know that many more people are avid readers of the North Laine Runner.

Promoting a tolerant and diverse community

We both want to promote the North Laine as a tolerant and diverse community where we can live in peace and accept the presence of people with values and lifestyles that may be very different from ours.  At the start of our term in office, one of us (Sara) wrote an article about graffiti that aimed to promote just that kind of understanding of what she felt was a misrepresented subculture. We've been pleased to see the Council and other organisations taking a more constructive approach to graffiti artists in recent years and have enjoyed the displays of urban art that have become quite a feature of the North Laine, as well as those on the station site hoardings while that development was under construction. We have also taken pleasure in seeing David Samuel's 'Rarekind' gallery join the array of truly unique and different businesses that still survive in the North Laine.  At the same time, we didn't want to cause offence, or to condone the defacing of people's homes and businesses - we were as upset as anyone to see an outbreak of tagging by 'OFK' and friends all over the area recently.  Perhaps the existence of high quality urban art means that we can develop an aesthetic response to it and, as Germaine Greer recently suggested, give it marks out of ten in order to shame the bad graffiti out of town.  (Many thanks for Harry Venning and The Guardian for allowing us to reproduce the 'Clare in the Community' cartoon that comments ironically on attitudes to graffiti.)

On a personal note

I (Mark) would like to thank all of the North Laine residents and NLCA regulars who made me so welcome as a newcomer to the area when I started. It has been an honour (and often a lot of fun) to work with the NLCA over the past four years - even though I still get Kensington Place and Kensington Gardens confused when delivering NLCA minutes...! I thoroughly recommend it to anyone who wants to get to know the North Laine.

We would also like to say how very touched we have been by responses to the news of Sara's brain tumour. We really do not have space here to list all the many people who have expressed concern, or offered sympathy, wise advice and practical help, but we know who you are and your support has a place in our hearts and memories.

To take just one instance, I (Sara) bought a tricycle so that I could still take our daughter around town despite deteriorating balance and some difficulties walking. I have really relied on a huge number of friends, neighbours, acquaintances, local residents and shop owners, sometimes also total strangers, to help me get it on the road, learn to ride it, and in particular to cope on many occasions with motorists outraged to find it taking up 'their' road space, or people who think it would be fun to give it a kicking when they see it parked in the street. Such support has really helped us understand the meaning of community and to gain a sense of belonging. Maybe 'community' is something you need when you are more vulnerable? And maybe it is also when you most need it that it becomes most meaningful.

However, on the positive side, the tumour is benign, we hope that surgery will take place over the summer and that I'll be back to near normal (albeit deaf in one ear) by the autumn.

[Previously published in the North Laine Runner, No 191, March/April 2008]