Compost

 Happy New Year to everyone, lets hope it’s a better one than 2001. This month’s Compost I think will be a short one, plenty of other things going on at the moment and not many events to report on anyway!!
Firstly, the calendar in the back of the December ACORN was a bit of a mystery to me. I got a call form John White to tell me that the Lydden date published was the wrong one. ‘Whata stupid mistaka to maka’ I thought, but when I delved, it wasn’t me…. oh no, I think the Ed must have other things on her mind as well!!! So ignore last months calendar and look at this one for proper dates, he says hopefully. Just to make doubly sure, the date for the Lydden sprint will be April 14th which is approximately 1 month later than usual. At the moment I have no one down to Secretary this or for that matter, the North Weald meetings. If you feel that this is something that you’d like to have a go at, then please let me know. I promise you won’t be left on your own to sort it out, advice and help will be on hand.
The autotests as mentioned last month, will need a new organiser. They may be 5 months away but time flies, we all know that. The job involves applying for permits to the MSA, booking the venue, looking after paperwork on the night and sending out some results. It’s not rocket science and once again help will be available. I will wait in anticipation for a phone call.
What’s been happening lately? Croydon’s 12car ran on December 14th from Westerham Garage and was attended by 11 crews, so another good turn out. It was a good event for Sevenoaks as well. Daren and I took an outright win, something I’m not sure that we’ve done before and Chin on his own came 2nd. Daren and I were convinced at about ¾ distance that we would be dead last. We hadn’t come across the kind of route-check that Croydon were using before and we had loads of NSP’s on our sheet. I’m not going into detail but we didn’t think that there should be quite as many!!! Then we reread some of the plotting instructions and thought, ah, that’s what they meant, pulled a couple of answers from memory and it was good enough to win. We had driven the correct route and been back along it once or twice after sussing things out. This cost us 2 minutes and 1 fail only. Daren came up with a nice gesture of dedicating our win to Martin Williams, which if you’ve read this first may have you wondering why, but I’m not going to explain here. Next 12car is ours on Jan 11th, preceded by our scatter on Jan 9th. Both of these will have happened by now so I’ll fill you in next month.
What may not have happened by now is the annual awards evening and dinner dance at Leeds Castle. Possibly too late to put your name down now although if there have been any cancellations, then maybe not. I expect to see loads of faces, we really need a good turn out to ensure a revisit in 2003, so please be there.
Chin has the Kent Rally organisation well in hand and the PR work should be underway by now. Thanks to the volunteers for going out and delivering the hundreds of letters to the households along the route. Your help will be needed on the night as ever so please mark the date in your diary and try to be available. The date is February 16th/17th.

MARK DAWSON

The Acorn : January Edition