It has been a busy time with all the fuss over the coming 30th Anniversary of the Falklands Conflict. The arrival of Facebook and Twitter since the 25th Anniversary, especially the latter, has enabled anyone and everyone to offer their views and opinions on the situation with the result that if you get into the line of fire the twitter traffic becomes heavy, sometimes aggressive, often rude, often ill-informed and, just occasionally, amusing.

I feel sorry for Lisa, our Newsletter Editor and Editor of Penguin News in the Falkland Islands, who is having to cope with journalists and TV crews from around the world trying to say something original and often getting 'the wrong end of the stick'. As we have seen with the rioting in London last year the advent of the mobile phone has given fast and efficient communication to the masses, a double edged weapon for good and bad. Language can still be a barrier although Google Translate sometimes manages to make sense of some tweets.

Sales of 'Diddle Dee and Wire Gates' has been a trickle but, apart from a small ad in the Penguin News alerting UK readers that we had copies, hardly anybody knows we have got them to sell and the main ad will go out with the Spring Newsletter.

Whether we will get the Newsletter out early is anybody's guess as Lisa is overloaded with other duties so I am not too hopeful. Even if we got it out on time it will probably be too late to pick up many takers for the visit to Kew on 25 April - I have managed to gather 17 visitors so far so still have 8 places to fill.

At least I know that all my material for the Newsletter is with Lisa so it will not be my fault if we are late getting it out. We are adding to our number of proof readers this time which might help us to pick up any errors before it is published.

Taking a three day break to celebrate my sister's 70th birthday but I expect I will be watching twitter if nothing else! One good spin off of all the press coverage has been an increase in the number of new members joining us - all via the website which is proving its worth and on which we hope to increase the material we have on view, we are clearly not using it to its full potential.

Two items of note arose from my visit to the London Office on 25th January.

 

I found the boxes of the book 'Diddle Dee to Wire Gates' had arrived thanks to MLA's Roger Edwards and Sharon Halford who had brought them north on their way to meetings with the EU in Brussels. I was able to post off the first two copies to be ordered from us and managed to sell ten copies to members of ExCo and FIGO staff. I still have 118 copies left but a promotion in the Spring Newsletter may encourage sales. Full details are given below in an earlier post. 

The other item was news of our proposed visit to Kew to see their work in relation to plants from the Falkland Islands. The date has now been chosen as Wednesday 25th April 2012. The programme will commence at 2.00pm in the Jodrell Laboratory at Kew with a tour of the areas with Falkland plants. There will be a tea break from 4.00pm to 5.00pm followed by lectures on the Conservation of Falkland Plants. The visit will end about 7.00pm. There will be an opportunity to meet Rebecca Upson (Falklands Conservation Native Plants Project Officer), Richard Lewis (Falklands Conservation Invasive Plants Associate), Cynthia Williams (Stanley Growers Nursery Staff), Kit Strange (Kew Alpine Nursery Specialist), Tom Heller (Kew UKOT Seed Bank Officer), Martin Hamilton (Kew UKOT's Programme Co-ordinator), Sara Barrios (Kew UKOT's  Programme GSPC Officer), Marcella Corcoran (Kew UKOT's Programme Horticultural Officer) plus other staff and volunteers involved in the programme. Numbers are limited and priority will be given to those who attended our visit to the Millenium Seed Bank at Wakehurst Place last year - this is a ticket only event.

At the Executive Meeting on 25th January we made a start on a review of what we are about, what we do and do not do and what we ought to be doing. As an opening discussion it was most interesting and it is taking ages to summarise for the minutes of the meeting. This blog even came into the discussion and I was ecouraged to make the address more widely available, at least to our members so that they could benefit from any pearls of wisdom that might accidentally stray into my comments. Such readers as there are will be aware that I have kept out of the political arguments that have crept into the papers and even on television with the approach of the 30th Anniversary of the Falklands Conflict. In my last post I did mention some of the main items that appeared in the British press.

For an organisation that supports the Islanders we are, perhaps, a bit slow in responding with letters to the Editor where appropriate and it was a point that came up in the discussions mentioned above. There is always the option for any member, to make a personal response, to comment, especially in the on-line versions of the papers and the point was made that the articles by Simon Winchester and Héctor Timerman in The Times deserved a strong response and it came in the form of a full article by the Foreign Secretary. Enough said - must get back to the minutes of the meeting.