Wembley and District Scottish Association

Summer Social

 

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Held at Church of the Ascension, The Avenue, Wembley from 8pm on Monday 20th May 2013.

As our 80th Anniversary season draws to a close, l thought that a brief review of each of the major events would be in order, with each evening providing one dance in tonight's programme.

Opening Dance Class 

Back in September. with the Paralympics having finished just the day before, our season kicked off with a gentle warm-up of straightforward dances. The very first one we did was EH3 7AF

 

80th Anniversary Social

 In October, on the nearest Monday to the date that the Association was formally constituted in 1932, we celebrated with cake and cava. All the dances had formations that draw an eight and a zero, such as The Duchess Tree.

 

 

Fireworks Party

 This was held on a perfect evening in Eastcote and everyone contributed a superb collection of Fireworks, the remains of which I am still extricating from my lawn! No dancing so The Fireworks Reel seems an obvious choice to represent this event.

 

Christmas Social

This is our main opportunity to welcome visitors from other local societies to our Monday nights and I make a special effort to provide the best music available, including the ever popular Christmas CD by Jim Lindsay which provided the tunes for Culla Bay

New Year Social

After the excesses of the Festive Season and with the coldest time of the year just starting, Caroline's soup is a welcome start to the New Year. The theme for the evening was a light-hearted, and totally fictitious account of a New Year's Eve party - remember The Dancing Master strutting his stuff?

Burns Night.

Our most formal event of the year was another great success with nearly 100 people enjoying the hospitality at Northwood Golf Club. However, it could have been so different as bad weather forced us to postpone the event for 3 weeks. We had a long discussion with the club secretary and catering manager and for some time it was in the balance whether we would go ahead with the original date, postpone or even cancel. Therefore I have chosen Equilibrium as the dance to represent this year's Burns Night.

 

80th Anniversary Ball

Our highest profile event of the season where dancers from across the region joined us to help celebrate our 80 years. This was the second time we have held our Ball at Nower Hill School and we are now settling in well which helped make the evening go with a real swing. One of the dances we did was, naturally, The Anniversary Reel

 

photograph by Stephen Webb

 

Spring Social

I decided to indulge myself with the theme for our social in March and look out some music by bands we don't normally dance to on a Monday night including an old version of The Byron Strathspey by Andrew Rankine which I remember dancing to when I first started at Wembley back in the 1970s - a wonderful trip down memory lane for me.

 

West MACs Ball

At this annual event we join forces with the other local societies to raise money for a worthy Scottish charity, this year we were able to send £1,000 to The National Autistic Society, Scotland. it was our turn to look after the ticket sales this year and many thanks must go to Patricia Hamilton, Brenda Manbauhar and Pam Crisp for sharing this duty between them. Another of our Past Presidents, Caroline Hamilton, did another splendid job as MC. The first dance of the second half was Queen's View

 

Summer Social

And so we come to the last full evening of dancing of this, our 80th Anniversary Year. Thanks to everyone who has attended our Monday evenings and made them such a pleasure. Don't forget the AGM and Closing Evening on the first Monday in June and the End of Season Meal on the 18th June - venue to be confirmed. I think a suitable dance to close this evening with would be Midsummer Madness

 

 

Graham Hamilton