Our October coffee morning

Coffee and chat at Café Crème

Heather writes:

"5 of us made it on a lovely, sunny (but chilly) day to the friendly (and very reasonably priced) Café Crème. Only after I had left, had nipped into Ideastore, had an eye-opening trip to a "well known" bargain emporium with Tammy and set off home did I recall that we had not taken a photo! ... Lots of the usual good cheer and chat: having the builders in; reminiscences of bygone EEWI sessions; what/not to see on TV or at the cinema; the news from Wales; benefits of joining the WI Wanderers; travel adventures including Littlehampton, setting off to cycle in The Forest and so much more. Bet you wish you had been there! Still had time for health updates, encouragement and understanding; unsolicited advice, and good wishes for all our members – present or otherwise occupied today. Café Crème well worth revisiting." 

Fancy joining us for our coffee morning? Look out for our next coming up blogpost.

Illustration by Lydia

Our October talk

The Queen Bees – our October talk by Esther Coles

The Queen Bees is a podcast by Esther Coles, our October speaker, with her friend Jane Horrocks. Also at our meeting were producer Claire, a friend and former patient of our president Sally, and her daughter Eve. Claire had introduced Jane Horrocks to Esther after she had suggested making a podcast about her bee-keeping project in lockdown, as Jane had an allotment nearby. The podcast ran for three years and guests included Paul Whitehouse. They currently promote the podcast and bee welfare through talks, recently at Somerset House and Kew Gardens, and workshops in candle rolling and candle dipping.

This month, bees are seeking out ivy, the last nectar source of the year, so plentiful that it can make enough honey to store through winter. The ivy bee, which lives in tiny burrows in the ground and eats only ivy pollen at this time of year, is being out-competed by honey bees. There is a movement towards replacing European honey bees with British black bees, which produce less honey but are smaller, sturdier and well adapted to our natural climate.

When bees collect pollen they get it all over their body hairs, groom it off and put it in their knee pockets to take home, They also eat it, secreted as wax to build the cells. In early spring, one of the main jobs for bees is to collect water from puddles. They also circle the hive and cool it with their wings.

Honey bee keeping became popular cities, particularly in London through a campaign called Plan Bee, led by the Co-Op sixteen years ago, which is how Esther got started. There are now too many hives and too many honey bees for the forage available.

Esther advised us not to buy squeezy honey from the supermarket – it is watered down with sugar syrup for mass production – but to look for local honey instead. Esther's honey, from her Crouch End hives, had a distinct, delicious lime flavour from her local linden trees. 

We tried Zandax honey from the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, which had a strong smell of caramel. Arbutus honey had a bitter flavour and a smell that some thought like disinfectant – it is being tested on cancer cells. Honey has historical uses in medicine, usually as antibacterial dressing for wounds. Sally had seen this in action, and said that while it's incredibly effective, it also stings a lot. Esther mixes a bit of honey with vodka when she has a sore throat. 

There was also a jar of propolis – the glue that sticks the hive together. This too has antibacterial properties. 

Esther explained the structure and use of the hive and the spinning machine used to pour out the honey from all of the frames at once. We heard about common practices to maximise production and things Esther allows – swarms, and wax moths, considered an infestation but in the wild they help clear out the wax in the hive without hurting the bees. 

Esther's local gathering place for bees is the Alexandra Palace golf course. The drones and queens meet for mating in late summer, before late August - September when the drones are dragged outside by the workers and killed before winter. 

Through winter, the colony forms a ball around the queen to keep her warm and the beekeeper needs to check and rearrange frames to keep them close to the bee ball in winter. 

Once fertilised, the queen produces around two thousand eggs a day. The larvae hatch in their cells and are fed by the workers before being shut inside with a wax plug to transform into a bee. A worker bee’s first job is to clean out the wax from its cell, ready for another egg. In summer the life cycle of a bee is about thirty-six days. The queens can live up to eight years, although most professional beekeepers kill their queens after two years, when their egg production slows.

Bees can produce new queen cells simply because they don't seem to like the current queen, or they produce multiple queens, usually because the colony is too big: they swarm to increase odds of survival while looking for a new site. 

Bees may ball around an unpopular queen and overheat her until she dies, or a new queen may challenge her. During the fight, the other bees will produce a high piping sound. When queens die accidentally, beekeepers can allow an 'emergency queen' to develop or order one through the post. Signs of a declining or unpopular queen can be increased aggression – if bees are flying around you near your eyes, ears, mouth or nose, or in your hair, they are considering sensitive areas to sting you and you should inform your local beekeeper. Esther had an aggressive hive in an allotment area that she had to rehome.

A hive has a shared pheromone for identification, though bees separated from their colony are sometimes allowed to join another if they give a snack of pollen to the guard drones. The hive is very dark inside. The bees communicate, usually about the best new sources of pollen, by standing on the combs and waggling their legs about, producing vibrations. They will argue, drowning each other out, secreting stronger pheromone or pushing each other off the combs. 

The Queen Bees is available on Apple Podcasts. 

And perfectly timed for our talk, our member Christine had received in some change that morning a new pound coin – featuring honey bees.

A big buzz of thanks from East End WI for a fascinating (and delicious) talk with a chance to try some candle-rolling.

Thanks also to Hannah for this month’s notes and to Christine and Heather for pictures.

Our monthly coffee morning and meet-up – Café Crème

Friday 24th October, 10.30-11.00, 566 Roman Rd, Bow, London E3 5ES, bus routes 339, 276, 488 or No.8.

It's back to one of our favourites this month. The welcome is always so warm here.

Our October walk

 

A Whitechapel walk seasoned with stories

We had a map: one of Graham Barker's East End walks packed with interest. We also brought our stories – family tales, childhood memories and the places we've called home. 

We paused at the Albion Yard brewery, its cobbles still ready for dray horses. We looked up at The Blind Beggar's pub signs, through the railings of the Trinity Green almshouses and we were treated to a peek into a hidden row of cottages where there were glorious Autumn colours. 

We heard the story of the Spiegelhalter jewellery shop punctuating what was once Wickham's department store. There were the two statues, facing each other, of William and Catherine Booth, founders of the Salvation Army. Across the way, the passageway in to East End institution Rinkoff bakery and the gates where Captain Cook set off. 

Towards Stepney Green we admired a ghost sign and walked on to Dunstan House, once home to the marvellously named anarchist Rudolph Rocker. Then, the clock tower commemorating Stanley Atkinson, local councillor and guardian of the poor, and a water fountain with a touching tribute to Leonard Montefiore.

A walk through Stepney City Farm (its goats striking a pose) led us to St Dunstan's and All Saints Church, the church of the high seas. At the pretty Mercers' Cottages, we had fascinating insights from one of the residents on their layout and history, social housing for over 300 years.

On, then, to our final stop for the day, the Ragged School Museum's café.

Fancy joining us for a walk? Look out for our next coming up blogpost.

Coming up in October

 

Steps in Stepney, Queen Bees and a warm welcome – coming up in October

Our monthly walk – Whitechapel to Mile End

Saturday 11th September, meet at 11.00 outside Whitechapel Station (the old entrance on Mile End Road)

Though close to home for many of us, Graham Barker’s route reveals some fascinating facts about the area. A copy of the route and info can be found here.  

Our monthly meeting – meet the Queen Bees

Thursday 16th October, 7pm for 7.30pm at St Margaret’s House, 21 Old Ford Road, London E2 9PL, entrance via the gate to the left. (If you’re joining us for the first time, feel free to email us and someone will meet you at the entrance on Old Ford Road.)

Queen Bees is a passionate initiative dedicated to educating adults about the fascinating world of bees through interactive workshops and engaging talks.

Their sessions are designed to inspire and inform, covering essential topics such as:

• The vital role of bees in ecosystems
• Pollination and its impact on food production
• How individuals and communities can support bee populations
• Sustainable beekeeping practices

...and these busy bees are going to teach us the art of rolling beeswax candles.

Our monthly coffee morning and meet-up – Café Crème

Friday 24th October, 10.30-11.00, 566 Roman Rd, Bow, London E3 5ES, bus routes 339, 276, 488 or No.8.

It's back to one of our favourites this month. The welcome is always so warm here.

Our September coffee morning

Coffee in the greenery at Clarnico Club 

First, find a way through the cheese plant... Our September coffee at the cheerily unhurried Clarnico Club, opposite V&A East Storehouse in the Olympic Park, came with added foliage.

Our chat covered transport apps, creative adventures, London haberdasheries, cold water pods, swimming, quilting, theatre, the Academic Archers, the Storehouse, the building of neighbourhoods and much else besides before we headed off to the rest of our wonderfully varied Fridays. 

Fancy joining us? Look out for our next coming up blogpost.

Our September meeting

Bystanders can be lifesavers – our September meeting

A heart sign with our hands: trickier than it looks! It's a sign of support for the national WI campaign Bystanders can be Lifesavers.

We were very lucky to have the knowledge and real life experience of our president, Sally, a breast cancer nurse, for an evening learning the basics of cardiac massage and defibrillator use.

Sally started by introducing our inflatable 'patient' for the evening... and the WI campaign. The theory is that even if you don't feel physically able to do it – cardiac massage is exhausting and in a healthcare setting, done in relays – you can instruct somebody else.

There are around 30,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests per year. The recovery rate is very low: about 7% survive against 27-28% in hospital.

Sally talked us through what a cardiac arrest is: a problem with the electrical impulses in the heart. Anyone who has had a cardiac arrest is likely to be unconscious and probably not breathing.

What holds people back from doing cardiac massage?

"Am I going to hurt them?" is often the biggest worry. Sally explained that you can't make them any worse than they are. Yes, we would probably break ribs but breaking the sternum would be much less likely. There's fear of legal action but it's obvious that someone has been in dire need. Fewer people are prepared to try and resuscitate a woman than a man because they're worried about taking a bra off (for defibrillator use, metal is best removed so belts and jewellery should be taken off too). 

During the pandemic, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation was phased out, because of infection risk and advances in knowledge, that the most helpful thing is to keep the heart pumping.

Sally took us through the main steps:

First, talk to the person. If no response, squeeze the top of the shoulders. Having ascertained that the person is not well and needs some help:

Shout out for help. You, or they, call 999 and ask for an ambulance. The first thing the ambulance service will ask is, "Is the patent breathing?" 

Tell them where you are. They give you the address and code for the nearest defibrillator that's registered with the ambulance service. There is also a website, The Circuit, which tells you where the nearest defibrillator is.

A lot of defibrillators are in settings such as schools and care homes where they are not accessible to the public. There is pressure at the moment to make them accessible. Stations have them – Waterloo has 100 – and most fire stations. Each defibrillator has a guardian, who does the upkeep and registers it with the ambulance service. But where they are, how accessible and which are registered is very patchy. 

Back to the steps: once on to 999 with someone collecting a defibrillator, the best next thing is to start cardiac massage. It can be helpful to have your phone on speaker so that the ambulance service can talk you through what you need to do.

Sally demonstrated the best hand positions for cardiac massage, on adults and on children, the speed – 120 to the minute – and depth of 6cm.

Then, with our dummy defibrillator, which has all of the equipment but no electrical charge, Sally took us through how to use it and the importance of keeping people clear while it's shocking. The reusable pads, for adults and children, had diagrams of where to place them, and the machine talked us through as it analysed the heart rhythm, shocked, then if no rhythm, told us to resume heart massage.

Sally explained that if there is no defibrillator, or you are alone, you just keep going with cardiac massage as long as you can. But "You're not quite as alone as you think you are" – the ambulance service would stay on the line, we should feed back to them and they would tell us when it's safe to stop.

There was chat about the messiness of a real situation. That the person is likely to have poor colour with ashen skin, they may have been sick, they might be slumped in a chair and need to be got onto the floor, or need to be rolled onto their back. And then there are hairy chests. which can be hard to stick defibrillator pads to – there are razors in defibrillator packs now.

Sally told us how sophisticated training dummies are now in hospitals, even programmable with different heart rhythms.

Some of us had a go at cardiac massage and role playing the things we needed to do.

How would we know it's worked? Sally explained that people do cough and splutter, then you know they're better again. 

And what next? A lot of people go back into the community without enough knowledge of what they've experienced, so cardiac rehab is becoming available.

Sally's closing tip: "It's quite easy to forget to ask for help."

A massive thank-you to Sally for an interesting and engaging evening full of practical information and advice. And a special mention for our 'patient', who's welcome at a meeting any time, even if she was looking somewhat deflated at the end of the evening...

Our monthly coffee morning and meet-up: Clarnico Club

Friday 26th September 10.30-11.00, Clarnico Club, 1 Tandy Place, E20 3AS, opposite V&A East Storehouse

388 bus, a five minute walk from Hackney Wick station (Mildmay Line), or from Stratford International DLR, a walk across the Olympic Park.

Our September walk

Mellow fruitfulness, canalside industries and bustling café life – our September walk from Three Mills to Hackney Wick

Christine writes:

"The few intrepid EEWI walkers were treated to a welcome burst of blue sky and sunshine this morning. Starting at Three Mills we headed towards Hackney Wick. There was evidence of the changing season along the way (autumn blackberries, emerging ivy berries and who knew there was a row of old fruit laden apple trees canalside of the busy A12!). With talk of long lost canalside industries we passed the old Bryant & May match factory (remembering the women workers exposure to phosphorous causing the disease 'phossie jaw'). Arriving at bustling Hackney Wick our coffee /lunch stop was at Burnt Umber cafe. Thank you, fellow walkers for a lovely morning."

Fancy joining us for a walk? Look out for the next coming up blogpost for information.

Pictures by Christine