Local

I’ve been trying to declutter. Amongst other things, I’ve been adding more and more tabs to my browser, thinking, “Oh, I’ll include that in a news update on our site,” and it’s got to the stage where I really, really have to clear up all the clutter. So here you are.

If you remember that we were concerned about the possibility of Holywells High School in Ipswich being taken over by the Church of England, then things went very quiet, there’s been a development. The secretary of state for children, schools and families has approved the county’s plan to turn Holywells into an academy, with Kunskapsskolan, the largest provider of secondary education in Sweden, to be a “preferred partner”. Sounds interesting…

Our committee “meets” over the phone. The group is widely scattered over a rural area, so having committee meetings face to face, when committee members are all busy people with family commitments, is often inconvenient. The prospect of having to drive long distances, especially in the winter, can put prospective committee members off volunteering. It’s not very environmentally-friendly to drive when you don’t have to, and petrol isn’t cheap.

For the past few years we’ve held most committee meetings by telephone conference call, arranged through Community Network, a charity based in London that provides tele-conferences for charities, voluntary organisations and social enterprises.

Good news! Thanks to the efforts of committee member John Palmer, who scouted the area, we’ve found a new venue for our meetings. From next month (our AGM) we’ll be at the Pinewood Community Hall (owned by the parish council) on Hawthorn Drive, Ipswich, not far from the A12/14 Copdock interchange and Tesco. The car park is in Laburnum Close at the rear, next to Pinewood Surgery. See the events calendar for a map.

Yesterday, our Celebrant David Mitchell conducted a Humanist funeral for Kate Wasyluk, one of the victims of Scott Nicholls, whose car struck Kate and her friends Emma (who was also killed) and Rebecca Harold, who were walking home from an evening out on 21 February. Nicholls has been charged with dangerous driving, driving while disqualified, and driving without a licence.

Nearly 300 mourners attended the funeral at Ipswich Crematorium, where David described the incident as “utterly pointless, utterly random, utterly wasteful”.

Our March newsletter is online now for you to download. Feel free to give copies to all your family and friends, especially all the “godless” people we hear are in East Anglia.

File Attachment: SH&S News March 2009 A4.pdf (634 KB)

Not sure about pdf files? No problem!

Cath Elliott has written a piece for the Guardian’s Comment is Free website about a Theos survey on faith and Darwin, which indicates that East Anglia is “full of atheists”.

So far from being the Sodom and Gomorrah that religious folk would no doubt have the godless east pegged as, according to the latest British Crime Survey (pdf), "The East of England region had the lowest rates of overall recorded crime and violence against the person and amongst the lowest rates of burglary and offences against vehicles.

The 12th February 2009 was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. Our member Dan Clery has written his story:

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Charles Darwin, born on the 12th February 200 years ago, came up with what is probably the most important idea in the history of science. He reasoned that plants, animals and all living things are not static and unchanging, remaining as they were made by a divine creator; instead they change subtly from one generation to the next and those that are better suited to whatever environment they find themselves in prosper and reproduce more, while those that are less well suited don’t. In this way, plants and animals gradually change, eventually developing into new species and producing the huge variety of nature that we see today. Darwin’s theory, evolution by natural selection, is at the root of our understanding about life on Earth: it explains why there is such diversity in nature, why we are here, and why we are as we are.