Me, here again, within 24 hours. I’m determined to get back into daily blogging.
Today was Community teashop Sunday number one. It’s a multi purpose initiative this. Firstly its fundraising as we need £10k to fix woodworm in our village hall. We already have nearly half and have been coming up with various ideas to hold events to raise the rest and Sunday teashop run by volunteers was one idea. The teashop on Rum is one of the biggest hot potatoes here – Claire currently runs it and has for the last 3 years. She does a really poor job, never opens as many hours or with as varied a menu as she should, could, says she is going to and really abuses the use of the hall and kitchen. But as no one else ever wants to do it when the tender goes out each autumn for the following year she keeps getting it. She refuses to do Sundays, saying there is no call for it so a second reason behind the community is to demonstrate that there is a demand.
So after a brief meeting and some emails a few of us have agreed to take a turn every so often at doing teashop on Sundays. Ady and I went first. The idea is you open 11 til 3, serve whatever you want, have an ingredients budget of a tenner and everything after that is covered goes to the hall fund. We made carrot soup, bread rolls, quiche (actually that was dinner earlier in the week so I made extra and froze what didn’t sell for dinner next week!), two sorts of cupcakes and some flapjacks. Tea, coffee and juice is also on offer but we have that bought by the RCA (Rum Community Association) as a floating stock.
We did pretty well for the first shift on a grey and drizzly Sunday. The bar had been swinging until 5am so the few people who were on island as tourists were not really up and about today so our trade was almost all islanders but we sold at least four portions of everything. It was nice with various people calling in for cake and chats and the day passed fairly quickly. As it goes it was a grey and dank day anyway so although we’d have still been out on the croft doing stuff I didn’t feel too cheated at being in doors all day.
Back at home I collected some eggs and took them down to Fliss and then fed the animals on my way back up. Ady did the washing up mountain from last night that we’d not tackled last night and then put dinner on the barbecue to cook which our current condensation busting method for roast dinners on Sundays – cook it outside!
It;s been a productive week, with the exception of the Rum Venison website which I have still failed to sort out I have done everything else on our list of stuff to make happen this week.