Please find below information about forthcoming events in Amersham. The Society’s lectures are usually in the Kings Chapel. If any member is unable to make his/her way to these meetings and would like transport to be arranged, please contact Geraldine Marshall-Andrew on 01494 433735.
The Society’s Annual General Meeting will be held in the Kings Chapel on Wed 30 Oct 2024 at 8.00pm (to be preceded by a glass of wine or soft drink at 7.30pm).
AGENDA
- Apologies for absence.
- Minutes of the 2023 Annual General Meeting and business arising.
- Chairman’s Annual Report.
- Honorary Treasurer’s Report and Statement of Accounts.
- Annual Subscription: The committee recommends that the subscription should be increased to £16.50 for individuals and £25.00 for double membership, to take effect on the 1st of January 2025. The members are asked to approve.
- Election of Committee Members and Officers.*
- Any other business.
The AGM will be followed by:-
- Discussion of topics raised by members.
- TALK: “The Chapter Two Community Bookshop”.
This talk will be given by Mark Jackson-Hancock, the bookshop manager. Chapter Two is a community bookshop in the heart of Chesham selling pre-loved books, gifts, vinyl and stationery with all profits to The Hospice of St Francis.
* Election of Committee Members and Officers. Nominations should be sent by 23rd October to the Hon Secretary at 162 High Street, Amersham, HP7 0EG.
Dr Irving Finkel returns to the Society with his new talk.
Arrietty, the heroine of Mary Norton’s Borrowers books, kept a diary. This diary she assiduously filled out, while quotations from it provide chapter headings in the second volume, The Borrowers Afield. The speaker discovered that this celebrated Arrietty diary was no fictional invention to enhance the plot, but a miniature desk-top Victorian production of which Mary Norton must have owned a specimen herself, incorporating it with such effect in her story.
Dr Finkel’s determination to secure an example of this miniature diary for the Great Diary Project (the subject of an earlier Society talk) met not only with success, but led also to far-reaching consequences. These will be explained and elaborated in this upcoming illustrated lecture.
The Borrower books were a staple of his reading childhood. His sympathies are offered to all those who have never encountered them themselves, but this is easily rectifiable.
Dr Finkel is a British philologist and Assyriologist. He is currently the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures in the Department of the Middle East in the British Museum. He is an author of a number of academic publications and fiction books.
Recordings of his previous talks given to the Society “The Great Diary Project” and “The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies” are available to our members on demand.