Well it's time to start planning the next reunion - targetted for 2019.
This is going to be the last one I take the lead on so if anyone out there fancies shadowing the steps involved so you can take the lead on the following event then please make yourself known. There is a chunk of admin involved but I'm at this stage where most of the steps necessary to make it happen are in place and it would be a shame for these to be lost - tt gets a lot easier once you've got the hang of it. I plan to note down a lot of the steps in this blog so others can pick it up if need be.
We have a provisional date for 2019 of the weekend of September 14th / 15th. At this stage it means that the date is in the diaries at RHC so if anything crops up that will interfere with it we will get warned. This is mainly to reserves the various spaces we need - all the details can wait for quite a while. We have pencilled in bookings for The Hub dining hall, (Athlone dining room), Imagine (Athlone Common Room) and a hall of Residence (probably Tuke again). These are all provided by the College.
We also have earmarked the use of Medicine (Cameron dining room) and the associated annexe - but this has a whole stack of caveats around it as Cameron continues its inexorable march down the slope - so we will need to be prepared to have a contingency plan. This building is managed by the Students Union and is scheduled to be refurbished in 2018 - if the budget is available. If no budget in 2018 then it may happen in 2019 .....or it may not. The weekend we've selected is close to the start of term in 2019 so any work should have been completed by then - but there is always a slight risk that a different plan will happen but we should at least get notice of the risk so we can plan some alternatives.
At this stage getting the dates out just allows people planning holidays in 2019 can take the dates into account. To this end I'll probably do a mailshot in early September to get people to save the date. The anniversary of last year's reunion feels like a good time to do a mailshot.
We also have a secondary date of August 31st / September 1st. This may interfere with a lot of other holidays for those forced to go during school holidays and puts the use of the SU buildings at higher risk - particularly if 2019 is the year they do some refurbishing. The weekend in between is no good as the College already have an open day scheduled for September 7th 2019.
Talking of mailshots, it's always the ones that happen after a big gap that result in a lot of addresses being bounced as people change their email addresses from time to time. If this includes you (particularly those that use work email addresses and are retiring) then please let me know of any changes. Otherwise mailshots have become a lot easier as we have a service provider that let's us use their service at no cost. I'll say a bit more about mailshots nearer the time once I've refreshed my addled brain about what's actually involved.