Loretta College

Oh what a grand day we had on Thursday. Once more we had a visit from Loretta College who were celebrating Mary Ward Day (the nun who if I have this right founded the many Loretta Colleges worldwide).

Now I can't say what other students got up to on Mary Ward Day, however I do have an insight to what our visitors got up to.

They were met at Brinnington train station at 10am and walked to the Vale. Firstly they had, I am sure a nice morning at the farm, then from 12.30 onwards they were at our Visitor's Centre,

where activities had been arranged such as making fat balls for the birds, dream catchers and different teams took part in the orienteering (congratulations to the winning team) who in fact took the longest time but did complete all the course. After all that fun we got down to the serious job of worm charming. I feel I am right in thinking that this was the first time Reddish Vale has hosted such an event. We followed the rules as closely as possible. All the competitors, a charmer and gillie chose their charming tools and after we had drawn lots to get our plots we all waited with baited breath for Anne's arm dropping with the cry of "GET TO YOUR PLOTS" to start.

That was the beginning of singing, twanging and patting in the individual plots. Some of the students (and Tracy) used music they had on their mobile phones, while others used the old fashioned twanging. Well the worms who by the way were treated with respect and care! just started coming thick and fast. I am sure that some near enough jumped into the buckets. We had one pair of young men who had 40 worms in the first five minutes and felt that they had won easily and started slacking off, not realising that some of the young ladies were eager to get more and

and did. Congratulation's ladies on charming a wonderful 47 worms. My apologies for not having your names written down, also for not remembering the names of the ladies who won for having the longest worm. I think if we could have had the full half an hour we just might have broken the world record, well you never know.

The young ladies and gentlemen were all good fun and were very polite and friendly, I know that all the staff and volunteers in the Vale really enjoyed this visit. This is the second time we have welcomed Loretta College to the Vale and look forward to Mary Ward Day again next year. I just hope that everyone enjoyed the day as much as we did, I also hope you walked fast enough to catch the 3-O'clock train back to Manchester. Rember to wear your purple flowers with pride and please come back and see us soon.