AV News 177 - August 2009
A New Postal AV Group
D a v id F in d la y C la rk ARPS
You'll have heard of "Two peas in a pod", "Three men in a boat", but "Eight
men in a Portfolio"? Well, now you are about to. Strictly speaking, that's not
a completely accurate representation of the status quo as one of the men has
his dear wife as an associate. Strictly speaking too, we're not quite a
"portfolio" in the office equipment sense so much as a group of like-minded
AVers who correspond with each other.
This all began when I received an e-mail in
July last year from Jim McCormick in
Middlesbrough (whom I had once met years ago
at Snods Edge). He suggested that some of us
in relatively far-flung repositories of AV
enthusiasm and occasionally, accomplishment,
might like to consider setting up a group of AV
proponents who could post sequences to each
other in a cycle such that all would see each
others' work within a number of weeks and
perhaps (Heaven forfend!) criticise or even
comment favourably on them. He and the rest of us, were all aware that
although there are RPS and other AV meetings and occasions scattered
about the UK, several of us had to travel hundreds of miles to reach them,
often at bad weather times of year, not that that has always deterred us!
Not everybody wants to compete and not everybody wants to be
constrained by the 12 minute time limit on sequences. What we were all
agreed upon was, however, that we loved making sequences and trying to
entertain and inform our friends. Jim's note stirred a chord within all eight of
us he had contacted and so the Northern AV Portfolio was born. A number
of other designations were considered before we settled for this one. It
seemed best to incorporate our views and activities.
The original eight of us are scattered in far north Scottish fastnesses like
Avoch (pronounced "Auch"), Clatt (pronounced "Clatt") Banff (pronounced
any way you like!) and dotted about in other locations like Carluke, Dalgety
Bay and Stirling in Scotland and Carlisle, Middlesbrough and Newcastleupon-Tyne south of the border. Alastair Cochrane ARPS AFIAP has had to opt
out of our group but his place has been taken by Bill Barr. The rest of us, in
alphabetical order are Dr David Clark ARPS BPE2*, Stuart Edgar CPAGB LBPPA,
Jim Evans, Maurice and Ellen Dobson, Ron Henry ARPS, Jim McCormick
DPAGB and David Pickford ARPS DPAGB.
No doubt if anybody out there might like to join us, then they should contact
Jim though our numbers do perhaps need to be limited because of the
timespan of the circulation of sequences. Jim is the presiding genius of our
organisation and he makes sure that we all circulate our work (on flash drives
or SD cards) in time to the next recipient. That person, after as many viewings
as he likes, then sends his comments by e-mail directly to the author of the
piece.
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