End of XC Season Celebration, 4th April 2020

This Saturday should have seen us wining and dining at Antico’s in Jesmond to celebrate the end of the cross-country season … and we had a lot to celebrate with the Claremont Ladies team finishing top of Division 3.

For fairly obvious reasons this could not go ahead, but we are all getting used to this ‘working from home’ technology malarkey now, so it was decided that we could have a virtual get together using Zoom.

Even though this was put together at fairly short notice by our erstwhile Social Secretary Marie Slack, 9 of us made the Zoom conference and others contributed to the evening via email and WhatsApp.

The Zoomers were Richard and Marie Slack, Hazel Juggins, Alice Vialard, Maddie Day, Gill Milne, Tom Tinsley, Mungai Wairia and Sumanth Nayak. We were also joined by Richard and Marie’s daughter, Emma, all the way from New York and there were guest appearances from Mungai’s daughter, Olivia and Sumanth’s flatmate. It was an excuse to treat this as a night out, have a shave and dress in something that wasn’t kit!

A lot of us had stuck to the pizza and pasta theme as we had meant to be going to an Italian, some were cooking and some had already eaten. It was so good to see people and have a good chat – we even ventured off the topics of coronavirus and running!

As well as those on Zoom, Nina Jensen, Sarah Kerr, David Devennie and Howard MacLennan made contributions by email. Nina had tried to join but technology had let her down – her pizza looked great in the photo, though. Sarah and David had to work around childcare, though the Devennies looked to be having a treat with slow roasted lamb. Roberto Marzo had already tempted us with photos of his home made bread and pasta via WhatsApp.

Overall the experiment was deemed a success and we will definitely have a virtual post-handicap social at the end of the month!