THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT WAS: For Caerleon WI, 2007, was a very busy year with the regular monthly meetings, the discussion group, short courses, interesting speakers, and visits to various venues.

The Christmas lunch was held on December 4, at the Bear Hotel, Crickhowell, and after lunch there was time to look around the village. Crickhowell may be a small village, but their Christmas shops were fabulous.

The programme year ended with a carol service at St Cadoc's Church, on December 10, which was enhanced by the attendance of Lodge Hill Junior School choir and the Caerleon Endowed Junior School woodwind orchestra.

Whilst the congregation sang the traditional Christmas carols, we also enjoyed the mixture of new Christmas songs with traditional carols performed by the school children.

The lessons were read by Jean Rideout, Kat Tobin and Mavis Butler. Eira Evans read a poem which gave us pause for thought about Christmas and its celebration in today's world.

Many thanks to Alethea Williams, who trained the woodwind orchestra from the Endowed School, and Carol Beages the choir mistress from Lodge Hill Junior School.

Caerleon can be proud of their schoolchildren who were so well behaved and enthusiastic in their performance.

We certainly hope they will come and entertain us again.

After the service ended we adjourned to the Town Hall for refreshments and lots of chatting!

We were delighted also to welcome Rosemary Butler AM, together with friends from other WIs, Newport Central, Ponthir, Christchurch and Llanhennock.

It has been especially gratifying this year to have joined with other WIs in our outings, and to have visited and been entertained by them. We are all members of the Women's Institute, but each WI has its own personality.

Our president Dianne Roberts briefly reminded Caerleon members of events due to take place in the new year, and she was very surprised to be presented with our cup for the member who has contri-buted to and won most of the competitions held every month.

Thanks were given to Betty Moseley for organising these competitions - we appreciate her hard work in this respect.

We were also very pleased that Megan Rumbelow, a student from Caer-leon University called in to see us.

Megan is studying specialised photography at the university, and has "sat in" on some of our meetings and joined us when we visited the Welsh Assembly in Cardiff, which has helped her in her course.

The next Caerleon WI meeting will be held on Monday, January 14, at 2pm, and the speaker will be Jane Bridges and the subject is "Good Neighbours", which is a new project being set up by Newport WRVS.

Although the meeting starts at 2pm, do come earlier to take advantage of the craft stalls - information on the notice board, etc.

We look forward to seeing present members and new members who would like to join us.

Betty Westcott