Secretary’s Notes

After all the trials and tribulations, I cannot believe we are well over halfway through our golfing year. It was such a joy to go to Hockley on 3 June to play Hampshire as our first match in 20 months and meet up with all our friends again. It was even better when we won! In fact, David has a good record of wins as he says in his report.

We are hoping to see most of you at our Autumn Meeting on 13 October at Aspley Guise for our penultimate meeting of the year. I booked this as our Spring Meeting last year and when cancelled switched it to this year. I negotiated this with Phil Price as he was Captain of Aspley (also for this year) but sadly he has died, and his funeral is on 29 September.

Next years fixtures are mostly in place as shown in this newsletter. It has been far more difficult to book this year with golf clubs reducing their society bookings, prices increasing and contact with staff being more difficult. This has been the experience of other counties and will lead to increased costs all round. We will continue to subsidise some of our fixtures to ensure we play at some of the better venues, but I think Doug will be pushing to increase fees. Even then I think most will agree it is a good day out, meeting friends and having a nice meal is worth the cost.

We have had a couple of Committee meetings this year discussing amongst other things how to deal with the new WHS, provision of wine and the captains tours. We routinely discuss membership, fixtures and finances to ensure the Association ticks along nicely.Wen have around £20000 in the bank and Doug will report the 2021 accounts in the next newsletter or for the AGM. Clothing is also mentioned and Tony has ordered more shirts and hats and also has a few used (but cleaned) jackets for sale. If you have any requirements, please contact Tony and he will get them to you.

You will see we have only had 5 new members this year but as many captains continued on from 2020 it is not unexpected. However, with only about 90 of our members actually playing it is important to keep up recruitment. So if you know of potential current and previous captains who are not members please see if you can get them to join. This message is in particularly to our club ambassadors some of whom have already done so this year.

I still get requests for various information, most of which is available on the website. The website is always up to date and here is a reminder of some of the attributes.

1. The matches will show who has been selected and once active who is playing.
2. Click on the Postcode to see the location and the website and contact for each club is only a click away.
3. The tabs at the top of the home page will take you to this and past newsletters as well as clothing details.
4. You can get the email and phone numbers for everyone by adding /memberdownloads to the home page logon. I do it this way to protect the information.

Match managers can get members details easily and we were short of these this year with David having to deal with some himself. When the subs and match selection forms go out in December please tick the availability to be a match manager box to help us secure more names and reduce the burden on the current ones. Colin Elwell is going to be Match Secretary next year and he has been helping David this year. But Colin will be Captain in 2024 so we could really do with another volunteer to fill this Committee role before then. I can send you a job description if you are interested in being involved in our organisation.

Sometime in the next few years I will need to hand over my secretary role. I can easily carry it out now even though I am now living a long way from Bucks. However, I am aware that a lot of what I do is down to my experience over the years and that it is important that someone else should know what I do. If any of our newer members would be interested in taking on the role sometime in the future, then please let me know and I will explain what is required.

We will be holding our next AGM at our Winter Meeting at Harleyford on 22 February and the agenda and minutes will go out in the Dec/Jan newsletter or by email. It was interesting using email for the last AGM especially as we had minimal response. Let’s hope we can have a normal AGM next year.

Lastly please let me know of anything that you would like discussed or anything you consider would improve our organisation, matches and meetings.

Peter