A majority of workers think having an older colleague in their team is likely to have a positive impact on their workplace, a new survey reveals. {DynamicContent:Social Media Buttons} And the pol… continue reading Powered by WPeMatico
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This guest blog was contributed by Dr Jill Edwards, School of Healthcare, Leeds University. When I was born I was not expected to live long enough to go to school, but a few months ago I celebrated by my 50th … Continue reading →
A majority of workers think having an older colleague in their team is likely to have a positive impact on their workplace, a new survey reveals. {DynamicContent:Social Media Buttons} And the pol...
A couple of years ago I was chatting to a friend who lives in Ireland and she mentioned that she was going off to pick up her bike from ‘The Shed’. I assumed she meant the one in her garden but no, apparently there was this thing in the town where she lived called a 'Men's Shed' where, apart from repairing bikes and making wooden furniture, local men got together for a bit of a chat, to work on community projects and to look out for each other. I’d never heard of these ‘Sheds’ so dug around on the internet, read about how the movement started in Australia then spread out from there and, the more I read, the more I thought "Why isn’t there a Men’s Shed here?"
I knew that, locally, there were a number of men like myself who, through retirement, redundancy, ill health or other circumstances, were a bit cut off from their local community and when I mentioned these Sheds to them they almost all said "That’s a great idea… if there was something like that here, I’d use it". For the most part they felt that, unless you were interested in a sport or going for a pint, there wasn’t an awful lot going on to get them out of the house. So they just ‘pottered about’, doing a bit of gardening or watching endless daytime TV while waiting to drop off or pick up their children or grandchildren from school etc. I knew just how they felt as that’s pretty much how my days were being spent, just marking time.
If only there was something like a Men’s Shed…
Last year I got involved with a couple of local community organisations. That gave me new interests outside the house and also reminded me that, y’know, I can DO stuff. Through one of those groups I became aware of a need for more activities that got men involved in things. I spoke to a lot of men who felt they had skills that were going to waste and more than a few women who felt they had men who were also going to waste as, since they retired or were made redundant, they’d "just not been the same…"
If only somebody would start a Shed…
Towards the end of the year I decided that if nobody else was going to do it, then I would. I found out that there were a few sheds starting up in Scotland and read up on how they were doing it. I spoke to people who’d organised sheds in their areas and began to get advice on how to move forward with this idea. The first step would be to call a public meeting and use that to gauge the level of support locally, hopefully find a couple of like minded souls who’d be willing to give some time and a lot of effort to getting a Men’s Shed up and running.
And that’s where we are now… on the 4th of February, at 7pm in the Kings Arms, Lockerbie there’ll be an open meeting to discuss the benefits of a Mens Shed for the Lockerbie area.
Somebody had to take the first step, eh?
Thanks to Ken Harvey for talking to us and we look forward to sharing the future developments of the Lockerbie Men's shed…
