Coffee morning

Happy Mothering Sunday aka Mother's Day! Moffat Book Events made £400 at our coffee morning yesterday, thanks to many helping hands who will all be thanked via the Moffat News next week. We had sad news yesterday: our Moffat Book Events chairman Adam Dillon, minister of St Andrew's church in Moffat has resigned from MBE because of a health crisis at home. We wish him and his family all the best at this difficult time.

I began Mother's Day aka Mothering Sunday by firing off a squib in the direction of the Financial Times, whose TV critic and associate editor John Lloyd will be one of our guests at Russia: Lessons and Legacy, our international Moffat Book Events conference Sept 14-17.

Here's what I wrote:

Dear Editor

Your Companies editor Sarah Gordon started her article about the Encyclopedia Britannica switching from paper editions to online (FT March 17/18 2012 'Battleground over web content shifts decisively to quality') with: 'The forests will benefit'. When the red mist had cleared from my eyes, I tried to imagine a serious journal of record starting an article in comparable circumstances with the words 'Cider apple trees will breathe a sigh of relief' (at the cessation of cidermaking) or ' Welcome reprieve for stalks of wheat worldwide' if vitamin pellets ever replaced bread. Hello Sarah! We in the commercial forestry sector grow trees, in rows, to be harvested to make stuff. They are a crop, right? And once they have been felled and taken away to make paper, pallets, houses etc we plant some more! Magic, isn't it? Ms Gordon is welcome to come and see how its done any day here in the southern uplands of Scotland.

Yours sincerely

Elizabeth Roberts

I could have added, for the benefit of those who are worried about Anthropogentic Global Warming (AGW) that, for their 30-40 year growing cycle, commercial forestry trees suck in enormous quantities of CO2.

A batch of our Zacharry's trademark freshly-brewed non-alcoholic spruce beer, rich in vitamin C, was a sell-out at the coffee morning so I have asked Jim Hurren o/c the forest brewery to make another batch asap. Cheers!