Activities at Mortain Place Care Home

Tuesday 21st April was National Tea Day, and Barchester, as a company, received tea packs from the National Tea Day team. Ours arrived just as we sat down for a royal afternoon tea (with it also being the Queen’s birthday too), which was full of various types of teas and biscuits!

This was such a lovely gesture; every single Barchester home received this! Mortain Place was also chosen to be part of a live Zoom call with ‘celebs’ from the TV show Made in Chelsea! Our Head of Activities, Maria, and two others from the company spoke with two of the stars about how tea helps bring us all together, and what we have been doing with the residents whilst in lockdown.

How quintessentially British of us to celebrate the Queen’s birthday with endless amounts of tea!

Local people in Eastbourne have been dropping of gifts at Mortain Place. Our residents have received lots of pictures and paintings done by children and adults in the local community with lovely messages on to show they are not forgotten at this difficult time.

All gifts being dropped off are in sealed plastic bags and go through 72 hour quarantine to ensure residents and staff stay safe. Residents are really happy that people have done this for them and they will be putting the shells and stones in the flower beds they are currently planting in, and the pictures will all be going up on the walls in the care home.

Residents and staff will be inviting the local community in for afternoon tea to say thank you once the home is open again for visitors.

The dog show which took place on Saturday 7th March was a great success! Lots of people and dogs attended and had a fun-filled afternoon in aid of charity Canine Partners. It was extremely cold, but the dogs donned warm coats and some even won rosettes for best in their category. We raised £162.00 for the charity, so thank you to everyone who attended and supported us and the charity.

Valentine’s Day can be difficult as life moves on and we grow old, but throughout February at Mortain Place we focused on not those that we miss, but those we still have, and new people in our lives. We made cards for each other in craft sessions, sang at the top of our voices in singing groups, and got ready for a big party together borrowing each other’s’ dresses.

For Valentine’s Day, we had a dinner dance, to which everyone was invited and at which everyone sat together. We moved our dining area to the bistro so we could sit at long tables and chat to each other over a three-course meal, and not worry about who had come with who, and who had a partner, etc etc. After dinner, and a few glasses of fizz, we moved down to the lounge for the disco of love songs and danced the night away!

There are thousands and thousands of national and international days to celebrate throughout the year, from the classics such as The World’s Biggest Coffee Morning and Chocolate Day, to the slightly more obscure like National Cherry Day! On 15th January, we chose to celebrate National Hat Day at Mortain Place.

In the morning, we had a lovely visit from a local primary school, The Haven. A group of Year 6 children joined us in a craft session and helped us make mini top hats. We had great fun with a variety of colours, feathers, sequins, buttons, and glue! Thank you so very much to the school and the teachers who joined us, the children were incredibly polite and helped us out heaps!

At 3pm, we sat down for a Mad Hatters’ Tea Party. The table was laid with multiple tea pots and cups, mini glass bottles labelled ‘drink me’, an array of chocolates and homemade jam tarts enticing people to ‘eat me’, with little white rabbits hopping around. The room was decorated with giant playing cards, clocks, and signs pointing this way and that way. Alice made an appearance, and everybody had a hat to wear, handmade or not.

We had a wonderful afternoon, drinking tea and wandering around Wonderland. ‘We’re all mad here!’

The Court House Museum in Pevensey contacted Mortain place care home in Pevensey Bay Road, Eastbourne and offered a full colour A3 reproduction print of their newly commissioned Painting commemorating William the Conqueror’s return to Pevensey in 1066 for a victory gathering, it also shows his half -brother Count Robert of Mortain who reigned in Eastbourne in 1067 in the picture with William the Conqueror.

The museum wrote to Mortain Place care home asking if we would like the print for our new home as we had named the home after Count Mortain and would we like to have more information on the history of Robert of Mortain.

Peter Harrison the curator of the Museum kindly visited Mortain Place care home spoke to the residents and staff about the history of the painting and then had the picture framed for Mortain Place it will now take pride of place in our reception area at the home.