Autumn has well and truly arrived, and we have been making the most of the season and keeping warm. We have created an autumn themed board with interesting snippets of information and beautiful pictures of all the things that sum up autumn. Most importantly, the board displays the residents' creative crafts. We have our own tree with personalised fingerprinted/finger painted leaves in a range of autumn colours.

It is always amazing what one can make with paper and residents enjoyed creating their very own paper pumpkins to mark Halloween. 

We marked International Gin Day with a mini tasting session, interesting facts and tours around distilleries in the UK and Scotland. 

We explored the top 10 gin brands and all about gin labels and even explored how to make gin by hand in a small distillery. It showed the process before commercial distilleries with the fancy equipment.  

Residents tried Sipsmith’s Lemon Drizzle Gin with tonic or lemonade with a slice of lemon. They also had Gordon’s Dry Gin with elderflower tonic water and a little gin with fresh blueberries to give it a fruity flavour. We don’t have many gin lovers, but this little tipple was enjoyed by most for the afternoon. 

We are always encouraging residents to tell us about them, particularly their stories highlighting moments in their journey so far. It is amazing what we learn about each resident and what they teach us every day. It’s the special time they get to share and talk about important milestones, what was happening in the world at the time, their jobs, their favourite films, and music, where they may have travelled. Each journey is unique.  

The war years are the most fascinating, the stories are remarkable from men and women. What experiences they had throughout, at the end or the impact on their childhood, factors that make them who they are today. 

Pictures help paint a picture, bring back memories tucked away so it’s important we stop, and listen in these reminiscing sessions. 

Many of our residents, families and staff felt great sadness at the passing of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. The last couple of weeks we have watched as the live programme paid tribute to our late Queen with her final journey to Windsor on her funeral day. We have commemorated her through our memory board with photos of her life and our own written condolences, which were shared with the Royal Family. For many, the late Queen represented comfort, hope, compassion and peace throughout her reign of 70 years and she will be sorely missed. 

We had an afternoon filled with learning interesting facts about the invention and history of telephones. Discussions were enjoyed as we remembered the first telephones in our homes, our first childhood phone numbers and the first mobile phones our residents may have had. Supposedly, there are 1 billion landlines and 10 billion mobile phones around the world. What advancements the world has seen with this technology. We also got creative and in order for us to communicate, we made our own ‘lover’s phones’ with paper cups and string instead of tin cans. 

Our residents thoroughly enjoyed an early evening quiz night with a refreshing glass of Buck’s Fizz. A real test of general knowledge covering a variety of subjects. Between the quiz book and printed quizzes we really did learn some interesting facts and tested our memories. One question was about where the myth about carrots helping us to see in the dark came from. It transpires that it was made up during the Second World War by the RAF - their pilots ate lots of carrots and therefore had exceptional night vision. It was started to help prevent the Germans from finding out the British were using radar during night raids to intercept bombers.