Beckley & Area Community Benefit society Limited (BACBS)

The Abingdon Arms REOPENING

The long wait is over, The Abingdon Arms will open again on Saturday the 4th July!

This message comes from Suzy, Alex and Vicky.

“We are delighted and very excited to be reopening on Saturday 4th of July, 12pm-8pm.

However, the safety of our customers and staff is most important.There will be changes to your dining experience as we are following the guidelines mandated by the government.

When entering the pub, please familiarise yourself with all the signage. There will be a number of sanitising stations and we kindly ask you to sanitise your hands upon arrival. The toilets will be a one in, one out, system, please use your initiative and be courteous to those around you. The toilets will be cleaned regularly and thoroughly throughout the day so we must ask you to please be gracious to the female/male staff working extra hard to keep us all safe. (Please remember to wash your hands as often as possible). We are operating a minimum of 1 meter distancing between tables, and all social distancing throughout the pub and gardens must be kept to the 1 meter distance minimum too. To help with ‘traffic’ flow, there are now some steps up to the ‘back’ gate from the second level patio. This is for exit only at busy times.

At the moment, you can book a table for a maximum of 6 people. We must ask you to please remain seated; especially families with children as we will be offering table service only. There will be no service at the bar, and no waiting there please. Dogs will be still be allowed in the pub but must remain on a lead to minimise any contact with others.

We are all coming to terms with the 'new normal', but it is a learning curve for us all, so please be patient with us and we will do our absolute best to keep the standards as high as before. We have missed you all SO MUCH, and we can't wait to see you all again!

If we can all adhere to these rules, we will be able to get back to those good times sooner!”

Opening times

• Wednesday 1st July - Friday 3rd July - We are open for takeaways as normal from 5pm - 8pm. The pub will be open for takeaway drinks and village shop items from 12pm - 8pm.

• Saturday 4th July - We will be open from 12pm-10pm and will be serving food from 12pm-8pm.

• Sunday 5th July - We will be open from 12pm-8pm and serving food from 12pm-4pm. Sunday evenings tend to be quiet therefore, the pub may close earlier on Sundays. This will give staff time to do deep cleans of the premises and keep the establishment safe for us all.

• The menu will be confirmed closer to the time. There will be a variety of 5/6 starters and 6/7 mains and puddings.

For those who will still prefer to dine at home, the takeaway menu will be available throughout. The takeaway menu on Saturday and Sunday will be the same as the dine-in menu (available and updated online on the day, and with a 10% discount)

After the initial opening weekend, we will be opening 7 days a week for lunches and dinners.

However, the timing and menus are still being considered.

Our menus will be changing regularly whilst we work out what works best so please bear with us while we find our feet :) The current takeaway menu, and menu for Saturday 4th of July is now available on the home page of our website and you can book a table online. We look forward to seeing you soon!! https://www.theabingdonarms.co.uk/

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Even more than a Pub

Although the pub is reopening, we will continue with our programme of virtual talks for the foreseeable future. We will also explore the possibility of holding "hybrid" face to face and virtual presentations in the future for the sake of those further afield and who find accessing the Zoom talks from home easier than attending the pub.

Our next event is:

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Sunday 5th July, 6.30 – 7.30pm. 'Searching for exoplanets and alien extra-terrestrial life' - Suzanne Aigrain, Professor of Astrophysics, University of Oxford. ‘Planets orbiting other stars than the Sun, known as exoplanets, are one of the newest and most exciting frontiers in Astronomy. Since the discovery of the first exoplanet around a star like the Sun in 1995, well over 4000 others have been found, and hundreds of scientists worldwide now dedicate their working lives to studying them. So far we have learnt that exoplanets are both common (most stars host at least one planet), and extremely diverse (many planets found around other stars have no equivalent in our own Solar System). This begs the question: do any exoplanets support life, and if so how do we find it? In my talk I will give a broad overview of the different ways we find exoplanets and try to find out what their atmospheres are made of, and prospects for finding and characterising so called “habitable’ planets in the coming decades’

The session can be accessed here https://zoom.us/j/5841030100

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Sunday 19th July, 6.30-7.30pm. Preservation of the Monarch Butterfly, a Symbol of Mexico. A talk by Maria Antonieta Lopez-Portillo (“Mantina”)

Mantina, who has lived in the village for more than 30 years, studied Law in Mexico and later, got a first in history and politics at Oxford Polytechnic and, amongst other things, did an MLitt at Oxford University in Politics & the Environment. She will talk to us about the work she is helping to lead to preserve the Mariposa Monarca (the Monarch Butterfly or Tliil Papaloti, as the Aztecs would have called them) which migrates between Canada and Mexico (where it breeds). The number of the butterflies has, she has been warned, decreased to a critically low level. She is working with an NGO, FUNACOMM, which has started, with the “Ruta Monarca”, to create “ethno-agroecological gardens”, along with forest maintenance systems, both within and outside the butterfly hibernation shelters.

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Walking Routes Around Beckley and the Local Area

A final set of 12 Walking Routes Around Beckley and the Local Area, together with route notes, points of interest and GPX tracks are now available on the BACBS website at https://bacbs.org/local-information. The maps and notes for these walks will soon also be available in the form of a booklet which will be available for purchase at the same locations as stock the Around & About OS/Yellow Walk Maps guide map. The booklet is intended to be used in combination with the Around & About guide map.

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Grant to BACBS

BACBS recently applied for a grant under the Power to Change Covid-19 Trading Income Support Scheme (TISS), and we’re pleased to announce that we have been awarded a grant of £6,247. This is to replace our lost rental income since we gave our tenants an initial three-month rent holiday at the start of the Covid-19 emergency. The TISS was specifically designed by Power to Change to support community businesses such as ours, and will allow us to proceed with expenditure that supports our community cohesion objectives. We will let you know how we plan to use the grant in a future newsletter.

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