Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2009-11-08 18:15:50 - Graham Ellis
You'll see white horses at Westbury, at Cherhill and Hackpen Hill and (if you know where to look) at Devizes and Marlborough too. But you won't often see four brown horses in Melksham - here, pictured at the end of our street this morning.
It's been an interesting weekend. Yesterday, I was asked to go along and help with the jumble sale run by the ladies of the "Bowerhill Villager" - a free news sheet that's produced by their own team, and distributed every month to over a thousand homes. Funding for the newspaper comes from advertising, from grants, and from money that the ladies raise themselves at events such as the jumble sale at Bowerhill Village Hall. Abbi Dark - the Melksham Carnival Princess - was on hand at 10 a.m. sharp with a pair of scissors that turned out to be not QUITE so sharp to declare the sale open... and they flooded in!
It turned out that there was very little indeed for me to do. The team has run the jumble sale for years and I was something of a spare cog - in fact I wandered out and went round photographing some of the Bowerhill Industrial Units in that lull you get at jumble sales between the initial surge and tidying up all the unsold goods at the end. However, I took some pictures of the sale too, to help encourage others to come along next year, and to show you what an excellent range of goods were for sale. And at the end of the day, this hard work netted a profit of around a hundred pounds which goes towards keeping the Bowerhill Villager running.
Naturally, even Melksham Princesses need to let their hair down sometimes... here's Abbi in some of her time off during the sale taking some pictures too.
Melksham is really lucky with its free newspapers.
The "Bowerhill Villager" is keenly read right across Bowerhill, with advertisers regularly letting the team know what a good response they have got. The regular report from the local community police officer, parish and club news, letters which can get every bit as heated as ones at a less local level, tips, recipes, and even a regular monthly cartoon.
The "Melksham Independent News" covers the whole town - and has a quite remarkable editorial content for a 'free-sheet'. I'm sure that's no accident - it's a carefully designed feature that means that the MIN is really valued and read from cover to cover... which of course helps to keep the advertisers happy.
You'll see white horses at Westbury, at Cherhill and Hackpen Hill and (if you know where to look) at Devizes and Marlborough too. But you won't often see four brown horses in Melksham - here, pictured at the end of our street this morning.
It's been an interesting weekend. Yesterday, I was asked to go along and help with the jumble sale run by the ladies of the "Bowerhill Villager" - a free news sheet that's produced by their own team, and distributed every month to over a thousand homes. Funding for the newspaper comes from advertising, from grants, and from money that the ladies raise themselves at events such as the jumble sale at Bowerhill Village Hall. Abbi Dark - the Melksham Carnival Princess - was on hand at 10 a.m. sharp with a pair of scissors that turned out to be not QUITE so sharp to declare the sale open... and they flooded in!
It turned out that there was very little indeed for me to do. The team has run the jumble sale for years and I was something of a spare cog - in fact I wandered out and went round photographing some of the Bowerhill Industrial Units in that lull you get at jumble sales between the initial surge and tidying up all the unsold goods at the end. However, I took some pictures of the sale too, to help encourage others to come along next year, and to show you what an excellent range of goods were for sale. And at the end of the day, this hard work netted a profit of around a hundred pounds which goes towards keeping the Bowerhill Villager running.
Naturally, even Melksham Princesses need to let their hair down sometimes... here's Abbi in some of her time off during the sale taking some pictures too.