Swing low sweet……

What a day at Twickenham on Saturday. I am not really one to exaggerate, but it was awesome. The day went really well, and the 12 children form St Marys Primary and 10 children from Mount Pleasant really behaved themselves well and were a credit to their schools. Although it is arguable who enjoyed themselves the most - children or adults. The first good thing was that everyone turned up!! When we got to Twickenham we had a tour of the Rugby Museum and shops, then off to the changing rooms - just down the corridor from the England and Argentina dressing rooms. As we were going to do the guard of honour for when the teams came on to the pitch, we had a few practices of that - then on to the pitch. What a stadium, gasps from the kids, awesome, there were some of the team practicing on the pitch, particularly Jonny Wilkinson with his kicking. We went to the far side of the pitch where there were two tag pitches marked out, split the children into two teams from each school and played on the hallowed turf. Then swapped the teams around so both St Marys teams played both Mount Pleasant teams. There were several thousand spectators watching, the games were filmed and shown on the huge screens. Truly awesome. The children played really well and responded perfectly to their surroundings. The announcer had been telling everyone about our project and when the games finished and we started to make our way back to the changing rooms, the crowd were applauding, awesome. On the way back the President of the RFU - an ex-senior officer in the Police came to see us and shook everyone's hand. Then back to the changing rooms and some lunch, and all of a sudden it was 2.25pm - out for the Guard of Honour. Now the stadium was packed with 80,000 people, cheering and the place was buzzing - yes awesome. We stood there as the teams thundered out, the England team accompanied by tremendous flame throwers. The national Anthems were bellowed out - and that was our bit done. Back to the changing rooms, put on warm clothing and off to our places in the stands - front row no less - to watch the game. Fortunately England won - although not a convincing victory - and the try was scored right in front of us. All in all it was a fantastic day, enjoyed by everyone with loads of photos, videos and memories.

Well, back to real Police work for last week!! We had Holyrood tenants and Residents meeting last Monday which went well for us with no burning issues. Wednesday was the CTCG (Community Tasking and Co-Ordinating Group) meeting, which is a multi agency meeting covering the whole of the central area where we discuss the various concerns and troublesome people involved in anti - social behaviour. Thursday evening was the City Reach AGM which I missed due to training, but two of the team went.

This week we have the Northam patch chat on Wednesday and the Kingsland patch chat on Thursday. We also have the Council of Faiths Conference at the Vedic Temple in Radcliffe Rd on Thursday. I understand the Chief Constable is attending. On Friday we also have another meeting about the move to the new police station in Southern Rd which is going up quite quickly now. On top of all that we have our core work of the four junior PCSO schemes and of course now the tag rugby at St Marys school. To add even more woes to the team, we are introducing a new recording system for Neighbourhood teams called Safety Net, and the team are getting trained on that. We are going live with the system and it is also used by agencies so we can all add what we are doing about problems on one system.

Well, all the above is without actually dealing with any crime yet - and so I have been allocating crimes to the team to deal with as well. It certainly keeps us busy - but then that’s what we are paid for. That’s it for now… Swing low, sweet…………...