Blairgowrie & Rattray Saturday Lunch Club
It is National Volunteers Week!
To celebrate, we thought we would share a blog from John Corrigan! John has worked with the local communities in a volunteering capacity for many years - as a lot of you will know! Last weekend, John, delivered some of our Saturday Lunches and he has provided an account of his afternoon volunteering with Saturday Lunch Club.
"Saturday morning in Blairgowrie and a number of us turned up at the Blairgowrie Rugby Club to distribute small packages for the first day of the Blairgowrie and Rattray Lunch Club. Around 35 people had signed up for deliveries. My job was to drive the minibus which I had borrowed from the Alyth Youth Partnership. But before that we were invited to pose for the local paper – there’s always a catch!
The useful thing about a minibus in these times is that I could carry another volunteer and still maintain the physical distancing requirements. That meant that I could drive and the Lesley could deliver the soup and cake to the doors. Mind you, we did have a couple of deliveries in small housing complexes where Lesley and I shared the load – saved a bit of time.
We first had to try to sort out the route and check that we knew where all the streets were; not as easy as you think it is going to be – we found places that we didn’t even know existed. We also struggled to find a few numbers in streets, but people seemed really delighted to get a knock on the door and a smile.
I suppose I was surprised about the wide range of people who had asked to be part of the lunch club. There were people of all backgrounds. You could see that some people would not have been deemed vulnerable before Covid, but suddenly they were in the at-risk group. Some people have a garden and space, so perhaps lockdown is less of an issue. Others seemed to be more isolated, with very little opportunity to get out the door and meet up with people, and this has been so important, the way local people have looked after their neighbours.
The weather was lovely, and it was a great way of seeing Blairgowrie and Rattray in all its glory. I have to say that if the numbers requesting the service get more we’ll need a few more drivers to get the deliveries out there. It’s a great skill to be able to volunteer to drive and it’s only two or three hours on a Saturday…and the football season’s not on, is it!"
If you want to either join the lunch club to receive a lunch or if you want to help out, please contact Samantha on lunchclub@discoverblairgowrie.co.uk. See here for more details on the Blairgowrie & Rattray Saturday Lunch Club.