With scones, stories and plenty of tea, local volunteers keep loneliness at bay for older residents by hosting monthly tea parties. Here, a local volunteer explains what makes those afternoons so special
It all started in 1965 when solicitor Trevor Lyttleton encountered a lonely, homeless woman and provided her with a meal. This soon developed into a national charity named Contact the Elderly, now re-named as Re-engage.
The aim of the charity is to combat loneliness in older people (minimum age 75) who live alone by providing them with an afternoon tea given by one of a network of volunteers. This is done on a monthly basis with the guests collected from and returned to their homes by volunteer drivers. Other benefits include occasional visits to places of interest.
Our local branch has seen us move away from official membership of the charity and, although we now operate under exactly the same rules, we are entirely independent. There are now nine local houses (with 20 volunteers) operating on a rota basis, where we give these monthly afternoon teas. We have eight regular guests on these occasions. We started approximately 12 years ago and, it is sad to say, none of our original guests are with us any longer. The volunteers have changed as well, with some of the originals now being replaced by younger members of the community. Probably more changes are afoot as one of our elderly guests is three years younger than a couple of our volunteer helpers!
But what guests we do have! The variety of our guests is practically up to Thursday Murder Club standards. Wide-ranging conversations have revealed one of our guests was an England netball international in her younger days before she became a sports teacher, while other careers include refrigeration engineer, several secretarial jobs and a university lecturer in physics. You can imagine the level of conversation that our eight guests can generate once settled in with tea and biscuits. One of our guests comes from Cornwall and woe betide anyone who puts cream on their scones before the jam, and it must be Cornish cream, of course!
The volunteers aren’t lacking in talent either, as several have proved themselves to be top-class cake-makers as well as being generous providers of all sorts of sandwiches, scones and pastries, traditional bread pudding and endless cups of tea and coffee. Naturally, the conversations often refer back to everyone’s childhood and ‘growing up’ years. Things like the games that were played in the (safe) streets; cricket, football, marbles and many other innocent pastimes. The not-quite-so innocent ‘knock down ginger’ or jumping on the backs of the (very occasional) lorry that came down the street and the outcries that were given to the rare car drivers for “interrupting our game”.
There’s always room for more groups similar to ours and lots of volunteering opportunities on the Re-engage website.
For more information on becoming a tea party volunteer, visit reengage.org.uk
