I am originally from Somerset and grew up in a semi-rural area of Yeovil – ‘Yeovil Without’ as the council district was known. It was certainly ‘without’ something but despite this I have happy memories of being so close to the countryside – cows escaping from the adjoining farm field into our back garden and eating my father’s cabbages and our bantam hens roosting on our washing line – unfortunately one ended up as a meal for a fox!

My father was from Poplar, London and was regarded as a rather loud, slightly annoying but affable creature by the locals. Because he was a city lad, my father was especially proud that he had a gift in growing things. He loved his garden, his dahlias at the front and vegetables in the back. He loved animals as well – we always had a dog and a cat; and if he found an injured bird this was brought inside and put into a shoebox with wadding and fed milk carefully with the tip of his finger. Sadly, in most cases the poor creature did not recover.

As a small child I had various garden activities. I occupied myself with collecting caterpillars – I loved the orange and black ‘furry’ ones! – and catching grasshoppers… I wasn’t so keen on spiders but collecting cobwebs using a privet twig stripped of leaves and bent into a loop whiled away a few hours. With this background I learnt to care for and be aware of nature and to have a love of gardening.

Although I was living in ‘Yeovil Without’ we had good modern local schools – primary schools and a girls grammar school all built about the time I was born. I did well at school and qualified as a math teacher staying in Hertfordshire after I got married. After 15 years of being a secondary school teacher, I decided to change career and studied for an MSc in Computing Applications. My career from then until retirement was in the IT industry as a software developer. Far less demanding than teaching! This meant I now had time to pick up my love of choral singing. For many years I sang with The Letchworth Chorale and since moving to Norfolk now sing with the UAE Choir.

Soon after retiring to Norfolk, I joined NWT. I seem to remember the offer of a free bird identification book at Ranworth was an added incentive. Not long after that I saw a vacancy on the NWT website (or it might have been a members’ email) for a volunteer in the PR & Comms department at Bewick House. By this time, I was getting a bit bored of retirement and the thought of doing some office volunteering was attractive – so I applied and got the position – now nearly 9 years ago.

I started off processing press cuttings featuring NWT and/or its reserves. This involved summarizing the content in a spreadsheet and filing the cuttings. This was interesting in that in reading the cuttings I got to know more about NWT and its activities in Norfolk. After a few months, I was then shown how to add NWT events to the website to coincide with the production of the events leaflets. In those days there were far fewer events, most of which took place at Cley. As time went on, I also added information about species and updated information about reserves.

I still process NWT press articles and add events to the new look website, but I also do a bit of image library tidying and converting documents to plain text for those who have restricted sight. All my activities are interesting in their way but as my background is IT based, I find website work easier to plough through.

Volunteering at NWT has gotten me out of the house and has been a welcome distraction when life has been a bit trying. More importantly, I have learnt more about nature and have got to know lots of lovely people of all ages. I would certainly recommend others to volunteer if only to get a better understanding of the issues that affect nature in Norfolk.