Alan Edgar (Eggy1948)

@Pete - was there a room where the cleaners would have all their gear?

@Pete - my mind kept saying snooker table but I was trying to place it in the same room as the table tennis tables. Now you have said where it was my mind is at rest. As far as I can remember there were three table tennis tables available. One on the right, behind the kitchen wall facing toward the back window, as you went through the door and two on the left at 90 degrees to the one on the right. A quick diagram of the layout as I, and you hjave pointed out, can remember :- ps. I've forgotten to put the doors into the loos

A photo from the 2021 Piper Awards ceremony last night :-

Cheers @Pete - I still can't place him but someone had to be there and in charge before John Bygate (JB) turned up. If i remember correctly the YM leader had the first room on the left corridor as went into the building. I must have bumped into other leaders before JB turned. My mam's aunty Elsie used to take us to the old building (early 1960's) for the fund raising events for the new building = Beetle Drive with Pea & Pie Suppers. Loads of mature ladies shouting - I just need a leg to get beetle. My mam's cousin, Owen Humble, used to have a dark room, across from the YM leaders office, where he developed his photos.

So did you get to see the new building or was it just the old stone building when you were there?

@Malcolm Robinson - when someone buys a council house the council does the council pass on the original plans and deeds of the house to the new owner?

@Keith Scantlebury has asked me does anyone know the exact year(s) when this estate was built? I checked the OS maps and the first map I could find with the estate on is the 'Revised: 1938 Published: ca 1947 and it shows the nearby streets named but the Burnside estate is not named. When I checked on the overlay section of the National Library of Scotland site it has maps for 1937 to 1961 that can be overlaid with today's aerial image of the area and that has the Burnside estate on the first section but none of the streets are named : -

Mr Ruddy doesn't ring a bell with me. When I started going probably around 1963-64 I can only remember John Bygate but I know he took over from someone when I used to go but I can't remember a name. I'll have a think.

I hope you had that lot typed where you could copy & paste into your comment. If you didn't then i applaud you Ours has always been the traditional English xmas dinner. The only meat my wife would eat was chicken and turkey breast ( the white meats) with loads of different vegetables. I'll see if I can put together a full days menu of all the meals and nibbles that used to be served. - but don't hold your breath

Have you been practising this speech CL - have I asked this before - Did you go to the YMCA when John Bygate was the leader? = when I used to go with Don, Walter and Dave who is taking the photo :-

@Vic Patterson I agree Vic, very rewarding. I have never had any photo that I have restored printed off but I assume they should be Ok. I have never had any of my old B&W photos, or any I have restored for others, uploaded to any of the coulouring Apps or services. It's just the way I think Vic; If the photo was taken in B&W I feel it's part of the history and I prefer to leave itthat way. Having said that I have seen some old B&W that look excellent when 'colourisation' is applied. I know the colouring procedures must analyze the B&W shades to determine the colours to add but some just don't look right. There is a Free Photo Restoration & Date Old Photographs section on the genealogy site RootsChat. A lot of the work is excellent but, in my mind, some of the manual colouring of a restored old B&W or sepia photos is just over the top. You don't have to join to see the work they do, you can view all the original postings of the damaged photos and all of the responses from the group of restorers. I joined (and you only receive emails when you actually post a response to one of the postings) and occasionally post a restored photo. It has been a good way for me to practise my 'clarting'. https://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=h2au1lpfk82vgtfr1lue0rlae0

The poll is now closed and this years Piper Award goes to @Canny lass who throughout this pandemic has kept us occupied with her weekly quiz and has done a load or family and historic research to help many members of the group.

Welcome @Marlena Preece. I know of Howard House, Netherton Colliery, but I never lived at the Colliery so don't have any info to give. However there are postings, in the Discussion section and the Gallery section, of Netherton Colliery and Howard House. As well as the other members giving info you could use the search facility at the top right hand corner of the screen. If you enter more than one word into the search bar then it is best to add quotation marks around the words otherwise the system will return every item it finds for each word eg "howard house" will only search for that phrase but - howard house - without quotes searches for every comment with either howard or house in it. There are photos in the Gallery section under the 'Historic Bedlington' albums This is a direct link to an album by @Carole and there are a couple of old photos or Howard House and the staff in the album :-

If they have all gone then people will have to send this years electronically - photo by Simon Williams, Church Lane :-

I did try photoshop for a couple of months. One of my daughters tried to move me on from my old software and got me a years monthly subscription to photoshop. That was two modules/apps - Lightroom and I can't remember the other one - at about £20 a month. I played with it for the two months then went online to photoshop and convinced them I was too old to change and just had to cancel the contract. Told them, via online messaging, that I was 83 years old and that I just couldn't make the change from my old software. They wanted another 8 months monthly subscription to cancel the contract but I managed to persuade them to just cancel the contract without a cancellation fee of 8 months payments. Saved the daughter £200 and I just carried on with my Microsoft Digital Image Pro 10. As one of my 'hobbies from home' is repairing old damaged photos for members of Facebook groups and Rootschat I can't see me learning something new whilst the old software works fine for me. A couple of my recent repairs :-

I'm hopeless CL - very little I do like and the cooked food I do like has to be well done and free of sauces and spices. I once had Mulligatawny soup (c1988, Indian restaurant in London) and my mouth was on fire for 3 days😰. Beef gravy is fine👍. Raw fish! No chance - crispy battered cod is the only sea food I can stomach.

Just Bedlington twang and old technology - The first 8 words in my comment above are mine, the rest from 'GNU - GNU Image Manipulation........' was Copy & Paste from Google - but I thought Vic would understand it I have clarted with GIMP but even some of the commands from the menus I struggled to read. The text is so small.

I'm al for change = advancing technologies but I can't stand the way we are bombarded with loads of applications. I know technology has to cater for the up and coming pioneers of the future (our gran children) but I just wish they would allow us more mature people of this world the opportunity to easily remove the applications we will never use😊. I do all my 'clarting' with photos on my 13 year old Desktop PC with Windows Vista but I have backed them all up, memory sticks, and copied them onto my new PC ready for when the old PC packs in and I have to start working out how some new 'clarting' photo software works. I have Gimp downloaded on the new PC. Gimp - GNU Image Manipulation Program - is a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image manipulation and image editing, free-form drawing, transcoding between different image file formats, and more specialized tasks. GIMP is released under GPL-3.0-or-later license and is available for Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows. So it's a toss up for who lasts longer, me or my Vista PC

@Canny lass - can't find anything that just relates to the popup names. There is loads around about the file name McAfee LiveSafe but everything I can find says use the McAfee 'Dashboard' - and I am guessing you don't have that. Your situation has me beat - but I will keep looking, when I'm not clarting ps. Windows 11 installed on new PC (Vista still on the old one) - now I will have to find out all the extras that comes with it and see what I can delete

I think I'll move to Sweden - I melt in 21 degrees

I'll see if I can find out anything but it might take awhile - busy upgrading my Windows 10 PC to Windows 11, Sep 1 of 3 currently 78% complete