FLAGSHIP DIAMOND WOOD

To celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, the Woodland Trust is helping millions of people across the UK come together and plant six million trees. With HRH The Princess Royal as Patron, the Jubilee Woods project aims to create hundreds of Jubilee Woods and 60 special Diamond Woods, transforming the landscape in a generation and providing a lasting and meaningful tribute for many years to come. This includes the Trust’s exciting new flagship Diamond Wood in the heart of the National Forest in Leicestershire, which will be a haven for wildlife and open for all to enjoy.

After all the bunting has gone, the trees planted for the Jubilee will leave a lasting legacy that will leave a lasting legacy that will transform neighbourhoods, school playing fields, hospital grounds, rural and urban areas – creating homes for wildlife and areas for people to relax, explore and enjoy.

A delegation of seven from Leicester Council of Faiths is attending the event at the National Forest today, at which HRH The Princess Royal is guest of honour. There they are outside Pilgrim House, about to board a minibus and head off (left to right: Ajay Aggarwal, Gursharan Kaur Thandi, Cllr Manjula Sood, Tony Nelson, Sewa Singh, Inderjit Singh Gugnani, Keyhar Singh). They're all well enough turned out to meet a royal personage; I'm not sure how they'll get fare if they're asked to wield a spade or push a wheelbarrow today! Still, to coin a phrase, "Any sleeve can be rolled up." I just made up that ancient Chinese proverb, but I think it's “Pretty good; pretty, pretty good.”

I'm not going on this trip today. I have an hour's worth of Stronger Communities Partnership Self Assessment Sub-Group at the City Council this morning. I just wanted to make sure I got this photo for the blog. But seeing me here this early, one of my colleagues asks if I slept in the Welcome Centre, adding that he wouldn't be surprised. Perish the thought! I'm clearly overdoing it - and I should take heed of that, today of all days, being my fifth anniversary in post.

SO. FAREWELL THEN, DOWNSTAIRS OFFICE

The Council of Faiths has given up the monthly lease on the downstairs office at Pilgrim House. This is a purely financial decision as we look to trim our expenditure. It's something of a bitter-sweet decision as far as I'm concerned. I've been glad of this space just for my use, but the rent and all other expenses related to it have come out of my income.

It's been a useful and handy space for storage of our exhibition material and the like, but most of all, it's served as a good shop window for the Council of Faiths for several months. That A2 poster seen in the photo above afforded us an attractive public presence in a busy part of the city centre. More than once, while I was in the downstairs office, I heard people talking about the poster outside. On one occasion that sticks in the mind, a day or two after the summer riots last year (that barely touched Leicester) I heard a mother talking to her daughter, reeling off the names of our member communities identified on the poster. At the end she said, "Not every city has got all these different people living there, but Leicester does. That's what makes Leicester so special." Another time, a visitor to the city from Cologne in Germany saw the poster and came upstairs to chat for a while with Ajay. She'd been nursing a vague idea about starting an inter-faith group in her city but hadn't known where to go for advice.

Today I spend several hours moving the contents of the downstairs office upstairs to the Welcome Centre. I have the assistance of Clare, Harry and Grace in this task. Our work is broken up with a pleasant picnic lunch in the sunny Town Hall Square.

After a couple of hours, when the move is complete, the three of them head off and leave me to restore order to the Welcome Centre.

Personnel Management Group

Meeting with my Personnel Management Group this morning in Pilgrim House. For the first time, we meet in the downstairs office, as the Welcome Centre is being used by LARA (Leicestershire Active Retirement Association) who book it every other Friday morning.

For one reason and another, we've been unable to meet according to our schedule over the summer. I have another appointment on the outskirts of the city at 1300 for which I can't be late. We have a lot to discuss, both general and particular and there's plenty left over at the end of the meeting. So we fix another meeting for a fortnight from now.

OUR SHOP WINDOW

At last, we're making good use of the promotional opportunity provided by the windows in the ground floor office - well, one of them anyway. These windows look out on Bishop Street and Town Hall Square, a prominent and busy city centre location. We've never taken advantage of this position. This morning, I put up this A1 laminated poster (made by Printing.com, Charles Street, Leicester) in one of our windows, which should win us some favourable attention. We're working on another poster for the other window, which should go up shortly.

Just ... gone!

I moved into the downstairs office at Pilgrim House a year ago, but the windows still showed transfers for the Just Fairtrade shop. They've been in their new premises in St Martin's Square for nigh on two years now, but folk can be slow to catch on. Apparently, people were seeing the transfers on our windows, calling in and finding nothing there, so they went off again in the belief that the Just shop had gone out of business.

Last week, someone from the Just shop phoned and said they'd come and remove the transfers, cutting their last remaining tie with Pilgrim House. We'd been quoted some ridiculous price by professional cleaners to get these transfers off without causing damage to the glass. So I was glad to hear that someone from Just Fairtrade was coming to take care of it.

This morning Roger, a member of their board who volunteers at the Just shop on a Tuesday (hence his nickname among staff there, "Tuesday Roger") arrived around 1000, with hairdryer and scraper. You can't see much of Roger in the picture, but that's him up the ladder, blasting and scraping away at the transfers. I finished the job later, getting the last sign of them off with white spirit. Very nice and clean it all is too now; you'd never guess these things had been there. Thanks for lending your elbow grease Roger.

One of the reasons I was keen for us to get the use of this downstairs office was so that we could use the street-level presence in such a prominent position to promote our existence there - and to showcase our work of course. Hopefully, we can get on that now and get some sort of display in place.

Yet another case of "Watch this space!" (quite literally).

"To me!", "To you!"

A bit of lifting and shifting this morning, with the assistance of Tony Stokes, from the Methodist Church next door. He and I clear the downstairs office of the last of the display materials that had previously been used by the Just shop. We get them out of the door at Pilgrim House, then in the next one at the church. These various bits and pieces have been taking up space in the downstairs office since Just moved out near the end of 2009. Some of the bits have been blocking the window, concealing that there's an empty room in such a public and vulnerable situation. But we have a pair of nice magnolia-coloured venetian blinds now - although when viewed from outside, the blinds reveal the previously unnoticed fact that one of the windows is tinted; so they look more like a coffee and cream combination than being two of the same colour.

Carpet cleaners coming today. Then the place will be in a pretty decent state to start functioning as my working office. Well, clean carpets and new blinds are definitely steps in the right direction!

FLY THE FLAG

There's a flag over the door to Pilgrim House, 10 Bishop Street, Town Hall Square: the base for Leicester Council of Faiths. New English Design, who share the building, have just put up this big silver flag with a white "10" rising up from the bottom of it. The row of six windows above the flag belong to the Welcome Centre. I've got the use of all of that virtually all of the time, although my work station is behind the two windows farthest right. By the end of this month I'll have relocated downstairs, to the right of the door, in the office space where the windows are currently covered over with cardboard.