Happy New Year!

As 2012 dawns for us here, I want to wish all of our residents and visitors the best for a happy, healthy, prosperous and safe new year.

We have website visitors from many countries including the USA, New Zealand, Czech Republic, Canada, Philippines, Chile and Ireland to name but the most recent! To all of you, as well as all our readers in the UK, a very happy New Year. Ours is a very small village, of about 80 people, and there is inevitably change here as everywhere else. We are pleased that you all want to share in our various activities and gossip, our joys and occasionally our sorrows and difficulties. Our small community is made so much greater by this international interest in us; it gives a whole new meaning to community.

You read of our day-to-day activities in the monthly Sheldon Jottings, as well as some of our other battles with the councils (recently snow gritting for example) and others. These are all part of life’s rich tapestry of existence, and it makes life all the more meaningful to be able to share our joys and sorrows with the wider international community.

Looking back through the year, our small community worked together for cream teas on bank holiday Sundays and at other times, Sheldon Day, the Royal Wedding day celebrations, harvest festival, a local history weekend exhibition, rug making days, monthly local history group meetings, the Sheldon Christmas light up, the Nativity procession, Remembrance Sunday service with the laying of the wreath, our twice monthly church services, the rapidly growing success of our village website, our fight for better gritting (not yet successful), our fight to retain our village as a polling station for elections (successful), and our fight for better broadband. This is quite a remarkable list of events held in our village throughout the year, and even more remarkable, it is never just the same two or three people helping out (complaints we often hear from other villages) but the majority of the community; in fact probably every household in one way or another is involved through out the year in some form of our community togetherness…quite remarkable.

So here’s to an even better, more productive and even more community based 2012 to you all.