Thank you so much for your vote and your trust in choosing me as the chair of the Ditchling Fair committee. Lucie has done such a brilliant job and she'll be a hard act to follow. Thank god she'll be on the committee as a Special Advisor and I'll have Mercedes as a Deputy Chair. I'm really excited to make the Ditchling Fair 2012 a wonderful and memorable event. As I said, as a relative newcomer to Ditchling, this is my way of saying thank-you to a community that made me feel so welcome and in which I feel so at home.

I'm equally aware that I am nothing without your support, your network and your drive to make the Fair 2012 happen. So please do let me know what your thoughts are, what your needs are and how I'm doing in this job of Ditchling Fair Chair.

Last night we discussed the Fair 2010 and were delighted to hear that we raised over £3000. A fantastic result so thanks again to all of you who worked so hard to raise this money. This fundraising was never the main objective of the Fair, we always felt that organising a community-enhancing event to celebrate our village and its people was more important. But for the next Fair all is still open.

We also discussed trials and tribulations of the road closures and looked carefully at the feedback forms which were handed out on Fair day. Very quickly this led to a lively brainstorm with lots of good ideas for the next Fair.

Some of those ideas were;

• a sculpture or stone to commemorate the 700th year the Charter was granted to Ditchling
• a exhibition at Stoneywish of all the previous Fairs
• the Museum is gathering information for a book about the Ditchling Fairs so we could use this to promote the Fair and learn more about our history
• some ideas to provide food for the hungry visitors would be a Food or Local Produce market
• a week of festivities, a village breakfast, a poetry reading, a children's play
• organise a pageant, an elaborate spectacle of the history of Ditchling by us the villagers. There is footage available so we can explore this option in greater detail later
• And last but not least, There were some revolutionary ideas about a change in the route for the procession

At our January meeting we can revisit some of these ideas and distill a rough plan that we present to interested villagers in a consultation meeting in the Village Hall in April. We'll also use the newcomers meeting in March to introduce the Fair to newcomers and recruit volunteers. I'm hoping that by June 2011 we can nail it down and have a more or less definite plan for the Ditchling Fair 2012

So do let me know your ideas for the Fair 2012!

Jolan