What The Staff Have Been Up To During Lockdown
Over the last week or so, we’ve been using some of our daily exercise time to check in on our colleagues for a quick, socially distanced chat and a couple of photos for our website.
We’re lucky that a lot of the West Essex team live close enough to our golf club for us to pop by to find out what new hobbies and skills they’ve been working on and what has helped them get through the recent challenges and uncertainty.
Here’s what we found out…
First up: keep your distance!
Here’s our Head Chef Enrico making sure we were two meters apart before we drank a cold can of Carlsberg and caught up on his doorstep.
Even though we had a laugh cracking out the measuring tape, strict adherence to social distancing recommendations was really important in taking all of these photos, even if the natural response was to want to give people a handshake or hug after a few weeks away from the club bar!
Our Italian pizza guru has been taking extra guitar lessons, although he’s already a dab hand with the fret and six-string, banging out well known tunes from AC/DC and Motorhead.
Is there anything Enrico can’t do?
Everyone's been baking!
From Guinness brownies to vegan puddings, banana bread to Geordie pasties, loads of us have been using the extra time at home to start baking.
Even though Amanda has been turning out lemon drizzle cake like there’s no tomorrow and Itamara is baking her way through oven loads of Brazilian Brigaderio cake, Karen was the only one brave enough to show off the fruits of her labour:
Freshly baked Black Forest Gateaux.
We all love our pets!
Being away from the club we have absolutely loved spending more time with our pets.
Mike, Karen, Alice,and Sandy have been spending quality time with their dogs, cats, hamsters and, err, turtles but it was Mike’s dog Muzzie that stole the show when we knocked on his door last week.
But out of all the crew at West Essex, it was club accountant Katie who has been nailing lock down at home with her lovely pooch, Jasper.
“I was planning to use lock down to improve my baking skills and read some books, but then I stumbled on a video about how to train your dog to speak, so I’ve mostly been working on that.”
Love it Katie, love it!
Family is everything
It’s been great finding time to catch up with our West Essex family over the last few weeks, but the reality is that for a lot of us lock down has made us find new ways of keeping up with our own families and friends.
Together and apart, we’re making a good go of it: from playing online quizzes together to sending our parents chocolates and bottles of wine, we’ve managed to keep up with each other pretty well even though we can’t always be together in person.
For some of us, it’s brought us even closer too: below is Denise our Events Coordinator and assistant chef Sandy enjoying the lock down to the full.
Katie form the office has been keeping her neighbours fit with her daily street exercise classes.
Looking forward to seeing the videos Katie!
Bar person and accomplished waitress Amanda has been juggling housework with homeschooling the kids since the lock down started. Here’s how she’s finding it:
“Being able to spend more time with the kids has been an incredibly positive experience (most of the time!). My husband has been teaching the kids baking, and being treating to home-baked cakes on a regular basis has been a right treat.”
See, even the kids are at it! Maybe we should start the West Essex Baking Company when this is all over.
Fine tuning your BBQ etiquette
You just can’t talk about a BBQ without talking about club handyman Mike. When it comes to good old fashioned BBQ’ing, from ‘deckle’ to ‘burnt ends’, Mike is the West Essex BBQ Pit Boss!
With can of Stella in hand, Mike is only too happy to talk about the etiquette of BBQ’ing. His sublime outdoor cooking skills have come through years of hard work and practice, and the West Essex crew stand testament to his burning brisket prowess as we regularly hold ‘team building get-togethers’ in Mike and Alison’s garden.
Even the “Oh sorry, I forgot to mention I’m vegan” never seems to trouble Mike.
Hat’s off to Chingford’s favourite barrel smoker!
Behind the scenes
Let’s not forget some of the people behind the scenes, Joe, Abdul and big Kiwi Phil. The lads have been working hard over the past couple of years keeping our function kitchen up to scratch, helping make ‘club eventing’ a massive success. Catching up with chef Phil I asked him about life during the lock down, this is what he told me:
“The first day of lock down I stocked up on enough non-perishable food and supplies to last for months so that I could remain in isolation for months, maybe years. I was way ahead of the game.
One hour into day one I went to the supermarket because I wanted a Twix!”
Keep Twixing Phil – we feel your pain!
Let’s get behind our local heroes
So that’s it, we’ve run out of staff to photograph, ones that we can safely get to anyway. It’s been really fun getting to briefly catch up with members of the team over the past few weeks. But what now?
Well, we want to keep this going by opening it up to you: all you have to do is nominate someone in our local community (Chingford area) who deserves to be featured and they’ll receive a free meal for 4 in our brand new West Essex restaurant and a 4-ball voucher for our award winning course.
Enter on our Twitter and Facebook by tagging who you’re nominating as your #doorsteplocalhero and tell us why they deserve a to win.
We’ll pick your local hero at the end of the month and deliver a voucher for their prize and feature them on our club page.
Over to you.
Who knows, the next door we visit could be yours!
