The other week I was visiting up north in UK, and on one afternoon we had half an hour to kill before meeting up with family for dinner. We decided to check out one of the local attractions, a supposedly Japanese/Oriental themed park. To be honest, I wasn't impressed with the park at all when I saw the entrance. The Japanese/oriental design was very unauthentic as they are two quite different cultures, a bit like if you mish mashing say German and Bulgaria into a design you end up with a mess. The result was so bad that I didn't even bother to take a photo of the pagoda entrance to the park.
Anyway, as I walked through, suddenly I saw a glimpse of red and white sticking out from the bush. It wasn't flowers. I took a closer look, and saw a teddy bear!!! A teddy bear hiding in the bushes!
Originally I thought a child had lost it, someone found it and put it on the bush to keep it off the ground. Then I walked around the bushes and saw three more. How odd.... I picked one up, and the even odder thing was that these were brand new clean soft teddy bears. Upon closer inspection, each of the teddy bear had sewn on it's little back butt, a label with a TG logo which said townwomen's guild and a website. There was also a paper tag around it's neck that said "Please take me home" on on side, and "TG for fun, friendship and making a difference to other women" on the other side. How cute! It seems like this organisation was doing some outreach work.
Since there was an invitation to take a teddy bear home, it would be rude not to do so. There were four to choose from, but I decided to take home the first one I saw instead of choosing out of the four. I believe it is fate that I came across this particular one with a red and white zig zag top waving at me. He looked like a cheerful chap that needed a name, and the first name that popped up in my mind was Norman. Not sure why. So everyone please meet Norman Scarborough.
When I got home, I decided to find out more about this "leaving cute teddy bears out in the wild" program. I hadn't heard of townwomen's guild before but they sounded like Women's Institute. If you've watched the film Calender Girls you would have heard of the WI. Unfortunately, their website https://the-tg.com/ didn't have any information on why they were leaving teddy bears out in the wild. I mean I know it's to promote their organisation, but surely there must be some sort of initiative, and not a few random members who got nothing better to do. The fact they sew these labels on the teddy bears and printed these take me home tags means it's organised in some way. But nope, there was no mention on the website at all.
Then I googled the townwomen's guild to see if they were on any other social media. And I came across a very funny comment on a chat forum from 2014 where one person said " The eldest is 92, I am one of the youngest at 70. The rest are mid 80's and not very fit, mentally and physically." Maybe that explains why their website has limited information about their activities!!
So I never got to the bottom of this initiative but am pleased to say that Norman is now living happily at home with me. And writing this post, actually gave me an wild idea for the Needlework Community. Since HiveFest is coming up, why don't you ladies orgainise some lovely hand knitted items to be placed around the HiveFest venue for members to find and take home, a bit like how I found and took Norman home with me. I know 
