Tuesday 28 July

Staircase mural

Guess where I went today? To the former jute mill (Dundee a city built on jute, jam and journalism) now occupied by Fairbridge. Great visit, great team, working in a city with its own particular problems (highest rate of teenage pregnancy in Europe, unusually high rates of illiteracyand alcoholism, to name three).

Courses are tailored to the issues, as you'd expect. For example we have bleeping babies, frighteningly realistic dolls, which perform all bodily functions, wake up in the night screaming etc. The young people (sometimes boys as well as girls) take them home for the night, and when they come back the babies are cleverly debriefed by download, all details of what happened and how they were cared for revealed. Most of the people on the course develop a bond for their baby, but also conclude that they won't have one quite yet...

The centre is large and beautifully equipped, as you can see from these photos:

IT suite, Dundee centre

Kitchen (with 5 workstations) and camera-shy Alice

Reluctantly dragged myself away from the Fairbridge team, taken by wonderful Alice, the manager, to the amazingly convenient airport for a flight in a delightful little plane to London City (Air France, can someone explain?) and home.

£50 zinging into the kitty from Japan, total to £12,053.33, brilliant.