Mearns Men's Breakfast Club

Having been invited to visit the Mearns Men's Breakfast Club by Liz Highet when we met her at Harelaw Dam earlier in the year, that's exactly what we did on the 1st of December. 13 of us headed over there and joined the Mearns men for their Friday morning meeting.

When we arrived, we were made very welcome by the men and their team of local volunteers. The Mearns Kirk Church hall was pretty busy with about 30 of their members already in and chatting away and the volunteers were taking orders for breakfast rolls, which all appeared to be prepared in-house. We did say we'd bring cakes so Raymond handed over a heap of blueberry and chocolate muffins, which seemed to go down well

Liz did mention that they had about 45 members and a team of 12 volunteers so they're a larger group than us with a higher average age range. That said, I'm sure Mearns has a larger population than Neilston so it seems reasonable that their group would be larger. Not that we don't have a fair number of octogenarian members but our average age is a bit lower.

The group usually meets for an hour in their church halls and that's often followed by some indoor activity until about 12:30. This time it was a session with Sporting Memories, a charity and social enterprise that helps older people to reminisce, replay and reconnect through the power of sport and physical activity. 

They passed round boxes of old photographs of a range of things to help people's memories, things they'd likely be familiar with or recognize, such as celebrities, sporting personalities, technological advances, scenes from movies, etc. It's so simple but it's a great idea for helping those who might be experiencing memory issues.

After that we had an us-versus-them sporting quiz, which we won even though some of their guys were very sharp on the football and rugby questions. It was very close and I thought the other side had it myself.

I think we all enjoyed the visit. It was nice to socialize with a successful neighbouring men's group and see how they do things. Many thanks to Liz and the team at Mearns for hosting us and to the men's group for providing an interesting and entertaining morning.