OLVESTON and Tockington WI started their July meeting with a minute’s silence for our lovely cheerful Secretary Liz, who very sadly has just died.

We shall miss her sense of fun, and her lightness of touch when dealing with WI affairs.

Then it was on to the current business, including arrangements for next month’s summer meal out – something to look forward to.

We then turned to our topic for the evening, which was crosswords.

You might have thought that a lot of members would think, ‘oh, I can’t do crosswords, who wants to do crosswords?’ Our speaker, Lizzie Lindsell, made the event great fun.

First of all she told us a bit about herself, including that she makes her living by composing crosswords for different magazines.

Then she explained all the different things to look for in crossword clues, which can help you find the answer.

These include the key words which can indicate that the clue is an anagram, or that there is a hidden word, or that the answer is made up of the initial letters of the words in the clue, and so on.

And then, of course, came the test: Lizzie had made up for us our own Olveston and Tockington WI crossword, with some clues that referred personally to some of our members – and we all had a go at doing it.

We worked in pairs, so it was not so frustrating as working on your own.

When Lizzie gave us the answers, there were great cries of satisfaction at words correctly worked out, and a lot of pleasure because we understood better what we were doing.