The tickets for the 2024 annual meeting on 8 June are now available to buy.
You can purchase these either through the events page on our website or via the order form in the December 2023 issue of The Trefoil magazine.
The meeting starts at 2pm with the venue open earlier in the day for our members to browse stalls and catch up with friends. We have an exciting event planned, including a talk with global traveller Sue Riches - see below.
Evening entertainment
The evening entertainment will be held in Portsmouth Guildhall too. The entertainment, organised by South West England, will feature the Royal Marines Association Concert Band starting from 7pm and finishing at 9.30pm. The Royal Marine Association Concert Band is a concert band of around 50 musicians who ‘aim to always thrill audiences the length and breadth of the country, just as Royal Marines Bands have done for over a century.’ Read more about them.
Members are welcome to attend with friends, family, and future Trefoil members. Please use your annual meeting order form to order tickets for non-members.
If you need a copy of the Annual meeting 2024 order form you can download it below.
The venue - Portsmouth Guildhall
The 2024 annual meeting will be held at the Portsmouth Guildhall - Guildhall Square, Portsmouth PO1 2AB
Guildhall square is easily accessible from Portsmouth and Southsea railway station. More information will be available about the venue closer to the time.
More about our annual meeting speaker
Sue Riches is a global traveller. After having a mastectomy due to breast cancer, Sue and her daughter applied for the first All Women’s Expedition to the North Pole. This has remained one of Sue’s top memories – learning that her team of women had made it to the North Pole. Although a challenge, Sue says once they were there, it felt less so. After battling Breast cancer, she believed the recovery was not a challenge as her optimism inspired her to know that she would always get better. Sue feels that the biggest challenge she has had was studying with the Open University for her degree – staying motivated even when under pressure.
In her spare time, Sue likes to keep busy. This includes dog walks, horse and carriage riding, biking and skiing. However, she is also very happy to sit down with a good book! For a holiday, Sue enjoys the less typical destinations. This list includes Mongolia, Peru or the Rajasthan desert, and has recently returned from Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan. One of Sue’s biggest influences is her father. After losing a leg and the use of his right hand during the Second World War, he remained positive – never complaining about things he couldn’t do. He lead a successful life and loved his family dearly.
On her bucket list, Sue still has the 5 Stans of Central Asia, which she has booked to visit in 2024. Sue once spent a month in Petra, teaching the Bedouin people there about carriage driving so that visitors who were unable to walk down the Siq could be transported down by carriage. After this they received a feast. This included sheep’s eyes which took a lot of determination to get down! Even with all the travelling Sue has done, it is surprising to learn that Sue hates snakes.
If Sue were Prime Minister for the day, she would add a bank holiday in October. The Battle of Trafalgar on 21 October being the chosen date, suggested by her late husband. Since his passing, she has discovered a love for gardening. Sue remains optimistic, inspired by Shackleton and his crew to work around problems even when its looks like thing are going wrong.