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The Reverend Richard Eastman is our clubs catering officer.
I am one of the newer members of the Probus Club of Wigston. I was born in 1953 and grew up on a Council House Estate in the best town, (now a city) in the North East, that is Sunderland. My early life was pretty uneventful. I wanted to be the North East’s answer to Laurence Olivier but in 1970 my mother strongly encouraged me to ‘get a job’. Not having done too well at school (I was never academically inclined), I enlisted at the tender age of 17 into the Royal Air Force to train as an Aircraft Radio Mechanic. After a few years I trained to be a Radio Technician and spent the next 22 years in the RAF attaining the rank of Chief Technician. During the latter years of my military career I became disillusioned with the politicians who kept sending us to war on false information. I began to explore other things that I could do, such as working in community. I experienced a ‘Call to Ministry’ and after a while I became qualified to become a Lay Preacher within the United Reformed Church (URC), and eventually after a four-year course at the URC college in Cambridge, I was declared competent enough to become a Minister of Word and Sacrament for the URC. I ended up answering a call to Minister in Leicester and was ordained in 2003. I spent eighteen years in post. I retired at sixty-eight and a half, and was invited to join PROBUS in my new status as a ‘retiree’. I have met some wonderful gentlemen with a fascinating range of backgrounds; we have some interesting speakers and more to the point we enjoy good food and raising money for Charity. I commend Probus membership if you want to meet interesting people and raise money for Charity.
