The book 'Little Women' inspired me to create a "Busy Bees' group of our own. As wives, mums and homemakers there's always something to be busy with and it's nice to be busy together sometimes. In reality our little group is just a few friends who meet together with a light hearted, tongue-in-cheek approach to our evenings. We have corporate literature, membership badges and keep a log book of our meetings, which makes some interesting reading as we look back and verify it with our official Bee ink stamper. The only requirement to join our group is that, whatever you do, you must be busy.

In ‘Little Women’ secret societies and clubs were all the rage and on rainy days, the girls in the story hold meetings of their "Pickwick Club." (The Pickwick Papers was Charles Dickens' first novel, published in the early nineteenth century.) At their meetings, Meg, as Mr. Pickwick, reads the paper they've produced throughout the week to her sisters.( As an aside, the children and I created our own paper called The Bill Bulletin some years ago which we all contributed to weekly.) During the meetings of the P.C. each of the girls impersonates one of the characters in The Pickwick Papers. Meg is Samuel Pickwick, Jo is Augustus Snodgrass, Beth is Tracy Tupman, and Amy is Nathaniel Winkle. Another of their groups is the Busy Bee Society, which finds its inspiration in Pilgrim's Progress.Here the girls in the story aim to get through their chores by dressing up as Pilgrims, wearing floppy hats, burdens on their backs (bags of chores to do in a rucksack) and a walking stick. They find a comfortable spot outside and set to work together. Later Laurie is allowed to join them, after solemn consideration, so long as he promises not be be idle.

We've been meeting together, on and off, for over three years but the group has really picked up the pace after unwittingly garnering outside interest via social media and we now also have an International member who is based in Australia but is currently gadding all over Europe. We hope to meet her once more before she goes back home. However, our internet group chat keeps us all in touch.

Some of us sit and sew, either craft based projects or the more mundane family mending tasks, some of us knit and one of our group often catches up on video editing for her growing YouTube channel.