Spotlight On: Interest Groups Online member Tomy

Tomy, a member of Bicester u3a and u3a Interest Groups Online, talks about his love of classical music and why he volunteers to help with the Interest Groups Online website.

It started five years ago when my wife found a leaflet about Bicester u3a. I love classical music and joined the Exploring Classical Music group. Those days we were meeting in members' houses.

I liked this group and the environment: For ninety minutes we listened to classical music and nothing disturbed us. The group operated in the best tradition of u3a: we were taking terms in presenting and hosting the biweekly sessions. 
Then the pandemic struck and we could not meet in person. My grandson advised me to use Zoom. It turned out to be a technical success: we could continue our meetings. But there was a downside: Zoom was not to everybody’s taste and our number shrank to a critically low level.

About that time I discovered u3a Interest Groups Online (then called Trust u3a).We decided to go “national”: today we are again a vibrant group that continues to meet every fortnight and enjoys exploring classical music.  

Recently, I have been helping with the Interest Groups Online website as a volunteer. That has to do with my professional background. By training, I am an experimental physicist. I always used computers to analyze my results. Today I can’t do experiments but I can do software.

To maintain a website I had to master a completely new software. I am still learning. That’s my personal benefit. I also see the benefit to the community: people are looking at the website and seeing that it’s working. When I retired, I realised it is now time to give back to society something that others can benefit from. I think I am achieving this reasonably well. 

Find out more about Interest Groups Online on the u3a website.