Eating Disorders Awareness Week, 1-7 March 2021

From Monday 1^st to Sunday 7^th March, join Beating Eating Disorders UK, to create a future where people experiencing binge eating disorder are met with understanding and compassion.

Binge eating disorder will affect one in fifty of us in our lifetime, it is the most common but least understood. It isn’t about being greedy or lacking in willpower, but a serious mental illness which many suffer with alone, often with the fear of how others might react the reason they don’t reach out for help.

 

We know the sooner someone gets the treatment they need, the more likely they are to make a full and fast recovery. As well as campaigning to improve the services available, we recognise that we must raise awareness of the signs and symptoms of an eating disorder and encourage and empower people to act now no matter how long their symptoms have been present.

In March, during Eating Disorders Awareness Week you can start to help change that.

Watch their campaign video:

https://youtu.be/ZDAz6JTowxg

About eating disorders:

Around 1.25 million people in the UK suffer from these illnesses, many in secret. They are of all ages, genders and backgrounds – eating disorders do not discriminate.

Eating disorders include:

• Bulimia
• binge eating disorder
• avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID)
• other specified feeding or eating disorder (OSFED),
• Anorexia, which tragically has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness, though all eating disorders can be deadly.

While this is the worst-case scenario, there are many ways in which eating disorders severely affect the quality of life of both those suffering and those who care about them. They steal childhoods, devastate relationships and pull families apart. But, with the right treatment and support, recovery is possible.

 

“Only 1 in 4 receive the help and support they desperately need to recover from binge eating disorder. Without it, many struggle to get better and some even blame themselves. Sign up to receive your free fundraising pack to support our service for everyone affected by eating disorders.”

 

Why Binge Eating Disorder?

This is the first time a specific eating disorder has been chosen as the theme for Eating Disorders Awareness Week.

Binge eating disorder is the most common but often the least understood. It is especially difficult to find treatment and our Helpline Advisors consistently hear that people with binge eating disorder experience significant shame and fear in reaching out for support.

Eating disorders are as diverse as the people they effect, and we are committed to make sure all of our communications and activities represent the broad communities we serve.

In November 2020, 29% of contacts to Beat’s Helpline were about binge eating disorder but only 6% of the media coverage we generated in the last year spoke specifically about binge eating disorder, there is little representation on the ‘your stories’ section on our website, and only 5 of our Ambassadors have lived experience of binge eating disorder. We’ve also never run a campaign that specifically asks for better treatment, despite repeatedly hearing about the particular difficulties people face.

We must challenge the unhelpful and damaging opinions so many people carry about the disorder so people living with this terrible mental illness can find kindness and compassion when they bravely reach out for help. We hope Eating Disorders Awareness Week 2021 will lay the first stone for this to happen.

Beating Eating Disorders UK welcome feedback for any of Beat’s activities and if you would like to do so please email comms@beateatingdisorders.org.uk.

To find out more about Bing Eating disorders, visit: https://www.beateatingdisorders.org.uk/types/binge-eating-disorder

 

Helplines:

Help for adults
The Beat Adult Helpline is open to anyone over 18. Parents, teachers or any concerned adults should call the adult helpline.
Helpline: 0808 801 0677
Email: help@beateatingdisorders.org.uk

Help for young people
The Beat Youthline is open to anyone under 18.
Youthline: 0808 801 0711
Email: fyp@beateatingdisorders.org.uk

Company information:

Beat is a charity registered in England and Wales (801343) and Scotland (SC039309). Beat became our working name in February 2007.

Our legally registered charity name is: Beat (Formerly Eating Disorders Association). Beat is a company limited by guarantee registered in England and Wales under number 2368495, with registered offices at Unit 1, 19 Rosary Road, Norwich NR1 1SZ. VAT Number: 700 285963.

Children’s Book of the Week: Look Up! by Nathan Bryon and Dapo Adeola

This week’s children’s book of the week is the award-winning Look Up! by Nathan Bryon and Dapo Adeola.  It tells the story of Rocket, a girl who loves astronomy, and her big brother, who prefers his phone.  We found five online things to do that are all inspired by the story.

1. Look Up! Storytime and draw-along

First up is this reading of the story on YouTube, plus a draw-along feature with illustrator Dapa Adeola.  You might recognise the author Nathan Bryon from his TV sitcom work!

2. Build a spaceship craft activity

Younger kids can really go to town creating their own spaceship with this fun craft activity.

3. Mae Jemison colouring sheet

In the story, Rocket is inspired by her hero Dr Mae Jemison.  We found this awesome colouring sheet celebrating the astronaut’s achievements.  

4. OurShelves: Meet Nathan Bryon and Dapo Adeola

Check out this YouTube film featuring the author and illustrator talking about how they created the book.

 

5. Make your own scratch art

Children can create the wonders of space using this amazingly effective scratch art technique.

Children’s book of the week: Goodnight Moon

Goodnight Moon is a classic American picture book from the 1940s written by Margaret Wide Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd.  It tells the comforting story of a young bunny wishing goodnight to all the objects in the “great green room”. 

Children’s Book of the Week: Errol’s Garden by Gillian Hibbs

Errol loves growing plants at home – in fact, he is an awesome indoor gardener!  We found five ways for kids to enjoy the story and to do some real and imaginary gardening.

Children’s Book of the Week: Elmer

On 23 May, join us in celebrating Elmer’s birthday.  This year, Elmer is celebrating everyone’s true colours.  Why not put on your favourite brightly coloured clothes and have a look at some of these wonderful Elmer resources?

Children’s book of the week: The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle

Did you know – we have a children’s book of the week? This week’s title is: The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. This much loved story filled with Eric Carle’s vivid illustrations.

You can download a copy to read from cloudLibrary with your Kensington and Chelsea library card. And don’t worry if you’re not a library member yet as you can join online here.

We’ve found some great resources on the web to help you and your children get more out of this lovely story –

Eric Carle reads The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Listen to the author read his iconic children’s book on YouTube. Eric Carle has a very gentle and warm way of reading.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar – the free app

This award-winning app teaches reading skills and problem solving for pre-schoolers. Eric Carle’s artwork is faithfully reproduced to illustrate puzzles and games.

Create a collage in the style of Eric Carle

The Imagination Tree shows you how to create a textured collage with your child by printing, painting, cutting and gluing. This is a really intuitive and expressive activity that kids will grasp quickly and can freestyle their way through. Good for using up scrap paper and things you can find around the home.

Explore more Very Hungry Caterpillar activities for toddlers

Even without a printer, you can get ideas from this hungry caterpillar-inspired activities. Explore crafts, puppet making, story-telling, counting and many more inspiring activities that help their learning development.

We’re going on a Very Hungry Caterpillar scavenger hunt

Three ideas for a hungry caterpillar-inspired scavenger hunt. Children love to search for things and to tick them off a list. They can also help set up the scavenger hunt by hiding objects around the room for someone else to find. A lot of the objects can be improvised, drawn on paper or found in your fruit bowl!

Author Caroline Lawrence at Brompton Library

On Wednesday 13 February, the first sunny day of the month, Brompton Library was host to an exciting event. Caroline Lawrence, author of successful series The Roman Mysteries, gave a brilliant two-hour workshop to 9 – 11 year-old pupils of local Earls Court School, St Barnabas and St Philip’s. The pupils were accompanied by Assistant Head Teacher, Nicola Challice.

The children learnt about what it is to be a writer and how to structure a story. This included ‘ninja description’, the ‘seven beats’ of plot and the ‘number shape system’.

The workshop culminated in working through the first chapters of Caroline’s forthcoming book, The Time-Travel Diaries, which will be published on 5 April. The children competed to see who could write the best blog about their experience. We think they all did brilliantly!

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Thank you so much to Caroline for such an interesting workshop. The Time-Travel Diaries is published on 5 April 2019. And thank you to St Barnabas and St Philip’s as well, the children were a credit to their school, remaining excited and involved throughout.

If you’re a local school and would like to take part in a similar event – please contact us at libraries@rbkc.gov.uk

Penny, Brompton Library

Halloween party and make your own jokebox

To celebrate Halloween, we are having a party at Brompton Library this Saturday 27 October, 2 to 3pm.

We will be making skeletons, playing spooky games, blowing up balloon ghosts and telling Halloween jokes with our own jokebox!  We have some great prizes and lots of special treats so why not come along? Book your free place here on Eventbrite

Here is our Halloween jokebox that you can print out and play with at home –

How to make the Halloween jokebox:

1. Print out the image above
2. Cut along the dotted line
3. Turn over so that pictures are on the table are face down
4. Fold all corners into the centre
5. Turn back over so that the pictures are facing up and fold the corners into the middle again
6. Fold in half so that the pictures are on the outside and the questions are on the inside
7. Put your fingers in the corners to open out.

We hope you enjoy making that and hope to see you at our party this Saturday!

Fiona, Brompton Library

All about us

A post from our Service Development Manager, Angela Goreham – about what RBKC Libraries have to offer.

R Research for a project that interests you
B Booking a PC, a place at an event
K Knowledge as we all need this
C Connect (to others in the community and the wide world)

L Lending items for your pleasure or information
I Information that will help you with your day to day or forward planning
B Baby activities and information to help new parents
R Reading – a core skill and past time in any format
A Access us at any time and from anywhere
R Resources – varied and plentiful, in different formats to suit different needs
Y Young and old – we’re here for everyone

Are you 1 in 840,344? Or maybe you are 1 in 515,004? They’re odd numbers you might say, but the first one is the number of times the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s libraries were visited between April 2017 and March 2018 and the second is how many items were borrowed during the same period – how many did you account for?

104 people from our local communities supported the Library Service by volunteering with us and over 40,000 people came to one of the events that we held.

They are huge numbers but we always want to beat our previous year’s figures so please come along to one of our libraries, find out what we can do for you and you can help us pass last year’s numbers.

There are six libraries within the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea – find out more about them and what we offer by either visiting us in person or our website or you can call us on 020 7361 3010.

Interview with author Sarah Matthias – part III

We are very lucky to be hosting an event later this month with author, Sarah Matthias. This will take place later today (Monday 23 April), which happens to be World Book Night, at Brompton Library. For more information about the event and how to book, visit our website

Sarah has very kindly answered some of our questions about her book, ‘A Berlin Love Song’ and we will publish her responses in three parts – this is the second part and the third and final part will follow next Monday. You can catch up with the first and second part here

We hope you enjoy them, so over to Sarah…

A Berlin Love Song is about a travelling circus.  What’s so alluring about circuses?

I love the circus. I’ve always found it romantic although I’m a great animal lover and I’m very glad we don’t use performing animals any more. Research into the circus in Germany was one of the most enjoyable parts of my research for the book. It was light relief from the Auschwitz research and what it was like to be bombed and how it felt to be in a tank during a horrific battle. There was so much I had to read that was upsetting, so learning about how to fly the trapeze and ride horses bareback was something of a relief. I actually watched the most amazing film about the Flying Codonas called Swing High that you can see on You Tube so I have actually seen Alfredo Codona perform his triple somersault. I also saw him perform it in the film Vaudeville where the Codonas were doubles for the actors. I watched this particular sequence over and over again when I was trying to describe what it looked like and what it felt like to be up in the dome of the Wintergaten Theatre in Berlin about to swing out over the audience below. I also thoroughly enjoyed researching Fredy Knie, the owner of the Swiss Circus where my characters find employment during the war. His circus really did appear at the Wintergarten during the winter of 1942/43 when the Wintergarten was bombed. He really was in his twenties at the time and one of the most famous horse trainers in Europe. He had a reputation for kindness to animals and that’s why he got on so well with Lili and her family. I hope I’ve done his blessed memory justice in my fictitious portrayal of him.

The Flying Codonas

When I was a girl I loved the song: Gypsies Tramps and Thieves by Cher. I used to lie in bed at night listening to it on my record player and imagining the life of a travelling show. If you look at the beginning of the chapter in A Berlin Love Song called Circus Petalo you might hear strains of this great song:

I was born in the wagon of a travellin’ show

My momma used to dance for the money they’d throw

Papa would do whatever he could
Preach a little gospel
Sell a couple bottles of doctor good

Gypsies, tramps and thieves
We’d hear it from the people of the town
They’d call us gypsies, tramps and thieves
But every night all the men would come around
And lay their money down …

 My chapter entitled Circus Petalo begins: I was born in a wagon in the middle of a show, amid the smell of canvas and sawdust, greasepaint and cheap perfume …

What were the hardest aspects of creating this book? What were the most satisfying?

The hardest thing about creating this book was the amount of really gruelling research I had to do – research that kept me awake at nights and sometimes made me despair of human nature. Man’s inhumanity to man and what seemingly ‘normal’ people are capable of doing to each other is always horrifying and sometimes I felt I couldn’t read another word about the subject. My visit to Auschwitz was harrowing, especially as I had by that time read so much about the camp that my imagination was running riot.

Then when I started writing, I had the very difficult task of how to express this horror and suffering in a story that on the one hand shone a light on this ghastly subject but was also uplifting and hopeful. Because during my research into the Holocaust I also came across so many stories of heroism, true selflessness and hope in that darkest of times, that I felt I wanted to share with my readers. Working out how to combine together the two aspects of this heartbreaking time in a narrative, without belittling the one and over-romanticizing the other, was a real challenge for me. I hope I’ve succeeded. I hope it not only raises awareness about a topic I feel has often been overlooked, the Romani Genocide, but also expresses my own world view – that it is and has to be possible to find hope, wonder and love in the midst of despair, degradation and hatred.

The most satisfying and enjoyable parts of writing this book were possibly recreating the folk Romani tales. I read lots of wonderful Romani folk tales but none of them seemed to fit exactly into my story so I set about using authentic ones but amalgamating and rewriting them for my own story. I didn’t feel bad about this because the nature of folk tales is that people pass them on with their own embellishments for their own reasons. Folk tales often reflect the concerns of a particular people at a particular time and so mine, whilst firmly rooted in the Romani tradition, have my own stamp on them.  I really loved writing them. I also very much enjoyed writing the dialogue, particularly amongst the Hartmann children. I suppose as a mother of 4 young adults myself I have listened to countless family ‘disagreements’! I know how young people talk to each other and how merciless they can sometimes be in their teasing of each other – sometimes cruel. Writers usually have to use their imagination to create unknown worlds but I didn’t have to look much further than my own kitchen table for a rich source of dialogue for the Hartmann children!

We hope you enjoyed our interview with Sarah, and hope to see you at the event this evening. Do book a place – it’s free- via the link at the top.