Oxford City Council organised a huge Party in the Park on Monday 9^th July – a sell-out 20,000 tickets were issued - to welcome the Olympic Torch Relay to its overnight venue.  The event included a range of stalls, spectacular displays and performances, and a try-a-sport section in which TVOC were involved.

Roaming members in TVOC tops gave out newly produced colourful TVOC leaflets to all who looked likely to be interested, encouraging them to visit our displays of local and other maps and challenging them to have a go - ”it will only take a few minutes” - at our Naughty Number nine-control grid.  The sight of people running round the kites provided lots of visual impact.

We also had a ‘proper’ mini course of about 300m around the Sports area with a 1:2000 map. This was popular with adults and older children looking for more of a challenge, and it was also useful to point out the controls when describing our sport.

We were up and running from 3:30pm to 9.30pm during which time we gave out over 1000 leaflets; about 300 people did at least one course of Naughty Numbers (many children had multiple goes, trying to beat their last time); and we collected a good number of e-mail addresses from those wishing to receive further details of our events.

Roger Baker

Item posted by Caroline Povey