Once again we are able to look back on a successful year for the club.

We have had notable speakers from important Public bodies during the course of the year, including the Royal Mint, the British Museum, the Public Records Office, our own Reading Museum and of course excellent talks from our own members. Other meetings have been devoted to the Coin Quiz, rapidly becoming an Annual Event, and the Club Auction.

In addition to that we have had two social events, a car rally for the Summer Social and the reinstatement of the 'Skittles Evening'. The latter was positioned somewhat later in the year than on previous occasions and we intend to rerun the event during this Season.

During the last year there have been some changes, which we hope have been an improvement for the membership:

• Refreshments are now provided at all meetings, previously this was only the case when we had an external speaker.
• There is a 'Member's Display' at all appropriate meetings
• We now have our own Web Page on the World Wide Web, updated monthly with the Newsletter

We lost our meeting venue early on in the season but were fortunate to find a replacement just next door! We have now negotiated a long term booking at the Abbey Baptist Church, which will take us through the coming season.

This year has seen our membership drop somewhat from last year. This is to be expected as we had attracted additional members for last season's auctions. However, we currently have 35 members with an average attendance of 19, indicative of a very strong involvement of members within the club. Indeed the short talks were nearly oversubscribed! I hope this high level of involvement will continue.

The clubs finances have also done very well this year with income and expenditure being more or less in balance. On balance then, there is no reason to raise the subscription rate for the 2000 - 2001 season.

Highlights for the coming season include the (late running) trip to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford on August 11th. This will be, in effect, our Summer Social. If you wish to go on this trip, please sign the form at the next meeting or contact a member of the committee. We also intend to look into the possibility of a 'day trip' to London, which will take in both the British Museum and the Bank of England.

I want to start by thanking our president Michael and vice presidents Bryan, John and Mark for their work during the year.

I want to thank Michael for his work as librarian.

I want to thank the rest of the committee members for all their hard work over the course of the year, which has made my job so much easier. I particularly want to mention Dave, as under our constitution, this is necessarily his last year as secretary.

A lot of what Dave does goes unnoticed. In addition to the visible parts of his club work, getting the Newsletter out each month, keeping the membership lists in order and various correspondence, he has been beavering away on projects in the background. For example he has put a lot of the club work onto computer, making the day to day management a lot simpler, he compiled a complete collection of club newsletters, and even at the eleventh hour it was Dave's initiative to update the member's interests. This is of course only the tip of the iceberg. He will be sorely missed by the committee and on behalf of the whole club I'd like to thank him for the past five years.