A Short Look Back Published on 26^th January 2026

Here we take a look back at the end of last year, the fun we had and how busy we were! In a combination of past newsletters and our Christmas season busy boom!

We have been non stop throughout all of 2025 but now it’s over we can glance back at what we’ve been doing and take a deep breath before we get stuck in all over again. Our variety of activities always keeps us busy, we invited back Ady Harper in October to give us a shimmy and a shake with some of our favourite tunes.

But our real hit of the month was our talk on the Dummy Drome by Rob More, we gathered quite the crowd for him, from people all across the county, it was brilliant.

We loved getting the opportunity to share information on the dummy aerodrome out at Sarclet, as so many had no idea it was there or that Caithness had helped play such a vital role in the war.

Everyone was glued to their seats and we cannot thank Rob enough for agreeing to tell us his story.

October’s Newsletter

When it came to November we were just jam-packed with stuff we started off with the delightful Ken Crossan giving us a talk and presentation on the Caithness seacoast and it was incredible, his photos of the local wildlife and fauna are beautiful and it was amazing to invite in such a kind man to talk about his wildlife and photography passion. He is certainly welcome through our doors at any time.

Then we were joined by Frankie Sutherland who set up his equipment and got to playing us a tune, it’s always great to hear him play and this was no exception, it really helped to brighten up our mild November afternoon!

We also welcomed the Nucleus Archive back this time it was the wonderful local Jennifer Ross who gave us a beautiful presentation on snippets of Dunbeath history.

She has promised to come back to us and talk about Lybster soon enough to give everyone a chance to hear about local history and the beauty in keeping records.

November’s Newsletter

Our lucky users got to experience 2 different classes in November, both were geared up to get us into the Christmas spirit a little early.

First we invited the lovely Ellie Sheales to give us a class on Lino-printing, this was a learning curve over 3 weeks, designing, carving and printing our very own cards and wrapping paper for Christmas.

Ellie was absolutely brilliant and we cannot wait to welcome her back into the centre again for another class, although it might be a while before our prints look like hers, we’ll give anything a try!

Our biggest festive class was our wreath making class, we invited Amanda Coghill to bring us all the Christmas cheer she could and help us make a collection of glowing festive wreaths, filling our wreaths with all kinds of foliage and flowers, berries and thistles it really felt magical. Plus the building had a gorgeous pine smell for a few days after, delicious!

Just look at how stunning these wreaths are, oh my goodness! We were offered lights to thread through them and the difference it makes is amazing, all the different approached people had to designing their wreaths really paid off and made many homes in Caithness a little bit brighter for the winter.

A huge thank you to Amanda Coghill who also kindly made a wreath especially for the centre, it took pride of place on one of our interior doors.

December 2025

The final hurdle before the finish line, December, while not jam-packed for the whole month our Christmas week always makes up for that.

December held the last lip-reading session for 2025, these have been a great hit and have helped people with and without hearing loss, it’s an important skill that helps with the prevention of hearing loss as well. It’s not all about the lip-reading advice is also being provided about simply advocating for yourself if you suffer from hearing loss to get the things you need.

We are loving getting to work with the Hearing and Sight Care on this one and getting to deliver rural sessions to support people with hearing loss throughout the south of Caithness.

We were also grateful for the ladies from the Royal Bank of Scotland’s Thurso branch, the graced us with their presence to talk about fraud and scam prevention, as it’s getting so prevalent even the best are struggling to spot them. This talk really kicked off our December and so many found it helpful.

Plus they were kind enough to leave us with some biscuits to fill up on with a cup of tea, delicious!

To kick everyone into the festive spirit we took a deep dive into Christmas just a touch early, we invited in the Caithness Handbell Ringers from Thurso to play us some Christmas Carols.

Not only did they play some beautiful Christmas classics, and relax us with the carols we all know and love, they got us all involved, starting simple and letting us be the bells in Jingle Bells and then playing a whole song alongside them. It was amazing fun, thank you so much to Susan and all of the bellringers not only for coming down but for thoroughly entertaining us for the afternoon.

We had the pleasure of gathering up a mini bus to take to the Wick Players Pantomime, Robinson Crusoe and the Pirates, a little team of 22 of us wrapped up warm and headed out to see what tales the players would be telling us this year.

Full of laughs and intrigue and all the expected panto shenanigans it was a blast and worth the late night we had! We cannot wait to see their next one.

Christmas Week

As we always do, the last week before Christmas we host our Christmas week, it is 3 days of Christmas meals we provide to our service users as a thank you for their support and as a lifeline over the festive period. Alongside the incredible lunches cooked by our staff we host a myriad of games and entertainment and this year was no exception!

Before our lunches kicked off we had the pleasure of welcoming back Faith Charlton, a singer/songwriter from Thurso, after we had her along in May she went off to college to study music and we’ve been fighting our schedules to fit her back in. We both found the perfect space just in time for Christmas!

She had our users absolutely hooked on her singing, from Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash and even some Skipinnish, beautifully played in between all our favourite Christmas hits, she had our feet tapping and us all singing along. What a start to our week!

Our next day had the return of our dear Ady Harper, who we filled up with trifle and got set playing us songs, he weaved his tunes in between our games wonderfully. He even joined in, stealing presents and picking tickets our of a hat.

The third entertainment of the week was the ever amazing Frankie Sutherland, he helped us pass the time on this festive Thursday afternoon, when we were stuffed to the brim of Christmas dinner, and joined in against his will for our Christmas games where we all had a laugh.

Although we missed out on being joined by our local primary school kids for carol singing this year, to give them a thank you for the kids support through the year with things like our poppy project we delivered some mini goody bags to enjoy on their last day!

Our final day this year was full of Christmas party games and some sing-along carols to see us through the afternoon, we played a bit of pass the parcel before our users were let loose to steal presents from one another and see who would come out victorious! We had such a laugh all before we got set up to draw our raffle and draw our Christmas week to a close.

We were so lucky to have a variety of hampers, bags, sweets, biscuits and other goodies in our raffle donated by people in the community and our users, it certainly made for a special draw to finish up 2025.

A huge thank you to anyone over Christmas who donated, their time, money or spare goodies to us we are over the moon grateful, it helps us support as many people as possible. Plus a double thank you to everyone who supported us throughout the year, and our amazing team of volunteers without them we would be lost!

So to everyone who walked through our doors, thank you for the support, and Happy New Year! We hope to see you all again very soon for another busy, chaotic, happiness filled year. The team at D&DC