Park Place Residents Diary

We have always said our residents are our best ambassadors. That’s why we’ve dedicated these pages to the residents of Park Place to fill with news, views and events, in the hope it will give you a genuine insight in village living Retirement Villages’ style.

We all love to reminisce here. Our childhoods before and during the war is a favourite topic.

So we were delighted to be invited to the local school as part of their project work on the war.

Nine of us went along. The children had worked so hard building an air raid shelter and they’d managed to get some 1940s cars there too – that took us back!

The children had been practising a number of songs from the war – they sang beautifully and sparked many memories.

Then we were put on the spot when they asked us for our experiences and memories and made notes for their studies. They seemed to be fascinated and it was wonderful to have such an engaging audience.

We can’t tell you how much we enjoyed the experience – we were talking long into the evening about the day.

Just one day left to go until our first Bring and Buy Stall. The residents of the independent living apartments have organised it – with the village staff providing coffee.

We’ll let you know how it goes! 

Well, that was certainly a week to remember. The Minstrels is no more and our retirement village now has a brand new name – Park Place.

The Mayor of Boston, Councillor Peter Jordan, came to perform the official relaunch. He was lovely, unveiling plaques to commemorate the occasion and spending a lot of time talking to the residents and touring the village.

What used to simply be known as the residential home and nursing home now have new names –The Gardens and Elmwood House respectively.

After the official part we all enjoyed some rather tasty canapés and a glass of bubbly to celebrate the occasion.

The renaming comes at the end of a spell of refurbishment. The inside of both Elmwood House and The Gardens have been spruced up and are looking really smart now.

In fact the only thing that’s the same around here is the fabulous team of staff who work so hard to make our lives really easy!

Now is hardly the best time to show off a new garden but, as they say, preparation is everything! Here at Park Place our gardening team has planted a brand new garden area - created for the residents of our specialist dementia unit The Aspen Suite.

Our gardens here are absolutely beautiful and available to be enjoyed by everyone but it’s important that those residents living with dementia have somewhere safe to be able to relax in the fresh air. So we have a new enclosed garden, accessible from The Aspen Suite. It has a seating area and some new shrubs and flowers which, come spring, will look absolutely stunning.

We are very lucky here to have an excellent relationship with some of the local schools – in fact many of our residents have grandchildren and great grandchildren at schools in Boston. No less than six choirs from those schools will be coming to Park Place over the next fortnight to sing Christmas carols for us to both listen to and join in with.

There’s something very special about sharing Christmas with children and we can’t wait to see them.