ŌPOTIKI’S Nell Bodman Singers don’t own a time machine but each week at Thornton Park Retirement Village they offer the next best thing.

The choir assembles to share songs that take elderly residents at the village back to younger years and carefree times they have known in the past.

These cheerful singalongs are crammed with material residents know and appreciate, whether the song is from the genre of folk, pop, country, gospel, or maybe a music hall standard.

The Spanish love song Vaya Con Dios still tears at the heart strings; that “daring young man of the flying trapeze” still gets the girl and; “you may suppose what you want to suppose when you hear Oom-Pah-Pah”. . . And yes, that “yellow ribbon” still gets “tied round the ole oak tree”.

The singing group was formed in September 1981 by Nell Bodman, a woman well known and respected in the Ōpōtiki area at the time. She sang regularly to patients at Ōpōtiki Hospital on Hikutaia Road.

A few years later, the group started singing at Peria House and continued there until it closed in 2019.

When Thornton Park Retire-ment Home opened, it was not long before the group started singing there.

For years they sang at both Peria House and Thornton Park and have performed at the latter to this day.

Now the Nell Bodman Singers are looking for people who enjoy singing and can spend an hour a week on Wednesday mornings to join in at Thornton Park.

If you are interested, contact Carole Young on 315 7919 or email [email protected] or call Patty Lindesay on 315 6140.