A Favour To Ask...

I have just finished my first week of International School visits. I've been in a different Barcelona school every day, with early starts and long signing sessions afterwards, so I will have been working really hard, but I have today to relax in the sunshine, before we transfer to Valencia tomorrow. 

I wrote this post before I left though, because I have a favour to ask...

Almost a year ago, I lost my dad. He was a gentle, modest man with a wicked sense of humour and a sharp intellect. It's from him that I get my love of words - apparently, when he was conscripted at the end of WW2, he carried a pocket dictionary everywhere and he read it from cover to cover. No wonder he had a fantastic vocabulary and was so good at crosswords!

He was also a great boogie-woogie pianist. He taught me to play Cow Cow Boogie when I was just a tiny thing and had to climb to get up onto the piano stool. It was a fantastic party-trick. Dad never learned to read music, playing by ear. He taught me various boogie-woogie songs over the years. I later took piano lessons and, though all that has mostly blown to the wind by now, I can still play Basin St Blues to this day.

Anyway, to the point. During the last 4 years of his life, Alzheimers gradually took my Dad from us and all these precious aspects of his personality slowly slipped through his fingers.

I am doing the Alzheimers Memory Walk in two weeks, on Saturday October 11th, in Dad's memory. It would be lovely if you could sponsor me, so I can help raise money to try and stop this horrible disease from taking the people we love from us, in such a very sad way.

This is Dad and I together, on one of the last social occasions when he was more or less himself, at the 60th wedding anniversary party we threw for him and Mum:

Anything you can give would be really welcome. Just go to this link. Thank you so much!