A HEARTFELT THANKYOU...

To all of you who raised £500 tonight for Overgate, our local hospice. It was a magnificent total and I'm proud of all of you. Particularly the staff at Il Mulino who handed over their tips to help those with life-threatening illnesses. Thanks too to MC Dave Boardman and all the Labour Party and Liberal Democrat councillors who gave support.
There are very few of us who are untouched by the distress which cancer brings. My mother and sister both died of cancer and that's why I chose the hospice as my charity. Tonight, we did our best in their memory and now well on way to achieving my goal of £4000.

LOCAL HEROES

I have spent this morning at the Overgate Hospice near Halifax which is my chosen charity for the year. The reasons why are entirely personal. My mother died at 61 and my elder sister at just 51 from cancer. Half my immedaite family, basically. One death was in 1986 and the other 1999 but these are not events one "gets over" as people who have not experienced such traumas seem to imagine.

Life goes on and the pain eases slowly over time but you never forget . Not in a wallowing, self-pitying kind of way but losing loved ones long before their "time" leaves a lifelong awareness that our time here is short and that life can be snatched away at any time.

So I'm going to be rolling up my sleeves over the next 12 months and aiming to raise at least £4000 for the hospice - hopefully more. The staff and volunteers who work at the hospice truly are local heroes - I found their dedication inspiring and also humbling.

So far I've signed up for a 10-mile Midnight Ramble around Calderdale in September and will be offering some media training to help them get publicity. Fund-raising curries and quizzes also beckon. But coward that I am I'm afraid I draw the line at abseiling .....