Category Archives: Blog

The New Beacon choir sing Christian’s carol

Christian is in the Chapel Choir at the New Beacon School and they had their Advent service at the beautiful chapel at Tonbridge school. The junior school choir sang Christian’s composition, “The Snow”, while he played the piano.

If any parent wants photos of the event they can be downloaded from here.

This is a time of year to appreciate what we have and to help others that are less fortunate. Darren and Amy are currently ordering and wrapping toys for Santa to deliver to children who are unlucky enough to be in St George’s over Christmas. We continue to work to work closely with Martin at Samuel’s charity and look forward to continuing to improve children’s comfort in hospitals in 2016.

Merry Christmas!

Christian

Peter Blandford’s photo

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Great News

We are thrilled to announce that Waitrose Sevenoaks have chosen The Christian Blandford Fund as one of their three charities for December’s Community Matters!! This is a scheme whereby at the end of your shop you are given a green token to place in a box of the charity you’d most like to support. At the end of the month Waitrose donates £1000 between the 3 charities, with the charity that has the most amount of green tokens getting the majority of the donation.

Please share this with your Sevenoaks friends and make sure the green tokens go in our bin!

Henry and Christian

Henry and Christian

Posted in Blog, Fund Raising, Things We've Done.

And we’re off!!

Rocket

 

The red rocket is on its way full of goodies for the kids at St George’s Hospital. Details of contents to come…

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Kevin Britt – Night Rider!

Kevin Britt is doing the London night rider event  and raising money for The Christian Blandford Fund.

Blandford/Arthur get together

Kevin writes

The night rider event is a 100k 62 mile ride around London taking in 50 of London’s most famous site including the Olympic park, Tower Bridge, Canary Wharf, Piccadilly Circus, Trafalger Square, the Royal Opera House and the London Eye.

There are over 4000 riders raising funds for lots of different charities. There is a musical theme to this years ride and takes the ride past icon musical sites in London including 21b baker street and abbey road (the Beatles) plus the pub from Bridget Jones and the globe in borough market. There is a selfie competition on the night to show the fun side of the ride. The event is organised by classic tours and there are no closed roads so the ride takes place along side the London night traffic. Continue reading

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Stagecoach – Medieval Market

Stage Coach

Christian used to love going to Stagecoach in Tonbridge, and I received this lovely email from Wendy who runs it…

I just wanted to get in touch to let you know that on our last day of term (28th March) our students will be having an informal Medieval Market for parents and friends. We would very much like to donate any money that the children make on the stalls to Christian’s charity. Continue reading

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The Christian Blandford Fund – a 13 year old’s perspective

Claudia received an email recently from the lovely Lucy Docherty. 

Lucy

Hi Claudia,

Its Lucy here. I have attached to this email a piece of English work I had to complete for school, because Mum thought you might like to read it.

We had to do a speech using persuasive and emotive language, and I thought Christian’s inspiringstory of his brave battle against cancer should be the main point of my speech, to persuade people to raise money and support the cause.

I performed it in class today and received an A*, I hope you enjoy reading what I have come up with!

Thank you,

Lucy Docherty

We think Lucy deserved the A*, in fact we thought it was so good we would share it on our site… Continue reading

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Father Christmas at St George’s

We had a great day handing out presents at St George’s helped by the wonderful play specialists. The photos are on facebook here and also here where parents can download hi-res versions using the username guest and the password Christmas. Thank you very much for the very talented photographer Hugh Miller who gave up his time and skills in order to help us out.

Santa 2014I received a nice e-mail after one of our Santa visits which i thought it would be good to share, I have changed the names to maintain anonymity.

I just wanted to say “thank-you” on behalf of my son Jack, who received a lovely teddy. It really cheered him up, as did the visit from father xmas and his little helper: his eyes lit up when he saw them (I think he was thinking “oh no, the door’s opening, someone in a uniform is coming to do something nasty to me”) and was lovely for his dad and mum to see. As you can appreciate, being in an isolation room at xmas is pretty grim for a kid. Jack has been poorly all his life and is a “regular” at St George’s, despite living 60 miles away in West Sussex. The distance makes it particularly difficult as his brother, Henry, who he is very close to, has to stay at his Grandma’s during his many stays at St George’s, so we are all split up as a family. Luckily, we were put on “home leave” for xmas but must return next Friday.

I think your charity is brilliant. As soon as I read the poster in the posh new parents room I could tell that the person who wrote it had a real insight into life for kids and their families in this situation that only personal experience (unfortunately) can bring.

Merry xmas to you all and keep up the good work!

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New delivery to St Georges

A couple of weeks ago I did a quick delivery to St George’s Hospital! The Red Rocket was packed full of goodies and ready to go, I delivered…

2 kids electric ride on cars – Going to operations in a little electric car is far more fun and maybe less scary than on a wheelchair.

16 Night lights – little things are sometimes important

3 plug in electric portable heaters – bizarre but well needed

3 mini iPads – for the play specialist to carry around as a tool to help distract children when needed.

11 Whiteboards – for the kids’ rooms

The Rocket - full of goodies

The Rocket – full of goodies

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Christian’s Christmas carol sung by The Cantus Ensemble at Sevenoaks School

Christian loves to play the piano and write his own music, this year he entered a competition run by Sevenoaks School to write a Christmas Carol for a 5 part choir. The winners and runners up in each age group got their song sung by the incredible London based Cantus Ensemble at the Christmas Carol concert in the school .

We are very proud that Christian’s lovely song got awarded 2nd place in the year 7 and 8 competition. It is called The Snow and all the words, piano music and vocals were written by him.

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Claudia’s Christmas Market

On November 20th Claudia opened the house to about 80 friends who came along to support The Christian Blandford Fund, and do a spot of Christmas shopping.

Coco Cuscino brought along beautiful bespoke cushions, soft furnishings and gifts,  Anahita displayed luscious smelling homemade beauty products and Phoenix had a table overflowing with gift wrap, cards, note books and much more.  Upstairs Ben & Lucy from The Square Salon were busy with manicures and hairstyles, Miss Captain and Little Captain had rails full of fashionable clothing for ladies and children, Ochre had some gorgeous cashmere, silk and wool tops, pashmina’s and scarves whilst Stella & Dot brought a bit of sparkle to the event with some stunning jewellery.  Cakes and nibbles were courtesy of Sara Hester from Tandem Catering and Top Table provided us with tea pots, cafetieres, milk jugs, cups, glasses, teaspoons and much more.

We raised a massive £2410 and more money is still coming in online.  Thank you to everyone who supported this event.

Many people bought raffle tickets that helped towards the final total. We thought Christian should pick the lucky winners…

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