My Story
Thanks for visiting my new Fundraising Page. The money I hope to raise from picture sales from my website and from craft fairs, art shows and exhibitions will help fund life-saving research and bring forward the day when all cancers are cured. You can contribute directly to this page if you wish (and I hope you do!) or via my website, https://picturesonline.co.uk, where a small contribution is raised from each picture sale. We're all living longer these days, and the extra care we need as we get older needs extra funding too. Sue and I are now in our early seventies, and other than disaster funds and the animal welfare charities that we support, we have not contributed much to research charities like Cancer Research UK, so we hope our modest efforts here will grow and eventually become of real value. We are both from working-class backgrounds, and in the 1950s getting on was a struggle at times, but it was at a time when the world seemed, in retrospect, to have been a kinder and a better place. Life seemed simpler and less frenetic then; environmental pollution and global warming were unheard of (nobody knew), the neighbours all knew each other and you were 'something' in the street if you had a phone or your dad had a car (ours didn't). But despite all that, and despite improving levels of healthcare, and the technologies and the gizmos that we've all come to take for granted, the spectre of cancer was always among us - that dreaded 'c' word. We've both lost parents (and probably grandparents) to cancer, Sue has had bladder cancer, and I lost my brother Peter to bowel cancer at the age of 48. Life not so peachy after all. We've settled into retirement in Suffolk, and are still busy with 'stuff' that satisfies the Protestant work ethic! - but it's now time to put a little something back too. Our parents, poorly educated themselves and with a war to fight and recover from, also fought for our better education, which in turn enabled us to secure good jobs and lead worry-free and fulfilling lives, in want of very little. But there's much that's wrong for many in Britain today: at a time when the need for food banks continues to grow alarmingly, when the greed of others is forcing more and more people onto the streets, and when child poverty is growing again, it behoves us all to do what we can for those more in need. Cancer Research UK may not get people off the streets, but their long-term research will benefit us all eventually. I hope you find you can manage a small contribution to them via this page. Thank you.
