2016 Bradley's Roundabout Appeal

Saturday 6 August 2016

In aid of Bradley's Roundabout Appeal

Amount raised:  £1248

Running total to date:  £35643

Earlier in the year Julie saw an article in the Retford Times and immediately recognised the picture of Bradley as being one of the students at St Giles School.  

An appeal had been launched by the Retford group RAG4E to fund raise for  a disabled access roundabout in Kings Park in Retford.  They had seen a post on Facebook by Tracy, Bradley's mum, saying how heartbreaking it had been to have to tell Bradley that he couldn't go on the roundabout in the park due to a lack of access. 

We thought that this roundabout was an excellent idea as a facility for the disabled children of the Retford area so Jules got in touch with Bradley's mum Tracy to see if we could help them by raising money at our summer charity event.

As everyone knows we do like to ensure that all monies raised go towards something tangible and local - and what could be more fitting than an item for the playground in the local park?!

We called it 'Bradley's roundabout appeal' simply because Bradley was the inspiration for the RAG4E appeal - and we are hoping to raise a significant sum to add to the monies already collected by them.

This is the type of roundabout we are helping to fund raise for - it will enable four children to be safe and secure while they enjoy the thrill of the movement.

The article mentioned a sum of £4400 - but in order to get a roundabout which fully encloses a wheelchair the cost is more likely to be over £8000.

Other fund raisers are planned including a sky dive - so good luck to those who are brave enough to do that!..

We'll keep our feet on the ground and organise our usual fabulous evening with band, disco, huge raffle, food and fun!

Preparations for the event were a bit last minute this year as for some reason Julie thought that the date was a week later so once she realised it was actually THAT SATURDAY and not the week after there was a mad flurry of activity!

I wasn't able to get over to help so once again good old Aunt Margaret was roped in to be her wing man!

After three days of making tissue flowers the table centres were ready. They all looked gorgeous with their little twinkly lights standing in coloured pots on mirrors.  Great work (as always!) Julie and Aunt M!

Tracy prepared a board with details about the target for the roundabout appeal and how much had been raised so far.

Once again we had a fantastic response to our raffle with some fabulous prizes.  Everyone is always so generous!  We had loads of lovely toiletries, pamper vouchers, handmade quilts, football shirts, food, meal and racing vouchers, rugs, booze, chocolates and loads more!  Every year we are overwhelmed by the amount of prizes we receive - and every year seems to be better than the last!

Our band this year were from Lincoln and were called the Stolen Fridays so we were able to listen to them doing their sound checks while we put the finishing touches to our tables.

So - with everything organised and ready our guests started to arrive...

Including these four looking well groomed and confident and ready for the next fundraiser...

... these are the brave people who are going to sky dive - James, Tracy, Laura and Katy. 

 (Pictures of the skydive are at the end of the post)

... and some of our 'feet on the ground' event attendees...

The meal was excellent - lasagne with salad and chips or two chicken skewers with lemon and parsley rice and a choice of chilli or barbecue sauce.

Dessert was apple pie and custard or New York cheesecake.

All absolutely delicious!

The band were great and kept the crowd entertained...

Our numbers were quite low this year as there seemed to be a lot of people on holiday so we were quite prepared to think that we wouldn't make a huge amount - but that every little helped!  What we were totally unprepared for was that so many people asked for raffle tickets - so that we had actually sold loads on the evening before we even went round with our begging buckets!!

This helped enormously towards our fantastic total - so we have to say a huge thank you to everyone who helped us by buying these tickets - and also a HUGE thank you to both those very kind people who donated prizes so that people could win them and those others (such as the Gate Inn, Ordsall who donated the prize money for the stand up bingo) - who made further cash donations!

And while I'm thanking people I would like to say a huge thank you to Ian and Julie - Beechy and Jules - as without their organisation and begging skills none of this would take place. (Actually that was just an excuse to add a really nice picture of them...)

The roundabout appeal and our event were advertised on the Trax FM radio station and as a result of this a very kind photographer sent us five £75 vouchers towards photographs after a free sitting in his studio.

These were put into the raffle and Mike won one!  

We didn't think that we would be able to use it as it was somewhere near York but then realised that it would probably fit in with the celebrations we were planning for baby sis Cathryn's (belated) 'birthday jaunt' with the siblings as we were going near there to collect a 1972 VW camper van to ride round in for the day (as you do)...

To cut a long story short the five siblings ended up having a great laugh and a really nice photo shoot. so hopefully the other four winners will enjoy it as much as we did!

So a big thank you to all our event attendees - we hope that you had fun and we'll see you at the next event!...

Thursday 1 September - Skydive day!

A perfect day for falling from the sky - so here are the pictures of our intrepid foursome...