Life is worth the fight

Last Thursday, Mike Peters of the Alarm and a North Wales musician toured the three hospitals in North Wales to highlight their amalgamation. He held a buskathon at each one of the hospitals to raise money and awareness for his charity, the Love Hope Strength Foundation. LHSF has already donated a significant amount of money to the North Wales hospitals in the fight against cancer.

Mike got hit by leukemia about 12 or so years ago, he won his fight only to be hit again with a different form of the disease which is not curable but treatable. Since his diagnosis he founded the LHSF, rocked Snowdon 4 times, Kili, Everest, Rhondda to name but a few. An amazingly talented guy with an equally amazing wife, Jules Jones Peters.

I really wanted to go to the Wrexham Hospital buskathon and Jules invited me to help the team out which I would have truly loved to have done. However, it was my eldest sons induction evening at his new high school so I was unable to make it. I decided to take some flowers for Jules as a show of support and was going to leave them in reception with a little note. When we got to the car park, who should be getting out of their car but Mike, Jules and Matt. To say that God works in mysterious ways is an understatement because I was able to hand the flowers over personally and introduce them to my sons. I was over the moon.

On Monday I went out for an amazing run! Its funny how I come up with the best ideas and thoughts when I am running so I must invest in a dicatphone so that it can come with me on my runs. As I ran in the rain on Monday, I was overcome by the beauty of the world, not just visually but the smell, the rain, it was amazing. I was then struck by the thought that heck, the world is the only treadmill you need. With that thought in mind, I laughed, I jumped and had myself a pretty amazing run.

Our local council has been trying to sell off our high schools tennis courts for development. I instigated a petition and my friend Judy helped me and together we got 673 signatures against the sell off. Judy wrote to the executive council and we were invited to the executive meeting in order to hand over our petition and lodge our objections.

It was quite a heated debate but our community councillor Hugh Jones put forward an amazing argument against the plans. Basically hightlighting the fact that the council had acted in an underhand way and had not made it clear to the board of school govenors the amount of land in question. He also highlighted the fact that selling of school land was against the councils pledge and that of the government. He raised the fact that Prince William was heading a campaign to stop the sale of school land and actually quoted him as saying "recreational land is not a luxury it is a necessity..." He highlighted the fact that Sport for Wales and The Fields in Trust were on our side in preserving the school land. He also drew attention to the fact that in 2009 a survey conducted in our village showed a serious shortfall in recreational facilities.

I am pleased to report that the council voted against going ahead with the planned sell off much to the aggitation of those involved in finance!

So I must report a pretty successful few days!