Hello, thanks for coming this far!

I want to tell you about a friend of mine, really nice kind lovely guy. He likes all the normal things, Xbox, football (well kind of, he’s a Chelsea fan!) oh and he loves early punk music – his favourite track is the Splodgenessabounds classic ‘Two pints of lager and a packet of crisps’! Yep, he’s just your average fun loving guy.

But he’s so far from average, he’s only 8, he’s got a great bunch of school friends, wonderful family, he’s doing really well at school and he’s also a great goal keeper for his local under 9’s football team and trains with the Portsmouth academy.

But his world and the world of his family and all his friends was flipped upside down just before Christmas, completely out of the blue, he was diagnosed with a brain tumour…

After his initial 15 hour emergency surgery to remove a tumour the size of a duck egg and subsequent operations, he’s on the road to recovery. But it’s a long road, one that will see him undergo further radiotherapy and chemotherapy treatment to treat his condition.

We all know how dramatically cancer can affect our adult lives and how we need to ‘be strong’ to fight it and we know how scary that can be. But as an 8 year old! That’s just not fair, that must be so much to have to deal with. At 8 I was still scared of the dark!!

My friend is so much braver than me, he comes in to see me at work with his infectious smile and full of chat and tends to leave with a couple of chocolates tucked in his pocket – much to his mother’s annoyance!!

He’s being helped out by the wonderful ‘Snowdrop Trust’ and they’ll be an important part of his rehabilitation over the coming months. I wanted to do something to help out and try to show him that I can also be a tiny little bit brave.

I’ve signed up to Abseil The Spinnaker Tower on Easter Sunday to try and raise some money for the charity who are being so helpful to my friend.

If you’d like to show your support, could I ask that you visit my just giving page and donate whatever you can. ‘Two pints of lager and a packet of crisps’ is about a tenner – do you fancy getting a round in????