Claire and Tom
This Sunday is CRY’s 10th Heart of London Bridges Walk. We’ll be walking again to remember Tom and Claire.
Please join us if you can – we’d love to see you and you can register on the day.
Full details are here but please be aware that the walk starts from a new location – Potters Fields Park near Tower Bridge.
Hope to see you there.
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Left to right: CRY founder Alison Cox, research fellow Dr Keteepe-Arachi and patron Ben Brown.
This morning I went to see your latest fund-raising efforts turn into potentially life-saving work at the CRY Centre For Inherited Cardiovascular Conditions and Sports Cardiology, St George’s Hospital, Tooting.
All the running, climbing, book-selling, cake baking and myriad other activities you’ve taken part in since our fund started in 2008 has now raised more than £150,000 for CRY.
So it was great to
It was particularly fitting that the BBC’s Ben Brown, family friend and CRY patron, was able to attend the launch because he represents each and every one of you who has ever supported CRY. Not only has Ben done whatever he can to raise awareness, he has also fund-raised by putting in the hard miles running half and full marathons.
It was also, of course, a pleasure to have a chat once again with Alison Cox. CRY’s founder may have stepped down as Chief Executive but she is still getting up at the crack on a Saturday morning to support events such as these.
Last year alone, CRY screened 23,000 young people. It shows a need, it shows the demand, but there’s a long way to go before there’s a national screening programme to replace the efforts of CRY. Since starting in 1995, the charity has screened more than 80,000 young people.
Part of that total is down to you. On the way home I heard Patti Smith on Radio 4’s Saturday Live. She talked about writing the song ‘People Have The Power’, which includes the line ‘We can turn the world around.’ Because of your efforts to turn at least one part of the world around, Tom and Claire’s Fund has sponsored more than 1,200 of those screenings.
That’s 1,200 who have been given a chance Tom did not have.
For today at least, then, it seems right to reflect with great pride on the efforts of a remarkable group of CRY supporters, a group that has raised £150,000 in Tom and Claire’s names.
Thank you.
The echo bought with your fund-raising efforts.
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Life After Tom on BBC iPlayer Radio.
Claire’s BBC Radio 4 documentary, ‘Life After Tom’, is now available on BBC iPlayer Radio.
You can find it here.
The programme, written and narrated by Claire, was first broadcast in October, 2008, and describes how she navigated the first 12 months after Tom’s death.
That it is now available on demand is due to the efforts of Claire’s friend – and producer of the programme – Linda Pressly.
Having listened to it again, it seems to me to have withstood the test of time and therefore stands as a fitting tribute to Claire, both as a mother and as a journalist.
PC, June 3, 2015.
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Tom and Claire
Claire wanted to raise £100,000 for CRY in Tom’s memory – and we asked you if you’d help to achieve that in memory of both Tom and Claire.
You’ve done that and more.
As of this morning, donations to what is now Tom and Claire’s Fund stand in excess of £110,000 since we first began fund-raising in 2008. There is still more money coming in.
All we can say is a huge “THANK YOU”.
Our focus will remain on working with CRY to provide free heart screenings for young people in west London. Our belief – Claire’s belief – is that screening can make a difference.
It can help to challenge a dreadful statistic – that 12 young people aged 14-35, like Tom, die each week from an undiagnosed heart condition.
Since we lost Tom in 2007, CRY’s figures suggest a further 4,500 young people will have died. The vast majority could have been saved with a simple test:
Like other health screening programmes, it can’t yet identify all those at risk. But in Italy, where screening is mandatory for all young people engaged in organised sport, they have reduced the incidence of young sudden cardiac death by 89%.
To read more on the latest research, click here.
But for now, all we’d like to say once again is a huge “THANK YOU”.
Paul and Ellen x
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… free heart screenings for more than 1,100 young people since 2009.
Happy Birthday Tom. Love you x
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for all the flowers, messages, texts and cards we have received since Sunday. It means a lot to us.
Claire, Paul and Ellen x
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