Thank You For Supporting Young Musicians in Palestine!

As many of you know, we’re always raising money for some cause or another. We invite you to add a pound at checkout, add one of our own, and before you know it there’s a tidy sum accumulating. Over the years you’ve helped us to help local causes (NED Care in Moretonhampstead, The Helen Foundation) and international ones (the World Wildlife Fund), housing and homelessness (Crisis), people at the beginning of life (Farms for City Children) and nearing the end (Rowcroft Hospice). We gave money to help buy a forest and run food banks; WaterAid, Help Refugees, the Prison Phoenix Trust, CLIC Sargent and War On Want have all benefited from your generosity.

We let each one run for a while, and every now and then change over. So just the other day we came to the end of requesting donations for Palmusic. This was an unusual one, supporting as it did music education for young Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, at the schools run by the Edward Said National Conservatory Of Music. In the past their graduates have wowed an audience at the Proms and toured Europe with Nigel Kennedy. Palmusic are their UK ambassadors, and I was lucky enough to go to a great concert they put on in Devon: that was the spur to wanting to help, and I was pleased as punch with your response - we were able to give them £1328. Thank you.

Our New Charity

We’ve now pulled our attention back to the local, with St Petrocks, Exeter’s charity for the homeless. I remember visiting Cork in the 1980s and being shocked to see a young mother begging in the street - now, I might have led a sheltered life, but I’d never seen anything like that at home. And now? You can pass three or four people begging in the space of a few hundred yards in the city, and it seems to me we have gone backwards over the last 40 years.

It shouldn’t be left to charities to deal with this but that, sadly, is where we are. So please look kindly on St Petrocks when you pass through our checkout.