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St Andrew's Church, Taunton

Colour Supplement

Articles by Christians around the world

Sunday December 23 2007

A concert for Kids for Kids

by Henry Haslam of St. Andrew's Church

I had a very memorable evening in London on December 12th. I had received an invitation to the annual Christmas concert to raise money for the charity Kids for Kids, so that I could hear my poem ‘A Gift of a Goat’ read by one of the charity’s trustees, Lord Cope of Berkeley, who had found it on this website and thought it suitable for the occasion: the poem (after some initial misunderstandings) does try to express the thinking behind what charities like KIDS FOR KIDS are doing.

Kids for Kids was set up by Patricia Parker in 2001, specifically to work in villages in Darfur. The excellence of its work has been widely recognised: it was Highly Commended in the prestigious Charity Awards 2007, for example, and Patricia Parker herself was invited to the Women of the Year Lunch.

The concert took place in St Paul’s church Knightsbridge, a fine, spacious Victorian church which makes a point of welcoming charity events like this. There were the usual ingredients of a Christmas concert: music, children, carols, readings – and there were also four trumpeters from the Grenadier Guards. The charity has an impressive list of celebrity friends, and the readers this year included Prunella Scales (with a marvellously funny rendering of a piece from Gervase Phinn’s A Wayne in a Manger) and Ruth Rendell (with Charles Causley’s ‘A Ballad for Catherine of Aragon’).

After the concert there was a party in the basement library at Canning House (home of the Hispanic and Luso Brazilian Council, which was founded in 1943 to stimulate understanding between Britain, Spain, Portugal and Latin America). Among those present were Nicholas and Christine Beale, who had sponsored the concert. Nicholas’ account on his blog, http://starcourse.blogspot.com (a blog that is well worth visiting, incidentally), gives a couple of pics, some well-deserved praise for the young violinist Ruth Palmer – and a kind word about the goat, as well.

Henry

Read more about the Goat's blog here.

Visit the Kids for Kids website.

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