// ‘Tea Party’ //

​On a beautiful sunny day in late July we held our MND Tea Party in the pavilion located in the field behind our house.

This took a lot of planning to do, inviting people on Facebook, finding things to raffle and sorting out the food. I also got the MNDA to send me some new merchandise and this included a hired banner to put up. 

The day before myself and George went to ‘The Range’ to buy a glass jar for the sweets and then ran around ‘Sainsbury,s’ to pick up the things for the sandwiches. This included amongst other things lots of bread for our ‘butties’. We also picked up a few more things for the raffle and of course milk.

In the evening Liz flew up the country to arrive in Lincoln just after 8pm, she’d been at work in London during the day. She was a bit late though as the train from Newark moved slowly along the tracks. When she arrived we started to plan the event. After Emily went to bed we spread the sweets out on the floor and filled the jar for our ‘guess how many sweets’.

This was really fun to do, George and Lizzy were drinking wine and being merry. I told George to put five sweets in the jar and just say ‘five’ everytime. We filled the jar up and then put a note on the bottom with the total amount. During this we were watching the telly and after this we started to watch the new trailers for films in 2017. The new King Kong, Wonder Woman and Justice League trailers all looked amazing and we can’t wait for them.

Due to this we all went to bed late, luckily though I slept like a brick until 07:30 and then at around eight I heard the footsteps upstairs. When George came downstairs she had a cup of coffee to help her wake up, I then started to tell her to fill the car up with the raffle items and MNDA merchandise. During this Liz came down and when they were ready they drove to the pavilion and started to put the things on the tables. 

They came back and George got Emily dressed in her blue t-shirt. Liz and Emily then went to the pavilion incase the cakes were delivered. After this me and George got ready and off we went. George was a bit stressed as the cakes hadn’t been delivered but as she pushed me there we saw the car leaving after they were delivered.

For about the first hour George was running back and forth to pick up things from home. This included my IPOD dock to provide the background music. Liz and Gemma (our neighbour) drew and put up all the signs and Liz had made lots of fresh sandwiches. Gemma and her husband also put up some sports activities outside incase some kids arrived. We were all ready and the people started to arrive. 

It was great to see people arriving, Maurice and his partner Joan attended and I had a great chat with him via my phone. He had lost his wife to MND and he reminded me of Dad. Not getting over the grief of losing your partner just moving on. 

It was surprising to see how many people attended and they mostly stayed for a long time. George’s Mum and Dad stayed for most of the day, Emily played outside with Will, Gemma and their children and just kept popping in to get a drink of milk. I’m sure she said hello to most of the people when they arrived. 

Some of my work friends also came and they enjoyed buying tickets for the tombola trying to win some good prizes. I really enjoyed watching them picking the numbers and winning and losing.

I managed to sell a lot of my pictures of Potterhanworth and it was great to see my friends buying them. In the future I’ll sort out some more pictures to be sold for the MNDA. I’m also looking forward to seeing some pictures on Facebook of my photographs hanging on their walls. 

It was a great day raising awareness and in total we raised £425, thank you to everyone who came and in particular George, Gemma and Liz for their help.