The Start (Friday June 27th)

After the excitement of yesterday, today was a day of reflection.

Yes, I know I haven’t revealed what happened at the meeting, sometimes just like on the telly, you get a cliff-hanger and then you have to wait a few days for the denouement.

I gathered all my bits of paper with venues details and ideas on and made a proper file to put them in and then had a good luck at the venues on Google Maps. What a great facility this is. You can mark landmarks on the map and measure the distance between them. You can also then switch to satellite mode and view the landscape photographically from above. This is particularly useful when looking for footpaths and cut-throughs for a route.

Although we had it in our minds to start the event at Manchester Royal Infirmary, I was reticent to confirm it as the start in case a glut of time specific visits and the final venue ended up somewhere way out of town. LRF were very keen on the start being at MRI and after I had spoken to Tom Holloway at the fund it was clear that it made total sense to do that.

Money from the event will fund research programmes at hospitals throughout the country and bringing the focus of the media to Manchester Royal Infirmary and tying that in with Leukaemia Research Fund raises the realisation of this at the start of Leukaemia Awareness Week.

At the press launch a couple of weeks ago I suggested to Guy Lucas, Consultant Haematologist at MRI, that the fund might be able to ring fence the money raised to go directly to the hospital. He told me that the best way to help the people of Manchester who had Leukaemia was to spend the money at the hospital which was doing the best research and that this was a moveable feast.

To illustrate this; in the news over the last few weeks have been the new £3 million Paul O’Gorman Leukaemia Research Centre at Gartnavel Hospital in Glasgow (www.lrf.org.uk/en/1/res20jun08.html) and the groundbreaking work done in Newcastle (www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/111954.php).

A couple of the daytime venues had time specific visits. We need to be in Belle Vue at 2.30pm and in Reddish either before 12.45pm or after 2.40pm, but probably before 5.15pm. It will all become clear why when we start naming venues over the next week.

With a start at MRI at 10.00am and a journey taking in the time-specific venues, the other venues and the….(did I mention we have a fantastic) finishing venue, a route map is beginning to form……

Tarzan