I have the honour of serving as the Chair of Royal Star & Garter, a charity that provides award-winning care for veterans and their partners living with disability or dementia.

Every day staff at our three Royal Star & Garter Homes go the extra mile for our residents. They have overcome personal and logistical challenges to keep our residents safe during the Covid pandemic. Even though Covid restrictions are relaxing in society at large, we expect the risk to our residents to remain high and so our staff will still be under greater pressure than most of us. I want to put myself under some extra pressure every day, very much in solidarity with our great staff and to raise some money for a really vital cause.

I am committing to ‘run’ at least 1,000 miles in a year on my cross-trainer (as my knees won’t let me do proper running).  I will have to fit this in around my full time job, my work with the Royal Star & Garter Governing Body and my family commitments.  And I will commit to making it tough on myself by setting the resistance level quite high and averaging faster than 8mph. This way, I estimate I will have to do about 40 minutes hard work every time I can get onto my machine. 
And I won’t stop at 1,000 miles – if I get there before the year is out
I will keep going.

Your support will mean so much. At Royal Star & Garter we live and work as one family and one community. Together we can continue to
make sure those who have had the courage to serve our country live happy, fulfilled lives.

Thank you.

Here is a little more about this great charity. Royal Star & Garter was founded in 1916 to care for the severely injured young men returning from the battlegrounds of the First World War. Today they provide
loving, compassionate care to veterans and their partners living with
disability or dementia. They offer residential care for people in their Homes in Solihull, Surbiton and High Wycombe, and through their

Wellbeing Programme offer personalised support every day of
the year. Over the next five years they plan to move into providing care in people’s homes and are developing specialist services for younger veterans.

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