In Februaty 2017, our dear friend and former school colleague was diagnosed with bowel cancer. Despite this setback, and having recently recovered from surgery, Sam has been amazing us all with his positivity, enthusiasm and all-round sparkly personality that we know so well.

The family have recently moved into a new home which is in need of a fair amount of sprucing up. Obviously the family need to focus more pressing matters at the moment, and as a result, the garden sits quite low on their list of priorities.

The plan is for us, his friends and old school colleagues, to help. Using the magic of new railway sleepers there's some pretty cool stuff that could be done to create flower and vegetable beds/herb beds, raised off the ground and would be accessible as and when Sam is up to doing stuff now and in the future.

We've costed up the timber needed, soil and fixings etc and it's going to be about £1,600. The thinking is that we can fill the place full of plants, fruit trees etc, do the graft of preparing the ground which there'll be a fair bit of, installing the timber, fixing them all in place, shifting the soil in etc.

If anything, it'll give the family somewhere special to be.

The garden will be designed by Abi and Tom's Garden Plants (http://www.abiandtom.co.uk), who will also kindly donate all the plants.

The saying goes, that every little helps, and that's certainly true in this case.