Hello

As you may know, my company Underbelly is once again producing our amazing Alfstock Festival in Oxfordshire on Saturday 27th September. It will be the third instalment of this family festival, named after my son Alfie and very much with his incredible character at its core; fun, happiness, extraordinary positivity and a love of live entertainment.

Alfie died of brain cancer in 2019, aged 7, having been diagnosed with a very aggressive form of brain tumour in September 2016. Over those years he took an exorbitant amount of treatment in his stride as his disease kept on recurring. Despite three 7-10 hour operations, over a 100 general anaesthetics and more hospital trips than anyone could imagine Alfie still managed to smile, shrug it all off and get on with it. The nurses that took him in for these very major operations used to comment on how he literally skipped down the corridor into theatre.

We couldn’t fault the treatment and care that we had with the NHS. We had one of the best paediatric neurosurgeons, Owase Jeelani, at the best children’s hospital in the UK, Great Ormond Street. Alfie was even sent by the NHS for pioneering radiotherapy in the USA which wasn’t then available in the UK. But ultimately, like so many others that have had to deal with a brain tumour, we ran out of treatment options and there was absolutely no chemotherapy option available. And that’s what we’re really trying to change…

My family’s Angel Child fund at The Brain Tumour Charity is raising £1.5M towards a specific and groundbreaking research project in Cambridge led by Professor Richard Gilbertson, an extraordinary paediatric oncology clinician and the Director of the Cambridge Cancer Centre at Cambridge University. His project has a genuine change of finding new and potentially life changing drug combinations for two of the most aggressive and difficult to treat brain tumours in children, one of which is a variation of the type that our little Angel Child Alfie had. Through previous Alfstock Festivals, other Underbelly fundraising shows and some incredible generosity and efforts from individuals donors, friends, family and work colleagues we are over £700K towards this target and quite literally every penny counts.

If you are unable to come to Alfstock this year but feel like you might want to still support Angel Child then we would be hugely grateful. I can hand on heart tell you that your money is going to a very special scientist trying to find genuine cures for diseases that no child should ever have to go through.

Thank you

Ed

and Lucinda, Violet, Kit and Willa