• Raiding Tours

    Cambridge RAG’s Christmas Tour for KidsCan, December 2011

    During the (mercifully mild) first week of the Christmas vacation 2011 seven of us embarked on a five day raiding tour around various southern towns and cities to raise money for KidsCan.

    KidsCan (www.kidscan.org.uk) is a charity based at the University of Salford that works to cure more children with cancer through groundbreaking research into developing new treatments, and improving the treatments that already exist, for childhood cancers. Having already done a raiding tour for them in the Easter vacation 2010, we knew that we were working on behalf of an incredibly worthy cause.

    So on the Sunday evening, armed with the items on this unusual packing list:

    • a  7 x purple KidsCan t-shirt emblazoned with ‘Curing children with cancer’
    • a  10 x roll of stickers
    • a  2 x Santa suit
    • a  1 x reindeer costume
    • a  Face paint
    • a  1 x stack of buckets
    • a  Our faithful count machine, Bertha

    we struck out in a CUSU minibus, affectionately known as Shirley the Battle Sleigh.

    Over the next five days we relied on the warm hospitality of the families of current members of the RAG Central Committee, RAG alumni and a couple of churches to put us up. Fortified by the amazing meals they prepared for us and the much-appreciated opportunity to shower provided by most of them, we made our attack on the good people of St Albans, Newbury, Guildford, Tunbridge Wells, Sevenoaks and, finally, London.

    Highlights of the week included:

    • Blagging free coffees from several branches of Costa (sometimes even in the same town)
    • The acquisition of the new onesies from Primark
    • Josie being given a banana by a generous passer-by to go with the monkey onesie
    • Susie having a whole bag of coins chucked into her bucket out of a second floor window
    • Flora getting two £20 notes in a morning
    • Coryan and Oliver taking it in turns to serenade us with snoring most nights
    • Playing with a Little Tikes castle playhouse (for ages 2 and above)

    Over the five days of Tour we raised a fantastic £7,404.21 for KidsCan and, on top of that, a further £1313.56 for CLIC Sargent, for whom we picked up some extra London permits on the Friday. With a grand total of £8717.77 under our belts by the end of the evening rush hour on the Friday night we left London exhausted and pretty dirty but chuffed with what we’d achieved.

    If reading about our escapades has left you wanting more, contact Oliver Kenny to find out about Easter Tour 2012, taking place between Sunday 18th and Friday 23rd March, proceeds from which will go to British Heart Foundation. We even have their mascot lined up; an oversized, extremely cheerful muscle of the cardioid variety named Hearty.