A spokesman for the ICRF said Granada’s Good Morning and Brian Turner of Ready Steady Cook would be supporting the aim to get

A spokesman for the ICRF said Granada’s Good Morning and Brian Turner of Ready, Steady Cook would be supporting the aim to get people baking and selling mince pies for the charity.Oxfam says it aims to emphasise the importance of regular year-round donations but admits that the response at Christmas is always particularly generous.Spokesman Charles Walker said Christmas mailshots would mostly be targeted at committed givers. One is a ticket-only carol concert on 9 December at Glasgow Cathedral in the presence of HRH Princess Alexandra where readings will be given by Kate Adie, Hannah Gordon and Magnus Linklater. Income from cards exceeded pounds l.5m.This year, in addition to the usual channels of fund-raising they are planning two major events. Last year the imperial Cancer Research Fund sold 6.22 million cards through their 500 shops excluding cards sold through catalogues.

A total of 80 per cent of our income goes directly to cerebral palsy sufferers leaving 20 per cent to cover all our administration.”Christmas cards are a huge earner for charities. If they let us know they would like to give annually or twice a year we can adapt our mailing list according to their wishes. We only have the funds to help 25 of these 100 children.”If the reader knows a disabled child or someone who is pregnant or is even pregnant herself an appeal like this is hard to resist.Scope pushes the point home harder by including a cut out angel to display on the top of your Christmas tree as a “reminder of all those with disabilities especially children”.Appeals manager Sue Greenwood says the biggest response to mailshots comes at Christmas and Scope hopes to raise pounds 500,000 from its seasonal appeal with a further pounds 250,000 in a follow-up appeal in January.”We have about seven mailshots a year but we try not to deluge our supporters with requests. That’s when her parents were told she had cerebral palsy, caused at or around the time of her birth.”Scope has paid for Gemma to attend a specialist school where her progress has been immense.The thrust of the appeal is this: “In the four weeks leading up to Christmas, more than 100 babies will be born with cerebral palsy – that’s one new baby every six hours Scope wants to reach out to all of them but we can’t. The reader will discover that “when Gemma was two days old she actually died but the doctors managed to bring her back to life”.Gemma was in intensive care for many months. Her mother will never forget the pain her tiny baby went through – so many tubes and needles.”But the heartache did not stop there. As Gemma grew up it became clear she was profoundly disabled from the waist down.

When other children were learning to walk, she still could not sit up or roll over. This year the appeal is focused on Gemma, born prematurely and weighing just two pounds The story is emotive. The NSPCC raised pounds 46.2m last year and a third of that figure came through donations during November, Dec- ember and January.This year the charity has Christmas catalogue inserts in two national newspapers and is running a television advertising campaign which aims to attract 100,000 donations.Christmas mailshots are geared to attracting 25,000 new donors.Scope, the former Spastics Society, finds that featuring a child’s story in their Christmas mailshot is effective. How is the money raised, and where does it go? Sally Staples investigates. The postman’s bag is heavier than usual – and not just with presents and Christmas cards. It is the prime time for charity appeals and hundreds of thousands of households are targeted. In the run-up to the festive season most of us will be deluged with dozens of unsolicited letters asking for donations.
Many of these will go straight into the bin but charities depend on those of us who, imbued with the festive spirit of generosity and goodwill, do actually respond to the request and reach for the credit card.Charities dealing with children will detail particularly poignant cases of need – a proven way to tug the heartstrings and reel in the cheques.

It is the time of year when appeals for our cash – in the name of charity – reach their peak. All bookings: 0171- 304 4000.Glyndebourne `Opera Bite’ No 14, a cassette guide to both `Paul Bunyan’ and `Albert Herring’, pounds 5 from 0118 978 9303. Auden, meanwhile, had recently fallen in love with Chester Kallman. It’s not at all an opera a clef, but seeing Paul Bunyan now, we may just rediscover the youthful thrill that Auden and Britten felt as they shared their discovery of three new worlds of love, of America, and of opera.`Paul Bunyan’: 5-6 Dec, Snape Maltings; 10-17 Dec, Shaftesbury Theatre, London WC2; 19-20 Dec, Corn Exchange, King’s Lynn. No wonder Britten felt moved when he heard the opera again, decades after its first performance. There’s a wonderful chorus, for example, `Once in a while the odd thing happens/ Once in a while the moon turns blue’ which is just so spectacular.”Britten later suggested that those lines were “about” Peter Pears, and certainly the relationship between composer and singer deepened (and may have been consummated) while they were in the States. He’d already written substantial pieces, the Sinfonia da Requiem, the Violin Concerto and so on; and you can clearly hear his voice here.

The lyrics are so clever that it’s hard to make sure that the audience gets it all, but even in his first opera Britten knew how to give the libretto an inner life. We have them singing in American accents, because Auden had American accents in his ear, and a lot of the rhymes and scansion are based on American English, albeit a British perception of American English. I’ve found that quite moving.”With one exception (Thomas Randle, the American tenor who takes the role of Inkslinger), Zambello’s cast is British: “It’s wonderful to work with singers who know what Britten went on to do Their experience of his work suffuses the performance. In Peter Grimes and Billy Budd, the chorus is part of the action, but it’s still a chorus; in Paul Bunyan, important characters emerge from the chorus. The orchestral music he wrote for the revivals in the 1970s was among the last music Britten ever composed, so the piece is both the beginning and the end of his operatic career. Because he was writing for young performers, he didn’t see any problem with having dozens of people around at every moment. Zambello admits, “It’s not without flaws, but for a first opera, it’s pretty fantastic The music speaks so clearly to a modern audience.