Treat Life Like A Postage Stamp

I was always told to stick to one thing until you get to your destination and, as you well know, I host poker tournaments up and down the UK.

A couple of weeks ago I was organising an event at a Yates’ bar in Blackpool and my youngest son, Jak, came along to help me as he normally does.

He usually brings his best friend, George, as they seem joined at the hip for most of the time, but on this occasion he came on his own.

I asked Jak where his mate was and he told me George had got a part-time job, working at the post office sorting out the Christmas mail. Straight away, this reminded me of a time when I was forced to work at the post office.

In 1972, me and three of my school friends got in trouble for football hooliganism and our sentence was to do 150 hours of community service each. This was the hardest thing I ever did as I used to start work at 10.25 p.m., finish at 7.25 a.m. and then go straight to school! I was absolutely knackered by the time I got home and it taught me a lesson I can tell you.

The job itself wasn’t too bad and my task was quite a nice one — to write replies to all the letters sent to Santa Claus. I’d sit in the sorting office in Railway Street, Wolverhampton, and I used to answer all the letters, which were usually accompanied with a stamped addressed envelope.

My replies were along the lines of, ‘you’ve been a good boy or girl and I’ll do my best to get you a chopper bike, train set, dolls house, or whatever.’

But one day I picked up a letter which didn’t have a stamped addressed envelope inside and this letter was about to change my life.

It came from a young man named Gary Frost who was in an orphanage in Wolverhampton — the Cottage Homes in Amos Lane, Wednesfield.

Gary was asking Santa Claus for £300 because Mr Humphreys, the bursar at the home, had promised him he could spend Christmas at home if he could accumulate enough money to buy an electronic wheelchair for his mother, who had been paralysed in a car accident which also killed his father and his identical twin brother.

This was the saddest letter I had ever read and I knew straight away that I would have to do everything I possibly could to get the money for him.

I took the letter to my school, Pendeford High, the next day and showed it to the two sports teachers, Mr Marsh and Mr Russell, and I also took it to the headmaster, Mr Brinsley-Edwards, who was a hard man but fair.

I asked if there was anything we could to do to raise the £300 and the four of us got together. We organised a school discotheque, a sponsored cycle race around Aldersley Stadium, a Christmas Fair and we also held a famine day, when all the children went without a school dinner and donated their dinner money to the cause.

This proved to be a great adventure and it brought everyone at our school together. We raised a total of £280, which was a colossal amount of money in those days. To give you a sense of perspective, you could buy a new Mini and put it on the road for only £600 at the time!

Mr Brinsley-Edwards went to the bank and got £280 in crisp £20 notes. We sent them by special delivery to Gary Frost, care of the Cottage Homes, and we signed the accompanying letter “from Santa Claus.”

Christmas and New Year went by and we never heard a thing. Then on the very day I was serving my last few hours of community service I picked up a letter and recognised the handwriting in an instant — it was from Gary.

I opened the letter and Gary had written: “Dear Santa, thank you very much for the money you sent. I managed to buy the electric wheelchair for my mother and we had a fantastic Christmas together. The wheelchair has changed her life and,because I was a good lad while I was at home, I’m now allowed weekend visits to stay with her, which is great.

“PS. By the way there was £20 missing. I bet those bloody football hooligans doing community service at the post office have nicked it!!”

Now follow that if you can.