Ellee Seymour

I have one humdinger of a day. Firstly, I shall be wearing my Headway hat today as I join its Cambridgeshire members as a helper in my role as trustee on their annual panto trip to The Arts Theatre, Cambridge to see Cinderella.

Headway is particularly thrilled and excited that Time Lord Dr Who, played by David Tennant who is Patron of Headway Essex, will be making a BBC Christmas appeal on their behalf.

Does celebrity endorsement work? Almost certainly if it is genuine and expressed with true conviction. Like David Tennant puts it across. The appeal tells the true story of Robert, a young man who was involved in a road traffic accident at just 17 years of age. He suffered severe head injuries and was in a coma for three weeks. Prior to the accident, Robert was on the verge of taking his place at Oxford University and had a scholarship to become a pilot in the RAF. The accident changed all that. Like many members of Headway, Robert had to accept his future was now very different.

The appeal will be broadcast on Radio 4 on Sunday, 23 December 2007 at 7.55 am and 9.26 pm and repeated on Thursday 27, December at 3.27 pm. Do be sure to listen in.

I shall be doing my proud mum bit in the evening when my son James sings with his school choir at their Christmas Carol Concert in Ely Cathedral. The Octagon Tower is very beautiful and I consider myself so very lucky to have this wonderful, ecclesiastical building on my doorstep, and to imagine James singing just beneath it is something special to look forward to all day.

In between these festivities, I shall also be working, I will be visiting the National Institute of Agricultural Botany in Cambridge who I am working for in a freelance capacity and have secured some fantastic media coverage, including an interview with the Sunday Telegraph next month. They are working on so many very interesting, cutting edge projects, I find their projects totally fascinating. I will tell you more about them later.

You have to wonder if it is the same Tony Blair. Our premier of old whose government did nothing to save school playing fields from being sold off and promote their use for health and fitness, is now advocating tennis as a sport which notherners should participate in.  The project is, in fact, named after him, as if to say that Blair and tennis are established partners.

The Tony Blair Sports Foundation has been set up in the North East and vowed to "invest in local people, inspiring them to make the most of themselves through sport. It is part of Tony Blair’s personal legacy to the area he represented as an MP for 24 years."

One of the main focuses of the Tony Blair Sports Foundation is to run an annual competition for school children in the North East to encourage more youngsters to take up sport and play regularly.

Tennis is a great sport which we never win at any more at Wimbledon. Why couldn’t Blair have promoted it for all school kids while he was in office when he had influence and could have made a difference?

Why are school tennis courts not used throughout the whole year, especially as our winters are milder? Isn’t that a total waste of resources and promotion of potential talent? Do we have talented trainers to nurture any future hopefuls?