Out And About With Your Dog Blog

The Seven Dials area of Brighton swung to the cool sounds of jazz last night, as Mark Bassey led a fund raiser for Canine Partners, the charity that matches assistance dogs with people with disabilities.

We were lucky to have two talented and hard-working Canine Partners in the hall – Yukon, owned by Pat and Graham Hewett, and Harley, owned by Moira and Pat Luck. In fact Harley showed a musical talent previously undiscovered and joined in on one of Mark’s solo trombone features! At first I couldn’t work out where the sound was coming from until I realised it was coming up from under Moira’s table!

The raffle was a great success with doggy toys (thank you to Anna) as well as a great selecton of wine, whisky, chocolates, and a host of other goodies.

I had great help from Sara, and her daughter Zoe, Andy and Chris, and Mark’s Mum, Joan. A big thank you to all of you for putting your heart and soul into the evening and helping me so much with the preparations. Also to Lianne and James at West Hill Hall for all you did.

Canine Partners is a fantastic charity doing an amazing job. The dogs are trained to assist in as many ways as they can including opening, loading and unloading the washing machine, retrieving items such as keys and mobile phones, responding in an emergency and helping with dressing and undressing. They truly are an inspiration and I often look at our wonderful dogs, Georgie and Jessie, and feel rather sad that we’re not tapping more into their amazing potential.

I’ve already suggested to Mark that we do this again next year and he’s very keen to do a special duo with his new musical canine partner, Harley!

A big thank you to the band, Mark Bassey (trombone), Terry Seabrook (piano), Dan Sheppard (bass) and Alex Eberhard (drums) as well as everyone who made the effort to come and support us.

We had a brilliant and joyful evening and raised £510!