Weekly Letter: Our evening with Elton John
Come with me on a journey from Parliament to Soho - to listen to Elton John on how compassion helped him save 5 million lives, (and drop in on a room full of male supermodels on the way home...)
Welcome to my weekly update on our comings and goings. This week James and I went to an event at the House of Commons with Elton John on what he described as “one of the best nights of my life”, and dropped into a room full of male supermodels. Here’s what I learnt…
You’ll usually find me at home, wrapped up in my favourite Arket jumper (I can’t be the only one who wears the same trusty cosies almost everyday when the weather turns cold/don’t judge), and pottering around tidying the kitchen for the thousandth time that day, often side-tracked by Summer shouting ‘COME MUMMY’, pulling me off to play with stickers or read a book. All very glamorous.
But this week I found myself peering out of the window of Speakers House state rooms overlooking the Thames and the London Eye, Big Ben towering impressively above me. Farrar had been invited to the House of Commons to celebrate Elton John’s incredible contribution to fighting and preventing HIV and AIDS around the world, and he brought me as his plus one.
I’m ashamed to say that aside from basic human compassion for anyone suffering, HIV and AIDS hasn’t been a subject I’d thought about much, until Farrar took on the storyline of his character Zack in Eastenders contracting the HIV virus as a heterosexual man. He played it with such respect and passion that it touched the hearts of many people who had lived through Zack's story. It also did an incredible job towards removing stigma around HIV and AIDS and educating us about the virus and how it can easily be managed now with treatment. Undetectable means Un-transmissable.
But to listen to Elton John’s speech about his journey setting up the Elton John AIDS Foundation, I learnt more about where we are with HIV diagnoses. His foundation has saved five million lives. Five million! But there are many people still living undetected - and numbers of diagnoses among heterosexuals are going up - many being women. People can live long fulfilling lives with HIV if we can get access to testing and treatment. So there's still work to be done.
Click here to read about what Elton John taught me about compassion, including the most important thing he’s taught his children.
What inspired me most, however, was the way Elton spoke about compassion. He also spoke movingly about the role of compassion in his journey setting up the foundation, from watching his friend Freddie Mercury, and hundreds others he explained, die from HIV and AIDS, while he said, he did nothing. It was a boy called Ryan White who had contracted HIV through an infected blood transfusion who prompted Elton to act. Elton was at his bedside as he passed away. Here is some exclusive real life footage recorded by me of Elton talking about this experience here: