Graham loves the Canford School

Dear Graham,

I will reply more fully when I get back next week but I wanted to say a heartfelt thank you for a wonderful and extremely generous dinner. It was a truly lovely evening bringing together Canfordians in such a warm and positive way. I am most grateful to you for making it possible. 

Your incredible generosity through your gift is also hugely appreciated. I will give you further thoughts later on how we might plan to use this to maximum effect but one idea I do have is to use part of the money to support an annual week long Arader Artist in Residence programme which will serve as the centrepiece of an Arts week. I hope that sounds promising. 

Your thoughts on using gifts of art to promote a new syllabus are fascinating and I will read your blog and explore the reality of this where it is in action but I think it’s a fantastic plan which I wholly support. I am sorry your previous approach wasn’t followed through, I am not sure why and I wasn’t aware of this, but I am very keen to make it happen. 

Do let me know the dates for your visit in late August. It would be a privilege to have you and your wife over for lunch or dinner at our home at Canford with Barry and Shan if we can make the dates work. We could talk more about the project then. 

Thank you again and enjoy the weekend. I hope your exhibition goes well. 

Kind regards,

Ben