Alumnae Blog post - Beglad by Poppy Halsted. Class of '72
Tuesday, 16 July 2024
Beglad by Poppy Halsted – Class of ‘72

When I stood before the open doors of the imposing building on City Walls Road, Chester in September 1972 as a scared eleven-year-old, little did I realise that it housed one of the most important rooms of my entire life. Not a classroom nor a science lab or language lab but….the Lower School Fiction Library!
Amongst the many volumes I would find, enjoy and love in there over my seven years as a pupil at Queens, would be one that has governed everything I do and everything I have believed in, my whole life for the next half a century.  My find was a presupposing Victorian children’s story called ‘Pollyanna’ by the author Eleanor H. Porter.
That book contained a concept that I think we should ALL try to embrace and allow to govern everything we do throughout our lives, ‘The Glad Game’. I think it should be a compulsory book for ALL children to read everywhere, nationwide if not around the world!!
“What”, I hear you cry, is ‘The Glad Game’? Well, it’s a very simple concept. All you have to try and do is find something to be GLAD about in everything you do and everything that happens to you, however bad it may seem at first every single day.
“So, what has happened to you that you have had to try be ‘Glad’ about”? is almost certainly your next question. Well, within five years of leaving Queen’s comfortable environment I was diagnosed with the lifelong, disabling medical condition, Multiple Sclerosis. And I am SO Glad that I was! If it wasn’t for my MS I would not have had the career I did, working for a London Law Firm called the ‘Disability Law Service’, not as a lawyer but with a group of lawyers taking on cases for Disabled people on a plethora of issues from Community Care, Consumer Issues and Travel and Tourism to Financial Issues and Housing.
I have enjoyed such a wonderful and fulfilling career doing something that REALLY matters for real people.  I wouldn’t have met some of my closest lifelong friends within the Disability Community if it hadn’t been for my MS. Latterly, I would not have become involved with a National Political Party’s Disability group or stood for election in my local Council if it hadn’t been for my MS. So far, I’ve been unsuccessful in being elected but I’m going to try again if selected – such a head rush!
Can you see why I’ve been continuously ‘Glad’ about something, however difficult it might have been, for my whole life since I first read about it aged no more than twelve? Are you going to try to be ‘more glad’ too? I SO hope that you will. Just be ‘more glad’ and enjoy your life from now until you get to leave it for a different place.

My message to you is simply….. Be more glad!

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