Well, I leave tomorrow.
It seems like it's been a long time coming - I first thought of this campaign whilst sipping wine with my mother the night before Easter. That doesn't seem like a long time ago, but it's over half a year.
I naively thought at the start that what a charity wants to gain out of people doing this type of challenge is money, it is rumoured after all that this is what talks. I thought that with The Stroke Association being a national charity, and the only one to support victims of the second single biggest killer in the UK, it would be fairly well known. Pretty quickly I realised that, I guess like all of my experiences with other, smaller, charities, it needs publicity as well as the green.
My total amount raised so far is around the £4,500 mark, which is a little under half of what I had originally hoped for. There is still plenty of time to make the remaining amount; I will be hoping to sell prints of any good photographs that I manage to fluke, but it probably won't get the total to five figures.
What I have done, however, is manage to get the charities name onto a variety of different media, and hopefully into a few peoples minds. The week of the fish slap, I made up the majority of the press surrounding The Stroke Association, managing to hit four national TV networks at prime time on a Saturday. I managed to get into several national papers the following day, along with numerous local papers in the preceeding week. I appeared on the primary BBC London radio station in the morning, and was sound-bited for all the other major radio stations in London. I have to come to think that this coverage would have cost easily five figures had it been done in a conventional manner so the charity has benefitted, albeit more opaquely than handing them a cheque. The success of this stunt rests on one extremely busy mum, who spared the time and her knowledge to give it the boost it needed. Huge thanks to her. (She knows who she is!)
I am now suffering a combination of excitement and nervousness - it's surprisingly difficult to figure which is which, but I expect they're both to blame. I mistakenly watched a program yesterday on the Galtuer tradegy of 1999 - 31 people died when an avalanche struck the remote Austrian ski resort. The avalanche was caused by excessive snowfall, followed by a brief period of slightly warmer weather. This caused a 'crust' of weakly bonding ice/snow on the surface of the snowpack. A subsequent storm then dumped light and fluffy snow on top of this hardened crust. Now it was only a question of how much more snow fell, and at what angle the slope was before it avalanched. Not surprisingly, I have been following the weather in the Khumbu valley where I am visiting - late October/early November had a surprising amount of snow fall, which has been followed by a period of crisp clear weather. However, the next few days are going to experience relatively warm weather - above zero celsius during the daytimes above 4500m. This means that if any quantity of snow falls once the temperature drops again, then it is likely to avanlanche as it will lay on the same icy crust that caused the 1999 avalanches. Thankfully, no great quantity of snow normally falls in December, it's normally towards the first half of January before anything appreciable falls. That doesn't take the concern out of my mind though. Anyway, I have other, greater concerns right now. Like who my tent buddy will be, and whether they will snore or not. Or whether my beard will cause problems going through Heathrow security.
I will try to update this blog as I go along and get the chance, otherwise upon my return I will soon have a website set up where the photos and videos will be available to see, and maybe purchase, if I am lucky to fluke one or two good ones.
