Patron needed!

Image source: http://tinyurl.com/44n294x

Next year, the big adventure is Dog Sledding in the Arctic Circle -- courtesy of Across the Divide.

To self-fund the challenge will cost me £2,860, including the £500 deposit I have to pay on registering. All fundraising money raised between now and the trip would be donated 100% to Cancer Research.

Alternatively, I can choose to raise a minimum of £4,720 in sponsorship for Cancer Research and pay only the £500 deposit from my own money.

I only need £500 to sign up with this option, but that's money I don't have lying around, going spare. But I do have some ideas on what I can do about this.

What I need as "The Flat Footed Adventurer" is some kind of sponsorship, or support -- in other words, I need a patron. The idea is if this challenge and the resulting publicity is successful to turn "The Flat Footed Adventurer" into a Free Range Career.

But we need to focus on this challenge first, and my ideas need some explaining I have made a list of as far as I can tell everything I need to make this challenge happen, and it looks something like this:

• Finance: This is most important, as I don't have £2860 -- corporate support towards this target will allow me to register and begin the charity fundraising.
• Fitness: This will be a challenge in the true sense of the word, and will require me to be dedicated to getting into the best physical shape I can be -- and have ever been. To do this I will need expert training, guidance and support.
• Publicity: I am a talented writer, and I want to document every step of the challenge, from signing up and raising money for Cancer Research, to the days spent sledding through the Norwegian wilderness. I will need help in getting my journals publicised -- and later, hopefully, published.

I have tried making contact with several large financial institutions. 8 out of 10 did not give me the time of day to even respond. One replied, curtly, that they do not support individuals. One replied and was both warm and helpful, sadly they could not help but they wished me luck. That was a bust.

The trouble is, I don't know who to contact. Surely, there are companies out there who could help and would want to help. When I hiked the Inca Trail in 2009, it was largely due to the help of transport giant First Group who were very generous in their sponsorship -- and they, in return, received a wealth of publicity, both in print and online. There is a tremendous opportunity for positive PR for any companies supporting me with this -- helped my own background in Public Relations. I am hoping this will help me to at least find people who might know people who can help.

Without the finance in place, I can't begin to find contacts for help with the other parts -- because the trip can't happen. I can get as fit as I like, learn to speak Norwegian and have a stunning network of people eager to help publicise my writing, but it's all for nothing if I can't even afford to go.

Cancer has directly affected my family. In 2008, my aunt Margie succumbed to the illness after a long battle -- she had loved to travel, and loved walking, and she was my inspiration for the trip to Machu Picchu. In 2010, my uncle John (my aunt's -- and my Dad's -- brother) was the victim of an aggressive brain cancer. The illness took him so quickly that there wasn't time to receive any nursing at home, but the family requested any donations to be made to Cancer Research UK. My uncle loved dogs, and this seems like a fitting way to remember both my aunt Margie and my uncle John, who were my Dad's two oldest siblings. I want to be able to raise awareness as well as money for Cancer Research. In the UK alone, someone is diagnosed with cancer every two minutes.

To summarise, what do I need from you? I need you to help spread the word. Please share this post with friends, with family, with followers. Please. Take 10 seconds just to think if you work for, or know, a company that would be able to help me achieve this challenge. But most of all, please help spread the word -- or if you have a spare few grand, and want the publicity, get in touch!

Your Daddy's Gonna Die

One night, I had a dream where this crow came and said: "Your aunt is gonna die."

I was so scared, I woke up my parents, but they said it was just a dream and to get back to bed.
 
But the next morning, my Aunt Stacy was dead.
                                    
It wasn't three weeks later when the crow came back to me in a dream and said, "Your daddy's gonna die."  I didn't know what to do.
                    
I finally told my father, but he said: "Oh, not to worry." But I could see he was rattled.

The next morning, he wasn't himself, he kept looking around, waiting for something to drop on his head -- because the crow didn't say how it was gonna happen, just those words: "Your daddy's gonna die."
 
He left home early that day, and was gone a long time.  When he finally came back, he looked terrible, like he was waiting for the axe to fall all day.

He said to my mother: "I've just had the worst day of my life."
"You think you've had a bad day?" she said, "This morning, the milkman dropped dead on the porch." (extract from 'Big Fish' (2003) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0319061/)

In the winter of 2007, my aunt died of cancer. She was my Dad's older sister, and as a kid she'd played a big part in raising him in a big family in east London, in post-war Britain.

My aunt had been in remission, but when the disease returned she chose not to fight it. I'm not sure if anyone knows for certain how long she had known for, and kept quiet.

I signed up to trek the Inca Trail in Peru the following year, to raise money for Macmillan Cancer Support -- giving something back to the people who had given so much care and support to my family when it was needed most.

My aunt is still missed by everyone who knew her, it doesn't seem right that she's simply not around any more.

I recently got the news my uncle, that is one of my Dad's older brothers, was ill and in hospital. He'd become confused, disorientated, and was sent for tests. Just about the worst fear was confirmed: it was a brain tumour, and because of the size and scale of the tumour, it was inoperable. This kind of cancer is often considered secondary to a possibly-undiscovered or undiagnosed primary cancer elsewhere in the body. The upshot is it's not a good prognosis. It's heartbreaking, and I can't decide if it's a blessing or a curse that he doesn't know he's dying. It's certainly not easy on his family that he often doesn't recognise them.

But it's the entirely selfish element that brings me to this post. I'm scared now my Daddy's gonna die. This is two of his older siblings, and I think it was Hodgkin's Lymphoma that killed his own Father at an early age. It's been a long time since my Dad thought he was going to die young as well, like there was some in-built early expiry date -- but I can tell he is quietly worried as well. What if these aren't isolated incidents, but instead a trend, a sign of things to come -- not just for him, but for all his siblings?

All I can do is offer support, to try not to worry unduly about something that might not happen -- but remain wary -- and start planning another fundraising challenge, to raise money for the people who need it.