I did it!

See my last diary entry for the summary(ish)!

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I'm training for the London Marathon! All 26.2 miles of it. Running that is. 23 April 2006!

I don't know how i'm going to do it, and it has definately been an ongoing saga. Please see my diary.

I'm raising money for The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) who very kindly gave me one of six sought after entries that they had. Many thousands have missed out on a place.

Anyway, the cause is a worthy one as I'm sure you will see. Animal charities seem to have taken a back stage recently and this annoys me a little. People tend to pass over such phrases as 'save the whales', 'save the planet', 'stop cutting down our forests'. The truth is that many of these issues are worse off than when there was a lot of PR about them.

The fact is that almost a quarter of the world's mammals face extinction in the next 30 years. All of the world's great apes, including chimpanzees and gorillas, are threatened with extinction in our lifetime, some may be gone in the next decade. This is due to poaching, war, illegal trade and loss of habitat. You may have already heard that palm oil plantations have nearly consumed all natural habitats for orang-utans, gray whales are nearly extinct (around 50 reproductive individuals remaining), the few African elephants left are being slaughtered in South Africa, and the illegal trade of animals (animals used as pets, gorillas killed for meat, tigers, bears and rhinoceroses used for medicine) is a US$6-10 billion dollar industry. We are only one of billions of animals on this planet and we are simply wiping the rest of them out.

I am trying to raise over £2000 for IFAW to help protect animals. This is the key bit though, every donation helps. It may be a pound it may be a thousand pounds. A pound a mile seems to be something that several people have mentioned to me, but I really don't mind.

Please help me to support this worthy cause. Please sign the guestbook with an encouraging spiel, mention your donation amount (or you can e-mail me if you don't want it displayed) and whether you work at City & Guilds so that I can receive match giving. Please just make sure that you tell me how much so that I know how close I'm getting to my target. You can also pay from overseas using www.PayPal.co.uk using my e-mail address above.

Thankyou thankyou thankyou.