#MilesForMatt keeps on running (and walking)

Matt Campbell at the 2017 ASICS Windermere Marathon

This Sunday will mark two weeks since Matt Campbell died whilst running the London Marathon.

The talented Masterchef star was fundraising for Brathay Trust. When I wrote the piece about him last week, the incredible figure donated to his JustGiving page was £165,000.

By Saturday, it has soared to £250,000, and on Sunday it passed £300,000. Remarkably, as I write this on Wednesday evening, the total looks set to exceed £350,000.

With my colleagues from Brathay I did what so many others have done recently, and went out on Tuesday and completed 3.7 miles – the distance Matt was from the end of the London Marathon.

Well over 30,000 people have donated, with many of them doing the same distance, running or walking – whichever they could manage. It has been a truly remarkable outpouring of love and generosity that, at times, has even had thick-skinned old me in tears, as I’ve monitored and responded to the thousands of social media posts from kind people letting us know they’ve done their #FinishForMatt.

Whenever you find yourself despairing at the stupidity, selfishness, violence and hatred we humans display so regularly, think about what has happened here. Tens of thousands of people have independently, or in groups, done something entirely altruistic. Most of them never knew Matt in person. Their kindness will go on to benefit many young people that the charity works with.

Maybe there is hope for us as a species after all.

This post first appeared as the third piece in my column/page in The Mail and the News & Star, on the 4th of May 2018. It was re-titled as "Man's humanity to man"... heavy! A slightly random picture of people on the lawn at Brathay Hall during the #LetsRunForMatt was included.

Donations continue to be made to Matt's Justgiving page. At the time of posting this, it was over £361,000.

(CD A-Z: RCD Classic Collection 10 - Indie Guitar Rock.)

Comments

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog