You’re looking at my boots, right? Well, I have to practise walking without heels for this mad Kilimanjaro trip – it’s not too late to sponsor me, by the way! So there’s still another £3,475 to go – I’ve already raised £25 from an ice-bucket challenge; that’s as well as donating half my annual leave, and it all goes straight to a good cause. I’m not actually sure how much the trip costs. The charity gets some special deal. No, sorry, the name’s gone out of my head – the tour operator does all that – but it’s for this fantastically deserving cause. God, what is it called? It’s for these incredibly poor African orphans, anyway, so definitely very needy and everything, or I wouldn’t do anything as insane as climb 20,000ft with no showers. Actually, there are no loos for basically the entire trip, and you can go days and days without hair-straighteners, which I’m going to have to come to terms with, plus the altitude sickness could literally kill you, so it’s super-gruelling, mentally and physically. Even the training: I’m already practising not hair-straightening one day a week.
OK, so you go to my JustGiving page, it’s all on there. I know people say it’s all about bucket lists, which is so cynical, because Kilimanjaro wasn’t even on mine – that was the Egypt bike ride for Mencap… God, the sunsets were amazing. And I wanted to tick off Borneo gorillas this year, for cervical cancer, but it was oversubscribed. So Kilimanjaro looked like the next most extreme challenge, and because of Africa it means I’m doing it in memory of my Mum’s aunt, which is the closest I have to a dead nan. She was mad about Africa. That’s what’s so sad, she never got there, so this is a tribute to her, and I’ve pledged to carry one of her old Ladies’ Detective Agency books for the entire trip, to make it even more arduous. So, if you’d like to sponsor me – even the kit costs a fortune, but of course I’ll be funding that myself. Apart from anything, I need to know it’s ethically sourced.
