Your fate is in the post
On 22nd July 2020, our brother in law died.
We knew he was ill for some months, but like so many people knowing someone with cancer, we hoped he would fight it and pull through. After all, the guy was tough. When we saw him in the UK earlier this year, he was still strong enough to lift yours truly off the ground (don’t ask.) But eventually, and far too quickly, cancer spread beyond the stage where anything could be done – just 5 months after we saw him.
So what, you might ask? If you fix your eyes on a random person in a crowd, you are likely to be staring at someone impacted by cancer in some way. Our experience isn’t anything special, right?
Right.
But that’s the point, isn’t it? There’s work to be done.
We contribute to several charities, but we have always given the most money to Cancer Research and the Alzheimer’s Society. We started donating to Cancer Research years ago, after a young and very talented man I worked with died of kidney cancer, and we increased our donations when a friend’s husband died of the very same thing.
And we support the Alzheimer’s Society because my wonderful mum suffered from dementia from her 70’s until she died in her 90’s with no memory of who I was. She did not deserve that. She was a beautiful woman with the kindest heart of anyone I have known.
Anyway, the punchline is this:
Some sailing blogs will ask you to buy them a beer to cover the cost of maintaining the website. And I can’t blame them, this stuff is time-consuming, and it isn’t cheap. Instead, we have added a couple of links on the right-hand side of our home page to encourage anyone visiting this site to contribute something to these charities. And, yes, we are aware that no charity is perfect and acknowledge the political arguments around direct funding. But frankly, we don’t care, because while some folks have their short arms rammed into their deep pockets claiming moral objections, the money isn’t reaching the researchers.
So, if you want to contribute to one of these great causes, please do so by clicking on the links above or on our home page. Come on, grab some karma and stump up your cash!
We could be blessed by many years of good health and retain the ability to get in all sorts of trouble way into our 80’s, but that might not be the case. And that’s the main reason we decided to set off on our adventure before getting our bus passes: nobody ever really knows what ailment is going to arrive in the post.
