As a sentence, it's the kind of thing from which great endeavours of cataclysmic foolishness are built.
This time, the line was delivered to me on Facebook, by a pal named Denise.
And she was talking about a song.
I'm fairly sure you all know the song, but maybe you're young or have been living in a particularly impenetrable cave, so here you go. If you don't know the song, it's called 'I would Walk (500 Miles)' and it's sung by gloriously Caledonian tune-lovers, The Proclaimers. Very catchy songwriters, The Proclaimers, and 500 Miles is one of a handful for which they're known outside their hardcore fan-base. It's a song that extends round the world, for both its joyous marchability, and its seeming note of lyrical, personal dedication. Good song. Great song.
Ahem...Here's a geeky-visualed version of the song. Hey, whaddaya want from me, I'm a geek, alright?
The reason the song suddenly appeared back in my life yesterday is simple to explain. Having started doing two walks a day in order to reduce my ridiculous and unsustainable girth, I ended up walking the equivalent of 8.9 miles yesterday. Not by any means miraculous,
'And I would walk 500 miles, and I would walk 500 more...' quipped Denise, before adding the fatal words. 'You should do that.'
You don't TELL me things like that. You really just don't. Those are seeding words. Those are words that sprout.
It took but the work of moments and a trusty calculator to work out that 500 miles, at 8.9 miles a day, worked out to be 56 days of walking. Say 60 days to deal with what should probably be known as the radical bloody-minded inclemency of British weather, the occasional bursts of life-having and suchlike.
60 days is two months.
Which is where the beginnings of a ridiculous plan started to form.
As a sub-challenge of The Disappearing Man, why not actually try to do that? Walk 500 miles. All the figures seemed to claim it should be doable, if not by any means easy. Lose weight, but give it some sort of definition, some challenge, some scope...
And then I started to ponder. If you're going to do something like that, if you're going to actually walk 500 miles - which is the equivalent of 25 marathons, by the way, in terms of pure distance - it would surely be a crying shame for it to go to...waste, so to speak. Why not do it for something? A sponsored walk of Proclaimers' proportions.
But who to do it for. There are plenty of deserving causes in the world. My first thought was Diabetes UK, given that a) I'm a UK diabetic, and b) the Disappearing Man weightloss effort was first inspired by the real, paralysing fear of the potential consequences of that disease.
And then it hit me. An organization that does astounding, much-needed work, but which is under actual threat. An organization that supports work I believe in, and which typifies the freedoms on behalf of which a whooooole lot of people recently did a good, effective bit of walking.
Planned Parenthood.
I recently did the Sister Walk in Cardiff. I'm a member of the UK Women's Equality Party. Could well be time to put my feet where my convictions are. I would walk 500 miles for Planned Parenthood, if you'd donate to them. I would do it in 60 days, because there has to be a structure to these challenges. I'd set up a separate 500 Mile Walk blog to chart progress, separate from The Disappearing Man, which has a history of getting rather sweary and scatalogical. Progress would be marked on my Samsung smartphone's S Health step-counter (unless some delightful techie-firm wanted to donate a properly hardcore pedomenter), and progress would be logged daily, so supporters could see how far I'd walked by that point.
What do you think? Would you support a walk like that, Disappearers?
Now, I should say, this is all top-of-the-head thinking at the moment. I haven't even found out whether Planned Parenthood accepts donations from sponsored events like this. But if they did, would you sponsor me to get my Proclaimers on and walk 500 miles to support them?
I've never done this in a Disappearing Man blog entry before, but if you'd be willing to sponsor such a madness, drop me a line, either through Facebook, Twitter (@FylerWrites) or via Fylerwrites@gmail.com (annnnd for all I know, cue the anti-PP hate mail...)
The 'official' walk won't begin till I've set up blogs and got sponsors and so on. For now, they're all just 'practice walks.' Speaking of which, I have to dash - Walk #1 for today is way overdue. But before I go, if you want to cut to the chase and simply support vital healthcare that's under threat from political dogmatism, they do take donations direct - go here and help them out right now.
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