Thanks for taking the time to visit my JustGiving page.

Children are so very important. I know in terms of my three children just how special they are and they will be shaping society in a few years time.

Unfortunately though, there are 2,500 teenagers excluded every school day. Some may get excluded because of one off incidents, however many are more regularly excluded because they have been caught up in family and social breakdown, bereavement, crime, bullying, abuse and gang culture. All this can lead to missed educational opportunities that will impact their lives forever.

The Lighthouse Group aims to help these kids and get them back into mainstream education through intensive 121 teaching mentoring and family support activities. They are a Charity and are highly commended by all the political mainstream parties for the services they provide. Their website is http://www.tlg.org.uk/ . Furthermore, if you like to visit one of their centres in many of the major cities, then please drop Tim Morfin their CEO an email at tim.morfin@tlg.org.uk, he will certainly be able to tell you about the bike ride!

Now for the ask, I have agreed to try and cycle from London to their Bradford head office which is circa 220 miles in one day to raise money. Initially I thought the challenge achievable but comments like “you must be mad” and “that is a long way to drive in a day” have sadly caused me to reconsider…..

I did reconsider; and now I am training longer and harder, taking a week off work to try and condition my svelte like figure to that of a honed endurance cyclist!!!.  Who knows, in July the Tour de France starts and perhaps the Cervelo, Specialized or Sky teams may hear in the global press of this achievement and I get snapped up by one of the pro teams. If nothing else I will hopefully raise a lot of money for a very good charity, I will certainly learn something about myself as there will be points where I will not believe it to be possible to complete the journey. That is where you come in and I the determination not to let the children down will hopefully be the deciding factor in seeing me through what will be a massive challenge.

Please give generously through the Just Giving web site …. Alternatively, those in BT can I encourage you to use the Give as You Earn website where your contribution is taken gross, therefore you pay no tax and BT matches your payment per month into an account from which you can donate to any charity. http://btgroup.intra.bt.com/social/GAYE.htm.

I look forward to hearing from you.

PS> I am not mad am I?