I'm hoping you will join me in supporting a fantastic cause! I'm doing the Reach the Peak virtual climb challenge for Alzheimer's Society where I will be climbing the height of Mt Everest throughout September. 

I'm not jetting off anywhere this is a virtual challenge, so on a daily basis i either need to:

Climb 129 flights of stairs, (15 steps in a flight!)

Measure my elevation - 294.9 meters per day

Count my steps - 1936 steps per day.

To many of you 1936 steps per day won't be a challenge but there's some days i barely leave my work desk so i'm lucky to get in a couple of hundred so pushing 2k is a stretch for me but I'm doing this, not only to raise very valuable funds but also to raise people's awareness.

My dad has Alzheimer's, the comment when people see him is that he looks good for his age. They're right he does, he'll be 90 in October and although I might be a little bit biased he looks at least 20 years younger but we have good days and bad days, at the moment thankfully the good days outweigh the bad ones but we know the balance will increasingly start to tip. On the good days it might just be we have the same conversation multiple times, or he can't find something he's put away. On the not so good days he might not know who i am (he thinks my 2 year old son is me), he gets muddled and pairs odd combinations of clothes together or wears them in a wrong order (a thermal vest over a shirt and tie will never catch on) or his memory distorts things, like the time we went to a caravan park and he told me he'd been there during his time in the Army (he's never been in the military) or the time I took him nightclubbing til the early hours of the morning - again something that never actually happened. A lot of the little 'mistakes' we just have to laugh at (you can probably guess that from my fairly lighthearted account) - we can't change it, its just Dad, if we act like its not right it distresses him, so most of the time we just have to go with it, but there is a more worrying side and a very sad side to it all too. 

The worrying side is the wandering, he pretty much can't go anywhere on his own because he's likely to wander off and forget where he is, he has once made it to a bus stop but thankfully we caught up with him before he managed to get anywhere, the sad part is him asking about his siblings and having to remind him that they're no longer with us and watch the grief hit again and again - thankfully the grief is short lived but it doesn't make it any easier to watch.

So, please if you can, sponsor me and help me raise some money that will go towards funding further research into the condition and potential treatments as well providing support for sufferers and their families.

Anything you can afford will be very much appreciated!