On 12th September, I'll be walking 25km along the Thames Bridge Trek for the Katie Piper Foundation - an organisation that has changed my life in the past six months, in ways I'm still taking in. Fred and Martha will be walking with me and Harry will join for the last 10km.

As many of you know, forty years ago, I was knocked off my bicycle by a 38 tonne truck, it was heavy! Multiple operations, a de-gloved left leg, a crushed pelvis, and a 13 pint blood transfusion that kept me alive (if you're reading this and haven't given blood - please do, it saves lives).

I owe so much to the amazing doctors who treated me: most of all John Clark, my plastic surgeon, who quite literally pieced me back together. That journey took me first to St Stephen's Hospital (now Chelsea and Westminster) and then to the Burns Unit at Queen Mary's in Roehampton. The start of this walk is close to where it happened.

Even now, the care continues. Spinal fusions, a hip replacement, and lymphoedema specialists have all made a real difference to my life in recent years, a reminder that recovery from something like this never really has an endpoint, it just keeps evolving.What people don't always see is what comes after the operations end. The scarring and the burns have never just been physical. They've shaped how I've felt in a room, in a swimming costume, in my own skin, for four decades, quietly, in ways I rarely speak about. There's a particular kind of loneliness in carrying something so visible on your body and you're still learning to live inside it.

Last December, having just turned 60, that quiet struggle came to a head. I found myself genuinely worried about growing older with these injuries, about how I'd cope, who would help, what care would look like. Then I saw an Instagram post from the Katie Piper Foundation, telling the story of a survivor helped after his own accident 30 years before. Something in it cracked something open in me. I got in touch. I was assessed, and offered a place on their rehabilitation programme at Rainford Hall.

I wasn't prepared for what that would mean. I met people who understood, without a single word of explanation, what it is to live with scarring, with pain that doesn't show, with a body that carries a story. For the first time in a very long time, I didn't feel alone in it. The support I found there, and continue to receive, has been beyond anything I could have hoped for.

For most people, 25km is nothing much. For me, with the injuries I still carry, it will be challenge. But I'm walking it anyway, for the Foundation that met me at a crucial moment and didn't let me go, and for my family and friends who have carried me, in every sense, for forty years.

Please donate if you can. You'd be helping the Foundation reach someone else who, like me last December, is quietly struggling and doesn't yet know where to turn.

Thank you.

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