Charity begins very close to home.

I am in the bath.

This is the first blog I’ve written in the bath but it probably won’t be the last. The reason I am in the bath is thusly. Today I spent six hours digging. Those of you who know me will know this is highly unusual behaviour for me, manual labour is not my forte. The fact that I describe it as not being my ‘forte’ should give you a fairly good depiction of where my allegiances lie when it comes to work. The reason I spent six hours digging is that I was invited to help out on a gardening project at Little Havens hospice. Little Havens is a charity very close to me (not just geographically) and I’ve attended fundraisers and the like for them in the past, my friend Luke did a skydive for them at the weekend. Today was the first occasion I ever felt like I was properly involved and got my hands dirty in every sense of the word.

It wasn’t until we were sat being given an introduction that I really began to think about what it is that they do there. Every year Little Havens needs 2.4 million pounds to serve as a respite centre for children and teenagers with terminal illnesses. They also cover a multitude of other areas of expertise and I recommend you look them up.

We were split into teams and given different jobs depending on our abilities. For some reason I was put to work with the men. They didn’t approve of me saying that the top layer of soil we were turning over was like the surface of a Creme Brûlée, and from that point I kept my dessert romanticising similes to myself.

Laying here now I can’t think of when I physically worked myself that hard and I feel a lot more fulfilled as a result of it than I would have doing pretty much anything else.