All is well

A good weekend. We went to the zoo, spent some time on the allotment, and cut the grass. The weather was nice. All is well.

Apparently we were nearly hit by a dirty great asteroid at the weekend.

Last week I had a bit of an email argument with the Marie Curie Cancer charity. This year they took over organising the National skinny dip events, which were scheduled for yesterday (2nd June). I was thinking I might join in. In 2011 the Wales venue attracted 413 participants and broke the world skinny dip record. However, to join in this year and find out the exact location, you had to register in advance and pay £15. Now I don’t mind giving £15 to Marie Curie, but I certainly don’t want to commit until I know all the details, and even then I think I’d rather decide on the day whether or not to make the journey. It’s a 2 hour drive after all, and the weather might have been awful.

Incidentally, Marie Curie also say on their website that the £15 registration fee was to cover “administration costs”. I can only assume that means it goes towards the cost of running the Marie Curie machine and not towards providing cancer care nurses.

So I wrote to Marie Curie and told them they were taking all the fun out of it. I also told them where the event was, to demonstrate that there was really no point in trying to keep it secret. And they replied by telling me that if I didn’t like it I didn’t have to attend. I didn’t attend of course.

As it turns out, the weather was perfect, and part of me wishes I’d just turned up and joined in anyway. They couldn’t have stopped me joining in without registration since it was a legal activity on a public beach. However, the event, which they hoped would raise £40,000, only attracted 91 people this year.

All in all, an epic fail as far as I can see. I will write back to Marie Curie pointing out that they have managed to reduce attendance by about 80% while trying to break their previous attendance record, and almost certainly failed to reach their £40k target by a similar margin. They ar eof course congratulating themselves on their huge success.