Child’s i Foundation

My book, a presentation and Gok

| Zapfly

What a month it has been! So much has been happening since the end of February. My principle focus has been on completing my first book. I am so close now that I can smell the ink drying on the first draft. My book is all about my cycle ride last year from Lands End to John O’Groats. I will be utilising the Blurb platform to publish it. It is a mixture of journal and landscape photography. Watch this space.

Other news includes all the preparation for this year’s cycle adventure, London to Nordkapp. I aim to be off within the first half of June. I have decided to cycle along the North Sea Route for part of the way. This will take me through England, over the channel to Belgium, then on through The Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and eventually, Norway.

En route to John O'Groats

I gave a presentation to the good people of the Child’s I Foundation last week as I shall be supporting their cause for this cycle adventure. I hope to have a few bloggers filling in for me whilst I am away. Relaying information from the various corners of northern Europe should be an interesting challenge but something to relish rather than fear!

I will start to post more information about the route in the next week, along with preparations and training. Ending on an exciting note, I did a shoot last week for the Gok Fashion Fix show website that will appear on the Channel 4 platform. Hyperlinks will be available from this Tuesday / Wednesday.

Sports Programme Manager

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Along with my various photographic endeavours, I like to combine my work with expedition style material. This can range from mountaineering to trekking, or in more recent times, long distance cycle rides. To that end, I like to complete at least one sponsored ride per year.

This year, I may well end up completing at least two. The reason for this increase in altruism is mainly due to joining forces with a new charity called the Childs i Foundation (CiF). They are raising funds to build an orphanage in Uganda for all the parentless children who are abandoned after the recent turmoil the country has suffered. I have been given the lofty title of Sports Programme Manager, which is nice.

So, one of my new jobs is to create some exciting sports programmes to raise money for the charity. First on the cards for me is getting my plans together for this summer’s ride, which I shall be doing for CiF. There are a couple of plans afoot at present, both of which involve Scandinavia. Pete and Mary should be joining me, so that will be really exciting. At present, we are deciding whether to head to Iceland or cycle from London via a ferry journey from Harwich to Esbjerg in Denmark, via Sweden and Finland up to Nordkapp, at the northern tip of Norway. Either option should be exciting but time will be the critical determinant in the end.

The other ride I will be looking at completing will be a quick four day stint from London to Paris. This will be the first ride that I organise on behalf of Childs i Foundation, so hopefully it will prove to be a popular ride. If everyone is altruistic in their approach, giving their time to help put the even together rather than just raise funds in isolation, this should be both a very accessible and comparatively inexpensive endeavour for volunteers.

More on this once I have looked into it further with my lovely CiF colleagues.

Lost weekend in Guernsey

| Zapfly

I was fortunate enough to be in Guernsey last weekend. The main purpose of the visit was to see my good friends Mary and Pete. We had a lot of things to organise. Firstly, about 60GB of HD video footage we shot on our Le Jog ride last year. Thanks to opaque technology and the need to have multiple external hard drives capturing the output of huge files via various video programmes, we spent most of the weekend indoors, struggling with the computer.

Fortunately, the results from the first MTS file transfers look good. Once we have managed to drop out the videos as manageable QT files, I hope to upload a selection of 1 minute files for each of the daily rides for the Le Jog ride to YouTube and link into this blog. More on this when I get round to it.

The other big focus of the weekend was to decide upon the timing and location of this year’s big ride. I have elected to raise money for a charity called Child’s i Foundation, set up by some of my Endemol colleagues. There is plenty of great information available about various charitable endeavours on their website, which is another WordPress blog like this one.

So far, we have chosen two rides that we would like to select one to undertake from:
1) London to Nordkapp (Norway) via Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland. This would be an epic 2500 mile ride, taking us well past the Arctic Circle.
2) Circumnavigate Iceland, which would be considerably shorter at a mere 1,200 – 1,500 miles.

I would love to do both rides but due to various fiscal and time limitations for all parties concerned, this is highly unlikely. What it will ultimately boil down to is timing. When there are several people involved with varying calendar restrictions, finding the sweet spot is complicated.

Does anyone have experience of either of these cycle rides?