Six months and Brian Blessed

Free food and booze is an offer that not many blokes can refuse, however if you chuck a speech by Bear Grylls into the mixer, then you would have to be a solvent abuser not to jump at the chance. Thankfully I'm not partial to sniffing Pritt Stick down some ally in Shoreditch, and so I accepted this offer from my new buddy Paul, and went to watch Bear talk about climbing, God and eating live animals at the All Saints Church in Kensington.
I tried to resist feeling the smug skepticism that non-religious people suffer from, and accepted the fact that Bears faith has actually played quite a significant role in his life. A brief and probably quite inaccurate) biography of Bear reads: joined the regular army at 18, rejecting the normal path to Sandhurst that public school boys take. The was asked into the Marines soon after this, and progressed to the SAS at a comparatively young age. Soon after this he broke his back in a low level parachuting exercise, and spent several months wondering whether he may ever walk again. Thankfully he began to walk again, and was directed onto an Everest summit attempt by an ex-girlfriend. After this his TV career took off, and he has started to eat live snakes and sleep in camel carcasses.
Bear was typically English in his modesty, and completely honest about the filming routine that they use i.e. that for a large proportion of the time he and the crew sleep in a hotel, apart from the odd night where they film in the desert/mangrove swamp. Although he did not give any technical advice that was relevant to the Everest Test, his attitude and burgeoning enthusiasm for all things 'adventure' was a refreshing perspective.
I thought I was lucky to see Bear, however it was only later that I managed to get hold of some tickets to see Brian Blessed at the Royal Geographical Society. As well as being the 'loudest man on Earth', Blessed is also an adventurer. He climbed Mont Blanc at the age of seventeen, and he has remained an active mountaineer throughout his life. Though he has never reached the summit, he has tried to climb Mount Everest on three separate occasions. During his attempt in 1993, the then 56-year-old climbed higher than any other man of his age; the height record was later broken by Yuichiro Miura in 2003. He has also successfully climbed Aconcagua in Argentina as well as Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Hopefully his experiences, mixed with his thespian delivery will make this a cracker.

As the title suggests, it is sixth months until we leave for Nepal and try and do the actual event. Thus we had the Trektators party at The Collection in Kensington. A brilliant night and a great starting point for everyone to pick up their fitness training and fund raising.