I have a special place in my heart for the Alzheimer's Society and suspect that I now always will. My Grandma was diagnosed about 8 years ago and as she has deteriorated over the years, myself, Mum and Auntie have become carers to try and enable my Grandma to remain in her own home.
With much love and hard work we have so far (touch wood) managed to keep her there. Over the last couple of years I've been keen to try and give something back but with uni, caring duties, a full time job and a family it can be difficult to find the time.
I did over the year however manage to do a couple of things. First off volunteering at the Nottingham Memory Walk. I (very naively) had NO idea how emotional the day was going to be. My volunteer duty was to man the 'memory tag' stand. This involved giving people tags and pens to write out a tag like this:
This genuinely made me sob!! I actually spent so much of the day in tears! The idea of the memory tags is that they all hang together on this amazing tree:
It truly is a beautiful thing. There are sad memories, happy memories and all of those in between that make up people's lives.
I also managed to fit in a little swim around Lake Windermere and raised £565 for the Alzheimer's Society which I was really please with. This is me just out of the water with my medal:
The next fundraising mission on my list is to complete the Clumber Park Memory Walk on the 1st October. If you would like to help out in any way you can sponsor our team here:
or to find out more about memory walks near you then please click here.
Now wondering what my next challenge should be................. Any ideas??
Disclosure: I haven't been asked to do this by the Alzheimer's Society and am certainly not being paid for it. It's just a charity that's very close to my heart!
