I am doing what I am doing for very personal reasons that span from the love of cycling, to the desire to regain some of the will to live I had prior to April 2013. I do not think what I am doing is particularly courageous or unique, but it is a challenge nonetheless, and I hope that following my progress people will find inspiration in seeing that nothing is too difficult and, given the right attitude and motivation, anything can be achieved.
I am sure I will meet many people along the way but I do not expect to be on my own even when in the company of nobody. Tarn was such a fundamental part of my life that it will be impossible not to think of what she would say or do if she was with me in all the new and unexpected circumstances I am likely to encounter along the way.
In her memory, for the duration of my meandering, I will try to raise contributions from the visitors to this site for the MS Society, which in many ways, but in particular with its online forum, provided Tarn a great deal of support over her last few years of her life. Many times she told me how just sharing in others experiences gave her the prospective and the strength to carry on. How she found the camaraderie and, sometimes, the levity in some posts sufficed to smooth the harder hedges of dealing with her condition.
To donate to the MS Society and help in the amazing work they do for MS patients and MS research, just use the JustGiving link and your donation will appear in the page I have set up for Tarn at http://www.justgiving.com/x10loupe.
Thanks in advance for your support.
Update 26 September 2014: The baseline is just about £4000 pounds, £3,779 to be precise. Considering that I’m going to travel approximately 12,000 miles in the first stage the fundraising target has been set to £16,000, baseline plus one pound each mile I cycle. This way at least it looks like I’m not starting from zero on the donation page.

Update 22 February 2015: Wow, there have been both small and large donations in the last 6 months pushing the total past the half way mark. It is a shame that the change of plan will make the £16,000 target less meaningful but that is of no interest to the people that benefit from your donations so keep on giving.

Update 12 October 2015: Donations have kept coming in despite the stop-start progress of my ride. After a summer where my legs went on holiday for a while, I’m starting again, tackling the bottom cone of South America. The new target is 100,000 miles on the push bike, I will not count the miles I’m doing on the motorbike as that would be cheating, and £100,000 raised for the MS Society. Keep giving.
Update 14 February 2016: I have to make an additional modification to the rules. I have not cycled quite as much this winter as I did last year. On top of that I have decided that I will spend a bit more time both on the motorbike and on foot over the next 12 months. This means that I am starting to count motorbike and hiking miles too as part of the total counter. They will however go in as bicycle miles equivalent on the assumption that the effort spent on the miles hiking is much higher than the effort on the bike but compensated by the much lower effort in the motorbiking (hope that makes sense).