The great sponsored tube ride for charity

On Thursday, I fly off to the temperate rainforests and volcanoes of Los Lagos, in Chile. I and some colleagues will be cycling a few hundred miles up and down the hills, and observing some of the work done by Computer Aid International, a charity which refurbishes and upgrades old PCs for use by schools, universities, and hospitals who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford such infrastructure. Computer Aid's work is the kind of charity work that really enables independent development, personal and national: computers enable education and vital locally relevant research.

As you may already know, I've been raising funds for a Computer Aid project to help the development of computer resources at Nairobi's Kenyatta University, which, already in need of research resources, has been the victim of recent troubles. In light of my own bicycle having had a non-consensual change of ownership while locked outside a pub in Fitzrovia on friday night (for which there is an outstanding punch in the face due and waiting on my desk, if the new owner would like to inform me where to send it), I have decided to embark on a gruelling sponsored challenge. Yes, on monday, tuesday, and wednesday this week, I will be riding the tube to and from work.

This is not a simple and relaxing task. I assure you, it is not going to be a holiday. I will be setting my alarm and getting out of bed a full hour earlier than usual, with no training, in order to stand on a street corner waiting for a rare chance to see the elusive number 3 bus. Should I be lucky enough to find one, I might find somewhere to stand on it, while it embarks on its migration through the traffic jams and roadworks to Brixton high street. There I will see one of nature's great spectacles: the herding of literally tens of thousands of humans. I will get to join them as they surge across at the traffic lights, and then stop abruptly and chaotically outside of my first major milestone: Brixton station. There they will wave their Oyster cards with superstitious flourishes at the automatic barriers, and stand two deep on the one working escalator, reading their free newspapers. Then, for half-an-hour, I will be conveyed in a real historical nineteen-sixties tube train through stations that have been stripped and "undergoing refurbishment" for three years. I will bounce around the carriage, held up by the dense mass of armpits, attempting to read a book. The train will stop outside of Victoria Station, in the stuffy tunnel, waiting for the train ahead to clear the platform. The same at Oxford Circus and King's Cross, where I will finally be deposited in a network of tunnels whose configuration seems to change every week, presumably due to the great concentration of magic at platform 9 ¾ above. The last exhausting leg of the journey is the five minute walk across the Euston Road and down the Grays Inn Road, past the snooker halls and the vomit puddles outside the kebab shops, to arrive at work ten minutes late, despite rising an hour earlier than is usually considered civilised. In the evening I will do the reverse. Where signal is available, I will give live updates on my progress via twitter.

So please, please, please, sponsor me on my great tube ride this week. Just a few quid. A bus fare's worth will help advance humanity. Links and tweets also appreciated. I assure you, this isn't going to me: I'll be paying all of my own tube fares out of my own pocket. Here's how you can contribute:

Make a donation through Just Giving.

or...

Buy some prints.

Thanks.