My Life as a Lion

After the spring bank holiday weekend my Lions activities recommenced with a visit to Marston Green Cricket Club to discuss sponsorship of their U11s for this season. A very productive meeting with their new fund-raising coordinator, Lucy, which may well result in a charity cricket match/fun day in September and a venue for our membership drive in October.

On Wednesday I travelled over to Worcester for another training session with my successor as district webmaster, Joy. I’m afraid that I’m a bit old school when it comes to web sites and the district site is still produced by editing HTML in Edit Plus. This week Joy created a new page for the site to cover the charity bike ride her husband, Lion Ian, is undertaking in July. He will be cycling from Land’s End to John O’Groats over 11 days with a colleague. They will be raising money for the Lions Clubs International Foundation (LCIF) and Crohn’s and Colitis UK. I also introduced Joy to WordPress and helped her create a blog (liononabike.wordpress.com) so that Ian’s progress can be charted. Finally we spent some time redesigning the page she currently maintains, Midland News, which is looking a little old-fashioned. We didn’t get this quite finished but the handover will be taking place during the whole of this coming Lions’ year so there’s plenty of time.

Thursday saw me in Stratford-on-Avon at Zone E’s final meeting of the year. It was fascinating to hear what the clubs in the zone had been doing and the amount of money they had raised. There were two common themes, Easter Egg raffles and supporting youth clubs where council funding was being withdrawn. Hopefully the Lions’ Adopt a Youth Club programme can help with the latter. Lastly a plug for two of the clubs in the zone, Shakespeare and Wellesbourne, who will be holding their annual raft race on 19th June. It is particularly worth mentioning this year as my daughter, Sara, will be manning one of the rafts with a team from EH Smith Ltd.

My final activity for this blog was the Great Midlands Fun Run an 8.5 mile run through Sutton Park. I was running for the fourth time in five years raising money for Marston Green Lions. At the time of writing this I have raised £115, £90 via a traditional sponsor form and £25 via JustTextGiving.com whereby donations can be made by text message (text LION33 £x to 70070). The cost to the donator is a standard text message plus the donation and, thanks to Vodaphone, the charity receives all of the donation.

And my time? A stunning 1 hour 8 minutes and 58 seconds beating last year’s time by 14.5 minutes and meaning a reduction of half an hour over the five years. Not bad for a 52-year-old!

Lion Simon Moss
@simonhmoss @MarstonGnLions @lions105m @lionsclubsorg