On fundraising for relatives in need

I rarely talk about personal things on my blog. People may have noticed that over the last 4 years I have almost never mentioned anything related to family or friends, and I did that for a reason. I chose to seperate my blog ‘persona’, if you will, from my own interactions in the ‘real’ world.

It is something which I believe works, I don’t think people lack an understanding of my personality from not hearing about family/relationships/friendships – though I don’t discount bloggers who take a different line.

The reason for my bringing this up now is that a cousin of mine (yes I have alot of cousins – due to large Catholic families on both sides), was playing rugby last year, and I believe while in a scrum, my cousin Victor was seriously injured. He is about the same age as myself, but since he lives in Longford and I live in Cork, and I come from a big-ass-Catholic-massive family, I haven’t met him in more than 10 years.

I do have fond memories as a child of going ‘blagardin’ in fields in Longford during my heyday in the ’80’s, this along with my brother and parallel cousin (we were the ‘townies’), and visiting those strange folk such as Victor who lived on farms, out in what I considered then, the middle of nowhere.

And how on earth could people live way out there anyways- there was just, like, nothing to do. Such were our urban views anyway.

I was always felt like such a weak-ass townie to Victor because I got hayfever.

Yes I was even allergic to the countryside.

So Victor, a man of a similar age to myself, related to me on my mother’s side is now very seriously injured, paralysed largely from the neck down. Effective quadriplegia. He appeared on the news today to talk about it, his Rugby club, Longford RFC, are going to extraordinary lengths to fund raise for his care and rehabilitation. This is no mean feat. 250 fundraisers will be at the Ireland match this Saturday to collect money for my cousin Victor. The injury has been described as one of the worst sports injuries ever sustained in Ireland.

You can watch the RTE news report here.

The Irish Independent today reported briefly Victor’s story, where he was pictured with Keith Wood, Gordon D’Arcy and Simon Easterby. (Pic not published but the story is there)

I don’t have alot of money by any means, and I don’t have a huge readership, but I want to help in some way.

I would like to ask that any of my readers who feel they want to contribute to this fund to either use the handy Paypal button below or on my sidebar:

This post will be the first for a some days, and I will place a permanent link to this post in my sidebar.

Update:

Total raised 4 Victor on blog awards night: €275.20
Total raised in Paypal: €75 €100
Overall total thus far: €375.20

Thank you all!