As those of you in the prestigious “Graham inner circle” will know, my dear mother, who sent me off to boarding school when I was seven but always really threw herself into her parenting duties on the weekends I was back home, suffers from Multiple Sclerosis, and has been increasingly affected by it over the last few years. While this has been a revelation in terms of where we’re now able to park the family car in town centres, shopping malls, etc, it’s on the whole a total, unremitting bugger of a disease, which poses relentless challenges to one’s quality of life and has as yet no known cure nor, for many like Mrs G, any reliable way of stopping its progression. Having done almost nothing to support mum thus far beyond occasionally upping my game on the household chores front, I’m really delighted that this year I’m able to two-birds-one-stone my own growing fitness insecurities with a proper fundraising attempt in her honour for the MS Society, an organisation that does so much both to provide care for people with the disease, and fund research into cures.

At my end, I’ve managed to carve out several hours a week into my busy self-employed lifestyle to go for some increasingly hefty jogs on the ketamine-flecked canal paths of East London, slowly rediscovering the long-distance stamina drilled into me by a childhood of running with or away from my 6ft 10 monster of a father, who’s talked a lot in his life about doing a marathon but never had the cojones to put his friends’ money where his mouth is and actually go through with it. My biggest run so far (as of Feb 13th) has been about 11 miles, and while I breezed through that like a champ, it still provided enough winces and twinges to hint at what an absolute shocker doing the full 26 is going to be. In exchange for the generosity of your donations, I pledge to train as hard as I can for this so that on April 24th I can not only finish the race but perhaps even do so in a time that is, if not fully Kenyan, then at least worthy of a social media boast. And the final cherry for any fence-sitters: in the event that I injure myself before the big day, my brother, whose body is currently about 70% cigarette smoke, has agreed to step in and walk it on mine and mum’s behalf. What more incentive do you need?

Thank you so much if you’ve read to the bottom of this needlessly long spiel, and thanks even more for any donations you can spare: I know that there are lots of these things to give to and so many incredibly worthwhile causes. I’ve set a big target in the hope that even if we get anywhere near it it will be a hugely satisfying achievement: I adore my mum, she has done so much for me and I am very proud to be doing this for her.

(Donating through JustGiving is simple, fast and totally secure. Your details are safe with JustGiving – they’ll never sell them on or send unwanted emails. Once you donate, they’ll send your money directly to the charity. So it’s the most efficient way to donate – saving time and cutting costs for the charity.)