Fifa 4 Pudsey

Last Friday, much to my surprise, my house mate Andy agreed to take part in a 24 hour Fifa Marathon for Children in Need. On that night, Fifa 4 Pudsey was born. 51 matches, 272 goals, plenty of controversial refereeing and 2 self-designed t-shirts later and the event has come and gone, and minus what feels like a delayed hangover, it has been rather successful.

Over £200 has been donated online and another £100 or so has been pledged, and we are in the process of encouraging and collecting further donations. Having agreed to take part and finalised our participation on the Friday we then had until Tuesday to arrange and advertise our event.

I created a 'Just-Giving' account for online donations and then we proceeded to plaster this link all over Facebook in a bid to rally support. We never really had a target in mind for a total, and whilst we're overwhelmed by the amount donated to charity on the basis of us sitting in a room for a day playing a playstation game, we wouldn't want to put a ceiling on people's generosity and therefore encourage you to donate if you haven't yet. There are many reasons to donate, but I think my favourite one is the smug feeling you can have when watching the show on BBC 1 tonight knowing you've done your bit to enjoy the entertainment, I know I had that feeling when watching the concert in Manchester last night!

For anyone that watched any of the 21 hours we managed to stream live on the Internet, (Virgin Media can take the blame for the lack of 2-3 hours when they failed to provide us an Internet Connection), I thank you, and hope you found it in some way entertaining, and apologise for our rather post watershed language choice.

Most importantly to everyone that has donated, thank you very much. The money is obviously not for us, but we have developed an attachment to the cause we gave 24 hours to, and whatever we have achieved feels that bit better every time we see another donation, whether that's £1, £8.07 [Thanks Mitch ;)], or £20. So on the other side of the coin, cheer me up that little bit more with a donation of some kind if you haven't yet!

The legacy of this comes in 3 parts.

In the short term, I feel rather ill and I'm pretty sure being awake for 39 hours all told has quite a lot to do with that.

In the medium term, £300 plus can do a lot of good to all those individuals and groups funded by Children In Need, so we, and more importantly YOU can feel proud of ourselves. We had the idea and gave some time, you had the generosity to make it worth while. Thank You.

And finally, in the long term, I find it very hard to believe that I'll be playing Fifa any time soon...

Richard

Introduction

My previous blogging experiences have been varied or patchy at best. I had to keep an online record during my Media Studies A-Level and have a blog for each of the two coursework projects. The second was far more successful than my first attempt, and is still being used as an example as an A grade blog, so can’t have been a bad attempt. Other than that, I also kept an account of the world’s vendetta against me by listing, often in huge exaggeration, everything that happened to me or I came across that wound me up.

I was recently asked if I would be happy for this blog to represent me as a writer, and I was a bit stuck. It was certainly written using correct spelling and grammar and represented my respect for the English language, and also represented me as a persuasive and creative writer as I explained my woes in great detail, usually with a humorous tinting. On the other hand though, it showed a tendency to ignore the good and sometimes truthful in my search for sensationalist entertainment, a tendency that I would rather not share with some of our regularly criticised tabloids. So here it is; a new start, and a line drawn.

This blog will hopefully uphold a lot of my morals surrounding life and also uphold the ethics that are frequently ignored by those that have given our press a bad name. As well as that it will offer me the chance to practice the skills required to be a sports writer in a smaller, but equally as public environment, as those currently at the top of the profession. It will also be my account of actions taken towards a career after my university studies, any key decisions or paths, and help me make the ultimate decision between the journalistic route, and my other option, teaching my subject of choice, History.

History was by no means my favourite subject for the most part of my school education. It was a non-entity at primary school, as sticking pictures of Henry VIII’s wives into an exercise book neither challenged nor interested me. I couldn’t tell you what subjects I studied in year 7 or 8 either, once I had joined my secondary school, but in year 9 my immediate future started to become mapped out for me. The enthusiasm of my teacher that year led me to taking the subject at GCSE and my next teacher, equally as proficient, and equally as engrossed in his subject made the decision to take it at A-Level just as easy, and from then it was my first choice subject at university too. A lot of the enthusiasm and passion for certain areas of modern history in particular has rubbed off from the teachers I have learnt from, and for a while now I have had a growing inclination that I would like to share my enthusiasm with groups of young people too.
So that is the basis for this blog, and the starting point of this journey.

My blind determination and bloody-mindedness mean I won’t accept anything but my first choice career, but what my first and ultimately decisive choice will be is still not clear, but hopefully that won’t be the case when I finish my degree in June 2013.