Each year Radio 2 have a Children in Need auction, where people bid for various items you literally could not buy normally. Conduct the BBC symphony orchestra; go shopping with Trinny and Susannah; sing with Elvis’ band; be the groundsman at Old Trafford for a day. Things like that. These tend to be bought by very rich people. The Trinny & Susannah thing went for £8,600, spending new year’s eve in the arctic with Ray Mears cost someone £15,000. The best one, however, came this morning. Recording a song with Pete Waterman was bought for £36,000…Bet it was a Dad Total from the auction came to £199,850, at which point Terry Wogan plus co-host put £75 each in, bring it nicely up to £200,000.

Radio 2 have just started their 24-hour music marathon, in which you can phone in and request whatever song you like, providing you donate something, be it large or small. This is, of course, all leading to the Children in Need spectacular tomorrow evening. I like it. It raises vast amounts of money (£26million last year) and everyone involved has a good time. Yet, as ever, there have to be people who feel the need to be snide about the whole thing. “It’s painful to watch, why do we have to endure this stupidity?” is often followed by “Why can’t we just donate money quietly, without all this fuss?”. This annoys me. A lot. To the latter people I say this: Go get educated. To the former: If you don’t like it, don’t watch! It’s raising money for charity, for crying out loud, what’s the problem? Everyone has fun and lots of people benefit. Enough said.

So, what am I doing to raise money? Well, I’m not dyeing my hair, it didn’t really work that well last time I was going to say I’ll donate a half a penny for every hit on this webpage, but I won’t know the stats until the end of the weekend. So, I’ve hooked up a page with a counter…each hit costs me half a penny! Unless you all manage to do something insane, l’ll pay the full amount This will end at 22:00 tomorrow evening.

So get clicking, COST ME MONEY!

UPDATE: Refresh the page as much as you like btw, I’m not logging IPs or anything

UPDATE 2: Clarification of above comments. I don’t have a problem with people thinking either of the two statements above, and giving their opinion when asked. It’s the people, many of them journalists, who feel the need to complain when nobody has asked them that bugs me.