The Justgiving Blog

The Justgiving helpdesk team normally don’t bat an eyelash at anything. These guys are calm, cool, collected professionals – It takes a lot to get them excited.

So we were all surprised recently when we saw Jonno jumping around excitedly as he took a call. Whatever could it be?  Turns out that comedian Bill Bailey‘s agent was on the phone!

Bill had heard through the grapevine that our August fundraiser of the month, Emily Thackray, is a big fan, and he wanted to get in touch with her. As Emily is currently in hospital awaiting a lung transplant we all thought that this was a great idea.

And so, after some emailing back and forth it turns out that Emily and Bill manged to hook up for a nice long call – and that Bill is interested in building awareness about transplants. You can read all about it on Emily’s blog here.

Warm fuzzies all round here at JG! Especially coz we’re all huge Bill Bailey fans – and now we know for sure that not only is he funny, he’s also a really nice guy. Awwwwww…

P.S. What’s your favourite Bill Bailey song or comedy moment? I like The Hokey Cokey in the style of Kraftwerk, personally.

As my musings on Bill Bailey would stretch too far in a comment field, I have to post about my favourite BB comedy moment(s).

The first time I heard of BB was when I saw him performing the greatest Cockney album in the world  (how good on the piano is he!). Have been a massive fan ever since, and in my opinion, the best joke has to be the Chaucer Pubbe Gagge.

Big thanks to my brother (Nick) for getting me the DVDs for xmas! A highlight of which was, of course, the inspection of England’s many hotel rooms with respect to their tea and coffee making facilities and the ubiquitous Corby Trouser Press

Whilst at the CASE conference last month (see blog) I took the liberty of documenting the aforementioned facilities (although there was no trouser press, and my trousers were creased)

Not bad eh! Jammy Dodgers! I think Bill would approve…

If like us, you’ve been following the progress of the Richard Hammond fundraising page, you would have seen the fundraising total drop last night.

A £50,000 donation made on Saturday evening has unfortunately been rejected. Donations appear on a fundraising page as they are made, however, the authorisation of donations takes place later. It was at this authorisation stage when the donation was flagged as "declined".

Last night we removed this donation from the page, which is a great shame. The total now stands at £148,990.90 – still an excellent achievement in just over a week. And we’ve just heard that The Yorkshire Air Ambulance have received two new offers for sponsorship – which is great news.

Donate to the YAA / Hammond page here or search for other rescue charities you can support.

Photo © YAA