Regular readers will be only too wearily well aware that Bankstone – along with various business associates it chooses, somewhat optimistically, to describe as friends – has spent quite a bit of time over the past few years doing things like riding undersized motorcycles here there and everywhere in an ill conceived, and frankly none too successful, attempt to raise money to support the excellent work done by leading airborne lifesaving charity YAA (the Yorkshire Air Ambulance Service).
So fundamentally pivotal has the role Bankstone has played in supporting the YAA been that, quite honestly, one shudders to think how the charity would have kept its fleet of two £6,000 a day choppers in the air without the crucial couple of hundred quid Bankstone has helped raise by riding about Yorkshire on monkeybikes every now and then. But enough about Bankstone and its tirelessly selfless good works. Our purpose here today is to give a friendly leg up to the public profile of the little-known charity featured in hit TV docu-soap Helicopter Heroes.
For example: Did you know that YAA needs £12,000 per day to keep both of Yorkshire’s air ambulances in the air and maintained. You probably did if you read Paragraph 2 above – but the way some of you people dip in and out of stories, there’s really no way of knowing.
But why, you may ask, does it cost so much to keep a pair of whirly-birds flying when I can run my luxury BMW exec mobile for mere pence?
One reason is that the charity is doing more these days than ever before. This involves attending around 10% more incidents with every passing year and coping with more and more people visiting Yorkshire, as events like the Tour de Yorkshire and Mountain Monkeys help turn the county into one of the universe’s top tourist destinations.
Then there’s the fact that YAA provides coverage up to 15 hours a day in summer and has to do certain things in the dark during the winter months. Plus new aircraft aren’t cheap you know, and every time some bright spark comes up with some new medical treatment or fancy piece of life-saving equipment that’s going to cost money as well. Then there’s sandwiches. You can’t fly safely on an empty stomach. Plus the cost of replacing Bankstone’s old friend Bernie the Bear as the charity’s mascot suit with that nasty little foam helicopter with legs thing.
Then there’s the fact that YAA flies around three emergency missions every day on average, carting severely injured people off major trauma centres to Leeds General, James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough, Sheffield Northern General or somewhere.
In all fairness, Bankstone can’t be expected to keep YAA in funds singlehandedly, so you might want to consider making a donation yourself.
Handily, you can do this by clicking on the Just Giving thingy to the left of this text, which will make it look like Bankstone’s most recent charity fundraising mission, the ill-fated Mountain Monkeys fiasco, actually succeeded in raising more than a handful of loose change scooped from the bottom of the Bankstone charity collection bucket.
So what are you waiting for: get giving, you mean old git!
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