By Big Papi
March 21 2006

Bob Jones, aka Big Papi, won the SWH4 raffle for a signed London Irish shirt. Now he has a problem and is solving it in a very nice way...

So here is the problem!

Thanks to the lovely people at Saints with a Heart I am the proud possessor of a brand spanking new, never been worn or had AG spilled down it, London Irish shirt signed by the first team squad and coaches. The only problem is that, to get all of the signatures on the shirt they had to go for the biggest size available, which is a 3XL.

Now anyone who has met me will realise that I might have the girth for a 3XL but I do not have the size being about 5’4” without the aid of built up shoes. It is therefore not an option to wear it. Frankly it would look as if I was wearing a dress and that is not a good look for a man of my advanced years.

So what are the options:

Well I thought about having it framed and mounted on a suitable wall of the house. Unfortunately Mrs. BP did not appear to be too keen when this was mooted so that plan was shelved (if you’ll pardon the pun).

So now I have a lovely brand spanking new etc. shirt hanging in my wardrobe doing nothing and benefiting nobody.

So what could I do?

Well after several days of sitting in “thinker” pose scratching the chin and coming up with cures for World poverty, famine relief and Global Terrorism I finally had an idea. What has been the most inspirational thread on the message board this year?

The answer is, of course, the brave fight of young Jack Wakefield.

So here is my idea – I would like to hold a raffle with the prize obviously being the brand spanking new etc. with all proceeds going to Jack's nominated charity CLIC Sargent. Tickets will be £10 each.

Hopefully the winner will either be large enough to wear the shirt or have an understanding partner who would like a LI signed shirt in a frame lit up with spotlights as the centre piece of their room.

Since the denizens of this message board are all (reasonably) computer literate I thought the best way to do this would be on-line.

If you make an online donation to CLIC Sargent here, you will get an e-mail confirmation back from them. If you forward that e-mail to me at my email address I will allocate you the appropriate number of tickets. My thinking would be to leave the thing running for a couple of weeks so maybe until the Bayonne match and have the draw made after the match possibly in the Cowshed (and with a bit of luck by one of the players).

Anybody who would like to buy tickets but is not on-line or has understandable reservations about on line transactions – if they send me an e-mail I will allocate tickets for them and they can send a cheque to the charity. I know I have no way of checking whether you sent the cheque or not but hey, if I can’t trust a LI fan who can I trust. If anybody feels that it would make sense to have a public ticket sale let me know and I will ask those nice people at LISC if we could use some space in their match day tent.