I’ve always been a cheerful sort of chap.

The Ancient Greeks had a saying that a thought is a thread and that a storyteller spins yarns. These are all pictures from weaving. Yarns are threads and they are formed by spinning. A textus is a piece of weaving and so a piece of writing came to be known as a textus from which we get the English word text. The metaphor has moved into common speech as we spin yarns and follow the thread in a story.

It is funny to think that this ancient term that referred to the craft of writing and depth of thought is now used to refer to what we do on our mobile phones and following a thread is an online activity.

But we can redeem the humble text!

Every month my pay as you go account offers me 100s of free texts and free access to the internet for £10. My credit just builds up and I religiously top up not wanting to waste my money on sending a text, when they are ‘free’. I hardly ever use my phone to talk, except in emergencies; old school.

So what to do with my bulging pay as you go account? Give it away!

70007 text ‘Barnabas’ and Barnabas aid gets £3. www.barnabasfund.org

70070 text ‘CHUN09’ & £amount to donate to the Leprosy mission http://www.leprosymission.org.uk/

And just to see how generous you lot are I have set up a page http://www.justgiving.com/Marc-Humphries and if you text

70070 with MEMH48  £amount  and you will have donated to Shelter.

Just a thought… do your children top up £10, use their free stuff, then run down their credit. You could encourage them to give by creating a page as I have done. The pay back could be that you give them £10 a month to top up, if they give away more than £1 a month in text giving. They could set up their own page to track their giving and encourage their friends to join them as a fund raising team.

Have we redeemed text? I hope so because giving is a habit our children need to learn. Now how are we doing…