It's that time of year again - World Rotaract Week, and so, as promised, I'm going to pimp to you this organisation which seems to take up a lot of my time (out of choice, I should point out).

Rotaract isn't something many people have heard of - I hadn't - except for my office, my friends and those who regularly read this, as I talk about it a lot. It's an international organisation for people aged 18-30. It's affiliated with Rotary, but we're a whole lot more interesting than them. The main point of Rotaract is to raise money for charity and help the community while making new friends and above all, having fun.

I don't talk about exactly what we do that much because mostly I write it up on our club's website. If you want to know, there are photos there, a blog of past events, and you can see how busy I could potentially be if I went to every event listed in our diary.

One thing we did this year that I remember well was on a hot day last July (the Rotaract year runs from July to June) - it was the day Half-Blood Prince came out - counting money and spending some time stood in the sun. We were collecting money for the local toy library by the simplest possible (but not exactly the most exciting) means - a tinshake. Which means you stand in the street with a bright yellow tabard on holding a tin. The local council rules say we're not allowed to shake the tin or ask people for money.

Having done it myself, I now make sure I give money to anyone I see holding a tin - trust me, they're pathetically grateful for making their time go a little more quickly.

Having collected the money we went and saw the toy library and while we were there, established that their shed needed painting.

Now, on the radio the other day I heard a very true statement. Someone was saying that time is much more precious than money because we only have a limited amount of time. So anything that we invest our time in has to be worth it. It's easy enough to give a bit of money to charity, it only takes a small amount of both money and time. Giving up time, though, is more precious - it's often a lot harder for charities to get people to give up their time than it is to get them to give up their money.

For us, most Rotaractors are just recently out of uni or in their first job and have debts, so we don't have that much money to give away. But what we do have is time that isn't going to be filled up with kids, for a start. So, we painted their shed for them. Between four of us it only took an hour, but was a lot of fun. I still have blue paint on me. Luckily, one of our members had just bought a house and told us in advance to put masking tape round the windows and plenty of newspaper on the floor. Sadly, we underestimated plenty. As one of our members put it afterwards, we painted the shed 100% well: 100% of the shed and 10% of everything else.

Also this year, we've done cheap things like watching DVDs round someone's house, gone to the cinema and local amateur theatre, and more expensive things like celebrated Burns Night.

Yesterday I woke up at 8.45 and managed to struggle out of bed at 9am. I put my phone on to find a text message from a friend to tell me she was going to pick me up between 8.30 and 9. Luckily, she was late and I was just about dressed by the time she arrived! The reason I was up early on a Sunday was because we were off to the Rutherford Appleton Labs, where she works, where we were going to have breakfast.

No, really. The National Committee have challenged every club in the country to have breakfast in unusual places. The laser control room was quite an unusual place to eat breakfast. It was actually in the Vulcan laser control room, which is in the Guinness book of records. It's quite a cool room - full of computers and equipment and looks like it wouldn't be out of place in Sam Carter's lab on Stargate.

While we were there we took our tea outside to have our photo taken with the big satellite dish in the backgound. I should point out that it was snowing at this point, and therefore just a little bit cold.

Last night was a bit more sedate as we went to the local theatre. A company formed by a friend of one of our members is on tour round the country using students who want to go into theatre/acting who are currently in their gap year. They were performing Alan Bennett's Talking Heads, which are a series of monologues. The first one they did was about an hour long - we were amazed that the time went so quickly, and the amount the bloke had to remember.

They were all really interesting and really well acted. If I was a casting director I'd hire them today. They were an improvement on Jesse Birdsall, which says more about his acting than it does theirs, mind you.

If this sounds like fun (if slightly masochistic fun at times) there's more information on internet. There used to be an International site, but now your best bet is to either go to the UK site, which has lots of info along with links to sites in other countries, or do a search for your area. You can choose to give up as much time as you like. If there's not a club near you listed, then it's worth emailing to ask - it might be that there's one in the process of being set up, or it might be that once you've expressed an interest they might think about setting one up.

And if you're sitting here thinking you're not the right age, you probably know someone who is.

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