A FORMER RAF technician plans to mark his 90th birthday by abseiling 100 metres.

Robert Barker – a self-confessed outdoor adventurer – will descend the Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth for a blindness charity.

Mr Barker has lived and worked in Bridport since 1973 and he wants to commemorate turning 90 by raising £900 this summer.

Mr Barker said: “I had long sought to find something that would be spectacular but still possible at age 90; eventually I came to the conclusion that I could manage a 100 metre abseil. The nearest I could find was the Spinnaker Tower. My only previous experience is a 20 metre abseil down a rock-face.”

The charity Mr Barker has chosen to raise money for is the Orbis Flying Eye Hospital. It flies teams of eye care specialists to low and middle income countries to save people's sight and share skills with local medical teams.

The charity works from a plane that has been transformed into a ‘state-of-the-art teaching hospital’ that has an operating room, classroom, and recovery room.

Mr Barker has previously donated £700 to the charity when he asked guests at his 50th wedding anniversary event to not buy presents but instead donate to the cause.

This time round Mr Barker said: “We had considered several possible recipients and settled on Orbis because they deal with restoring sight to children from developing countries and, at the same time, train local doctors to be able to continue the work of eliminating preventable blindness. I hope to continue to support this very laudable cause.”

Mr Barker will do his abseil on Saturday, July 16, just short of two weeks before his birthday on Friday, July 29. He had originally hoped to abseil 90 metres in keeping with his 90th birthday but the nearest he could get was 100.

When asked why he wanted to abseil, Mr Barker replied: “Well, I needed something spectacular to raise a worthwhile amount of sponsorship, something that matched my adventurous character, but still achievable by a nonagenarian.

“In general, abseiling is perceived as ‘dangerous’ whereas I know that the company offering the activity cannot afford to take any risks. I’ll be perfectly safe, I tell myself.

“Being a closet exhibitionist, I’m really looking forward to the opportunity to show off and, in doing so, achieve something to help people who are so much less fortunate than I have been throughout my life."

If you’d like to donate you can visit Mr Barker’s Just Giving page at www.bit.ly/3HEjaEm