This month, Ian Allsop’s blog is a proper meandering rant.

The Winter Olympics and a chat with the Charity Finance editor about his recent skiing trip to Andorra has reminded me of my own skiing career – it’s not only this column that has gone downhill.

It lasted all of about two minutes in 1992 before I was asked to leave the slope, which to compound my embarrassment was located in a prestige skiing resort, just outside Ipswich.

Apparently, my less-than-graceful descent did not convince the staff that I had ever skied before despite me lying that I had, and they were worried about insurance claims.

Anyway, a dry ski slope isn’t proper skiing is it? Whatever, I have made it a rule of my life since then to avoid skiing.

My maxims for life

There are three other maxims by which I live my life.

Firstly, nothing ever works (or lasts). Secondly, it’s all packaging. And third, there’s always something. This one sometimes has an extra word inserted before the last to give it a bit of Anglo-Saxon spice.

Someone I knew (there are a lot of these convenient yet anonymous people in columns, I have noticed – some might question whether they are proper people) always talked about doing things in a proper way and measured his every act against a scale of properness.

But how do we define ‘proper’? As an adjective, it denotes something that is truly what it is said or regarded to be. It can also be used as an intensifier, especially in derogatory contexts – for example, a proper little do-gooder.

It can also mean appropriate, according to or respecting social standards or conventions. Finally it can be used as an adverb for satisfactorily or correctly: as in, my eyes were all blurry and I couldn’t type my column proper.

All of which proves that there is no one proper way of defining ‘proper’ any more than there is in defining what constitutes charitable work. And this is the reason I am having a proper good look at the word.

There continue to be attacks on charities from MPs, predominantly Conservatives, about them not doing enough proper charity work, as if there is a distinction between tinrattling and handouts (proper), and (inconvenient) campaigning (improper). This is what has become known as ‘propergating’ (sic) the myth about what charities should actually do.

But aside from the question of whether these MPs are themselves doing a proper job in receipt of public funding, let’s look at them more closely.

I’ll start with Robert Halfon. Halfon being his surname, not a description of his brain when recently making some particularly unenlightened comments about charities.

Campaigning is not right for charities, in Robert’s view, but it’s apparently fine for FairFuelUK, a campaign run by a professional group of lobbyists, of which Robert is a passionate supporter in Parliament. FairFuelUK is largely supported by the petrol-dependent industry – road haulage workers, insurance companies, the motor press, and breakdown services.

Robert is a keen supporter of homeopathy, and public money being spent on it in the NHS. Yes, that’s right. Homeopathy. Proper medicine.

And let us not forget that Robert benefited from an education at Highgate School, which everyone agrees is a proper charity.

Other MP voices

Some other MPs who have raised their voices on this subject, and see if you can spot the link here, are Chris Grayling (Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe), Sir Peter Bottomley (Westminster School) and Jacob Rees-Mogg (the ultimate proper charity, Eton College).

And then there is Douglas Carswell (Charterhouse) and MP for Clacton (not a proper seaside resort). He is a vocal climate change sceptic, and has used his publicly-financed position as an MP to campaign on the issue, based presumably on the application of proper science.

MPs eh? Nothing ever works. They’re all just packaging. And there’s always something.

And as for this column – well it’s been more like a meandering rant propped up loosely by the word proper. I promise to write a proper column next month.

Ian Allsop is a freelance editor and journalist, and regular contributor to Charity Finance