Our weekly round-up of interesting and outlandish information, collected from the corners of the charity sector.

So not much, then?

I think we all knew this, didn’t we?

So, a Jaffa Cake is more essential than a tampon?

Okay, so Diary doesn’t normally venture into the world of Value Added Tax – or feminism for that matter – and has certainly never previously expressed any sympathy for George Osborne.

Attempting to do all three at once is nerve-wracking, definitely a one-off venture, and in all cases will definitely not become habit-forming.

But the whole tampon tax thing does seem to be a poisoned chalice.

Osborne’s hands, after all, have been tied to a certain extent by the European Union, which mandates VAT rates, and has in its infinite wisdom decided that you have to tax tampons at a minimum of 5 per cent. Basically the EU feels a tampon is less essential than a small, oddly tasty cake-cum-biscuit.

So Osborne’s being lobbied to lower the VAT rate on tampons, but EU law means he can’t. Nobody understands why, because VAT is too boring to understand, and when he tries to explain the rules, everyone either falls asleep or just shouts about how he’s a git who hates women. So he dreams up a solution – proposed by a female MP – to just give the money away, because he doesn’t feel government should have it.

Afterwards, everyone hates him even more.

One of Osborne’s problems was that he showed a tin ear to the mood music around women’s charities. After all, they have just been hammered with public funding cuts, year-on-year, and Osborne turns up and offers them a fraction of the money back.

The other was that he was, fundamentally, saying to women: “Here’s your own money back in a really patronising way.” It might have been an idea to ask women what they thought, for example.

No wonder people threatened to bleed on him.

Will no one rid me of this troublesome woman?

Diary would like to start a sector campaign to see Charity Dingle killed off by Emmerdale. Or at least forced by law to have a name change.

Diary, in its infinite nobility, engages in a continuous trawl through the corners of the internet to find ever more entertaining information to stuff into the maw of the ravening press. And life is made infinitely more difficult by the continued presence of Charity ****ing Dingle in every single Google News search.

Over the years Diary’s learned about her many affairs, her incarceration, a change of name, and any number of other irrelevant tidbits.

Is it not time for the charity sector to rise up, as one, and demand that she is removed from our news feeds so we can learn, without interruption, about important stuff like statues decorated with giant condoms, maps shaped like willies, and, of course, dildos?