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

Abseil away, abseil away

When you’re a charity event organiser, and you compile a list of things which could go wrong, remember to include “attacks by angry dive-bombing seagulls”.

That was the fate which befell the Yeovil District Hospital 100ft charity abseil last week, part of the £500,000 Flying Colours campaign to raise cash for a special baby care unit.

Nesting seagulls, concerned about their chicks, dive-bombed health and safety inspectors who went to the site. The inspectors concluded that being attacked by seagulls while climbing down a building was neither healthy or safe, and called the whole thing off.

There you go, then. Flying Colours, it appears, remains firmly earthbound.

It's hard to make a vastly wealthy family happy

Finally, proof positive that giving is good for you. A report released this week by law firm Withers, called The meaning of wealth in the 21st century: unlocking the secrets of successful families, delves in great detail into how to make sure wealthy people stay happy. (And also, Diary suspects, how to make sure they stay happy with their lawyers.)

Apparently, it ain’t easy being rich, and in order to be happy, you need big glossy reports explaining how to do it. This big glossy report is good news for charities, because it found that the more philanthropic families are, the more likely they are to be happy.

Diary is slightly sceptical about cause and effect here. Are families really happy because they’re philanthropic, or philanthropic because they’re happy?

Maybe this is too cynical. Perhaps we could take a lesson from the story of Chris Hohn, formerly the UK’s biggest philanthropist. He stopped giving to his wife’s charity, the multi-billion-pound Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, when the two of them broke up.

Proof, then, that stopping giving leads to divorce.

Oh, wait. Maybe that’s not right.

Sprout up a mountain

There’s always one person who has to take it too far. And that person, it appears, is Stuart Kettell, from Coventry, who’s decided to push a sprout up Mount Snowdon with his nose to raise funds for Macmillan Cancer Support.

Kettell has kitted himself out with 40 sprouts – because they fall apart, you see – and with a special mouth guard to protect himself against rocks. He plans to cover a mile a day for four days.

Well done, Mr Kettell. Very hard, but utterly purposeless. Congratulations.

Turkeys call for more Christmas dinners

Unusually, in these latter days of the coalition, a Conservative minister yesterday called for more lobbying by charities.

Nicky Morgan, financial secretary to the Treasury, broke ranks with all the people who’d spent their time telling charities they lobby too much, and said the opposite.

“My understanding of politics is if you want people to hear a message you have to repeat it ad nauseam and only when we are completely sick of it as politicians, does it begin to just about cut through,” Morgan said.

Morgan was trying to drum up more support for payroll giving – a thankless cause if ever there was one – and you can see why she felt the need to exhort charities to more action.

Diary suspects she can say this sort of thing because not many charities ring up the Treasury, and she actually quite fancies talking to some.

Also, that she has inadvertently revealed the real reason her fellow MPs have been so desperately trying to shut charities up. Not for any deeply-held political reason - they just can't keep up with the emails.