Society Diary: Fat dogs, disappearing funds, and golden bloody threads

26 Mar 2015 Voices

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

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

Fat dogs take the biscuit

It’s a regular menagerie over here at Society Diary this week. First there was the news that a swan stopped all progress on Britain’s busiest train line for several hours, and had to be rescued by the RSPCA.

Diary was originally planning to greet this with a series of swan-themed puns about the bird sticking its neck out, being egged on by its pals, swanning off at the end, and so on. But they didn’t really fly.

Then there’s the Russian charity which got into trouble after it launched a Groundhog Day-themed fundraiser and decided to eat the groundhog at the end of it.

Diary is unsure whether the animal involved even technically was a groundhog. In some places the animal is described as a marmot; Diary is vague on whether there’s a difference, because after Googling pictures of both, all that is really apparent is that they’re both kind of small and brown and furry and snouty.

Anyway, the groundhog or the marmot or whatever it was survived, after one of the guests took offence, bought it off the menu and carted it back to the zoo.

But the best by far of this week’s animal stories is the annual PDSA pet fit camp, which helps animals get back into shape after their owners overfed them, and gives Diary the opportunity to laugh at a picture of a fat dog.

Pictured is Mille the cocker spaniel, who weighs 74 lbs, and is approximately 109 per cent overweight. Which really takes the biscuit, as it were.

Diary is aware it’s inhumane and whatnot to laugh at fat dogs, but it is simply physically unable, despite all attempts, to stop itself from doing so.

You’d have to be sustainable to wait for it

Roughly 30 years ago the science fiction author Douglas Adams and John Lloyd, the inventor of the panel show QI, wrote a silly book in which they dreamed up new definitions for place names – the idea being that you find something that needs to be defined, but hasn’t been, and match it with a place name that wasn’t doing anything useful.

Among the places picked out for this treatment was a Lancastrian village called Ainsworth, which stuck in the memory of this column for no particular reason.

Anyway, here’s the definition:

Ainsworth (n): The length of time it takes to get served in a camera shop. Hence, also, how long we will have to wait for the abolition of income tax or the Second Coming.

This column rarely ventures into camera shops, so has no data on how long it takes to get served. But this term does seem likely to come in useful as a noun to describe how long it takes to launch a £40m fund that aims to help medium-sized organisations at imminent risk of closure.

We’re talking, of course, about the Local Sustainability Fund, which must be the longest-running non-fund in the history of government. Rarely, Diary feels, have so many column inches been dedicated to an issue on which so little has happened. Recently Rob Wilson, the current minister for civil society, announced that “progress has been made” on launching it. So well done there.

It may be sensible to summarise here, for those who haven’t already read 58 stories about the fact that the fund may or may not be launched at any particular point.

The Local Sustainability Fund was proposed by Nick Hurd, the last minister but one for civil society, and the last one to say anything useful about the voluntary sector. After a little while there was a 12-week consultation, then a series of commitments, and then… nothing.

Apart, at least from repeated assertions that the Cabinet Office will get around it to when there’s nothing else to do and it’s raining outside and the footy’s not on the telly.

The fund is only £40m and all they’re planning on doing is giving it away. It’s hardly rocket science. During that time they’ve managed to dream up, brand, fund and launch the £105m Access Foundation, which suggests something has gone awry.

It’s tempting to blame the fund’s absence on conspiracy, but Diary prefers the theory that you should never ascribe to conspiracy what can effectively be explained by incompetence.

New balls, please

Diary suspects William Shawcross, chair of the Charity Commission, is not an avid reader of this column – he doesn’t seem like a new-media kinda guy – but Diary is a column which is written in hope, not expectation, and therefore we reach out to William to implore him: please stop using the same quote from William Beveridge to introduce every speech you make about charities.

Beveridge, who founded the welfare state, described charity as running "like a golden thread through the living tapestry of our national story". We know this because Shawcross has told us, oh, every month or so, since 2013.

One would hope that in the 414-year history of charity as a legal entity, someone else has also said something worthwhile about the sector. Perhaps it’s time to look up charity in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations – a leatherbound edition of which Diary suspects lurks on an oak bookshelf somewhere in a parlour or study or billiard room in the Shawcross mansion – and see if we can find something else that fits the bill.

Diary has a couple of personal favourites. Take WH Auden, for example. “We are put on earth to help others; what the others are here for I don't know.”

I’m not here and I’m not happy about it

So the other day after a bit of pinging from press officer to press officer while writing a story about giving website the National Funding Scheme, a Civil Society News scribe got asked to get in touch with the organisation’s chief executive, but caught an out-of-office assistant instead.

You have to say that as out-of-office emails go this one, from Sue Davies, was a real doozy:

I have now left the NFS as the Trustees regretfully decided to make my role redundant.

It’s not clear whether she’s regretful in this scenario, or the trustees are. What is clear is that she won’t be picking her messages up any time soon.