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

Oh beard of Scotland...

Look at Geoff Cross. Just look at the man. What a behemoth. What a beard.

Diary, to be honest, is the kind of witty and faintly irreverent column which does not get 5 o’clock shadow. If Diary doesn’t shave on Monday morning, Diary gets Thursday afternoon shadow. So Diary is embarrassed by the size of that beard. It is a beard which shames lesser men. It is a beard which was nominated for Sports Beard of the Year by the website Beardwatch.

With mixed feelings, Diary has learned that the Scotland and London Irish prop is shaving off his beard at the end of the Six Nations for the rugby charity Wooden Spoon. He’s asking for £10,000. But Diary thinks the beard is worth more than that. To destroy such a thing of magnificence - a piece of hirsute mightiness so vast that it could be used to stuff a duvet – demands a greater sum.

Author JK Rowling obviously agrees. Rowling spotted this Hagrid-like facial protruberance and has promptly ponied up half the money. Now it’s time to do your bit. Cross’s total currently stands at £6,371. It’s time to help him cross the line.

Do you want to go cat speed dating?

This is the question asked last week by one branch of the RSPCA, and it’s an intriguing one, if only for the utter ambiguity of the question.

When first asked, Diary was uncertain what to expect. Is it dating, but at cat speed – ie very slowly most of the time, but quick whenever you spot a small bird? Or is it speed dating, but you have to take a cat? Or is it speed dating for cats and the humans don’t get involved at all? Because to be honest, cats aren’t great ones for long romances even in normal circumstances.

Sadly it turns out, rather more boringly, that you can just meet a lot of cats, all one after the other, and pick one to take home.

Normally with speed dating, both parties have to click a box before they get one another’s email address, but it appears that these niceties were not involved in this event. Apparently the cats kept chasing the mouse.

We will publish one day, I promise

Lord Hodgson, the great reviewer of all pieces of legislation tangentially involving the charity sector, has landed himself with, er, another review of a bit of legislation. This time he’s looking at the much-maligned Lobbying Act, about which no one, not even the ministers promoting it, has really had anything good to say.

Anyway, Hodgson has decamped from Parliament, at least on a temporary basis, and set up his review team in Great Smith Street, round the corner. It’s a good start that he’s doing his work outside the febrile atmosphere of the Palace of Westminister, but perhaps his choice of neighbour is a poorer omen.

He’s next to Sir John Chilcot’s team, who are conducting a review into the Iraq War. Chilcot and his team appear to have been conducting their review since the country was known as Mesopotamia. They’ve already outlasted one Prime Minister, and may well outlast at least one more.

Still, at least he’s unlikely to find that the Iraq War has been abolished. Hodgson is reviewing a piece of legislation which, if Labour come to power, may well not exist by the time he delivers a verdict on it.

Could we just have a grant?

It’s come to Diary’s attention that the government’s recent focus on social investment hasn’t met with unalloyed support.

Or to put it another way, people of all chalks, in all corners of the sector, are sitting there screaming at their screens, as another story about social impact bonds drops into their inbox, “Why can’t you just give us some f***ing grants?”

Alas and alack, it appears from our recent analysis of government grant funding that unrestricted central government grant funding is as much a thing of the past as hubs, the Compact, and the basket-hilted broadsword.

Hence this satirical rant by Jay Kennedy, head of policy at the Directory of Social Change, which Diary found rather diverting.

Kennedy is not 100 per cent a fan of the Access Foundation, a new £100m project to give grants to charities to improve their access to social investment. He has suggested, radically, that instead you might want to give grants to improve access to, er, grants.

On a secondary note, ignore the links to the Johnny-come-latelys at the bottom of Kennedy’s piece. The story was broken here and here on Civil Society News.