Our weekly round-up of interesting and outlandish information, collected from the corners of the charity sector.
So this is a Society Diary special about the pleasures of the flesh, in all its wobbly multi-hued glory. This column is dedicated, in its entirety, to those who for whatever reason have gone sky-clad in the name of charity. Or nearly sky-clad, anyway.
If some of the links between are more tangential than others, well, you have to cut your coat to suit your cloth. If you have a coat, of course. Which the subject of this column obviously don’t.
Anyway, let’s get cracking.
Meet Speedo Mick
Diary is waiting in vain for the headline “Budgies smuggled into Everton match. Police hunt culprit.” In the meantime, here’s a picture of Speedo Mick, perhaps the bravest fan the club has. Perhaps the most foolish. It’s hard to tell.
Mick’s been to 20 Everton games dressed in nothing but his speedos, cap and goggles, and seems keen to carry on. He doesn’t have a season ticket so each match he plonks himself down next to a new bunch of fans, introduces himself, and strips off his clothes.
A few of the games, it appears, were a little bracing to be wearing nothing but a pair of swimming trunks but Mick, nothing daunted, has carried on.
Mick’s raising money for Woodlands Hospice in Fazakerley, and has collected almost £5,000.
Thrill streakers
Next we move onto the widely reported spectacle of naked thrill-seekers at Adventure Island in Southend, who, as widely reported, failed to break the record for the most naked people on a rollercoaster, but still raised £10,000 for local charity Southend Hospital Charitable Foundation’s Keyhole Cancer Appeal.
The 57 daring individuals were treated to a white-nipple ride of epic proportions, but came nowhere near the 103 needed to break the world record.
At least they were in the altogether together.
If you walk through the garden...
Diary’s recently begun to wonder how much of the population are aching for a chance to take their clothes off and wander around in public, if they’re given the chance. Certainly following the success of the first naked charity calendar, a decade or so ago now, nary a search for “charity” on Google News goes by without some a glimpse of some philanthropically revealed bum.
Diary has observed that these calendars fall broadly into two categories. One contains a lot of enormous young blokes with intimidatingly large muscles who’ve clearly been aching for an opportunity to take their shirt off and tell people about it. For them it’s a two-for-one deal: “Hey, we can raise money for charity and make you beta males feel puny at the same time”. Diary is not partial to these individuals.
The second is the themed calendar, containing people linked together by a profession or hobby and contains loads of amusingly-placed objects that are relevant to the activity in hand – if that’s not a phrase which could be misconstrued. In this situation, Diary feels vaguely for the stamp-collectors’ club, and people who play the piccolo.
Anyway, these calendars can get a bit tacky too, but every so often an entertaining one comes along. Diary is quite fond of one released this week, featuring gardeners raising cash for Marie Curie. It appears that at least the two veg are clearly on display.
Dog day afternoon
Now, before you get annoyed about the naked link, let's think about this. Dogs are naked too. And that crucial loophole allows us to report happily on the latest Parliamentary dog of the year competition without breaking our own pointless self-imposed rules.
The competition was organised by the Dogs Trust and the Kennel Club and well, it was odd. We heard from Nigel Adams MP, who said he’d named his dog after a Pokemon and it does a mean twerk. A lot of men in suits ran around, ties akimbo, chasing after dogs who ignored obstacles.We discovered that Tory MPs like to name dogs after political leaders (Boris, Maggie and Winston were all in evidence). And the Independent ran a piece on how the contest was rigged because it was always won by Tories.
