A Christmas summary of the outlandish and interesting information collected from the corners of the charity sector.

Not much is happening around Diary Towers this week as our particular corner of the charity sector rolls down in a gentle, slightly rum-filled meander to Christmas Day.

Diary is aware that many charity workers are extra hard at work over the festive period, helping needy people, collecting cash, and generally ensuring the less fortunate miss out. We salute you. But we also suspect that while you’re hard at work, your slightly cosier office-bound brethren are either down the pub, puckering up under the mistletoe, or out Christmas shopping. Certainly not reading the news, anyway.

In any case, ‘tis the season to engage in festive round ups of everything else that’s happened this year, and as we never want it to be said that Diary was one for original thought, this column intends to jump onto that bandwagon, or possibly a sleigh. Some kind of festive conveyance, anyway.

So without further ado, here are Diary's favourite stories from 2014.

How to stop people having sex in your charity shop

As a charity shop, you always face problems. Attracting enough donations, finding enough volunteers, trying to stop people from having sex in the back of your shop…

Wait, what? Back up a minute.

Yep, it appears for one Exeter charity shop, random shaggers have become such a big problem that they’ve had to introduce new procedures to prevent them.

Local man Jason Daden, 47, and an unnamed woman were caught 'committing an act outraging public decency by behaving in an indecent manner, namely having sexual intercourse' in the Heavitree WESC Foundation charity shop in April this year.

Remarkably, it isn’t a first offence. Daden seems to have a predilection for getting down and dirty among £2.50 T-shirts, and has been caught having sex in a charity shop before.

“We would like to state that we have introduced new measures to help to ensure that a similar incident does not happen again,” the charity said.

Charity draws map that ‘looks like a willy’ - well it does a bit

Diary’s eyes were drawn, as if magnetically, to a fine piece of journalism on the BBC headlined: “Tourism map ‘looks like a penis’”.

It appears the Canal and River Trust has produced a map of Berkhampstead, showing the Grand Union Canal, among other things. And, well, it does bear a passing resemblance to a gentleman sausage.

The Canal and River Trust put out this statement: "This is one of about 100 maps we've been promoting. It does look, as the poster on Facebook says, like a willy. We didn't notice it. Somebody should have seen it, I agree.

"You could accuse us of being a bit naive, but canals are long, straight things, and when you draw a map it tends to be that sort of shape."

Minister fails to keep within his brief. Or briefs.

Diary had previously avoided mentioning Brooks Newmark very much, because it seems harsh to kick someone when they’re down.

But there’s only so much you can restrain yourself before it becomes too much to bear, and it begins to feel like your heart may burst out of your chest. Or some other organ might burst out of some other place.

It’s safe to say that Newmark didn’t covered himself in glory during his time in the voluntary sector. In fact, you could argue he didn’t covered himself at all.

We thought he’d made a bit of a mistake with his comments that charities should avoid politics and stick to their knitting. But those comments, in comparison barely, um, moved the needle.

Anyway Newmark’s decision to reveal his Parliamentary member while wearing paisley pyjamas, following a sting by a particularly unscrupulous member of the fourth estate, had consequences for all sorts of people, but two groups were particularly affected.

Those charities who’d invited Newmark to speak at their fringe events at the Conservative Party Conference were suddenly left staring at the prospect of having their keynote speech delivered by an empty chair. But retailers of paisley pyjamas watched sales soar - apparently M&S sold out at the weekend.

There’s been general disapproval of the way the sting was conducted, though, enough that Diary wondered briefly whether he could have claimed his peccadillos were his own affair, and fought for his job.

Stuck it out, as it were.

Okay, maybe not.

Bible Society inflatable whale banned from park

So the Bible Society has its own giant inflatable whale, which comes as a bit of a surprise. Perhaps even more surprising is that they’ve had to launch a Save the Whale campaign after discovering they can’t actually inflate it in London’s parks – or anywhere much else, for that matter.

It’s a life-sized model of a sperm whale, apparently. Society Diary has a soft spot for the sperm whale, because it's so weird. It has the largest brain on earth, is the second deepest-dwelling of all whales, and is the only natural predator of the supergiant squid. It produces both spermaceti, which is used to make the world's best candles, and ambergris, which is used to fix perfume, and costs more per ounce than gold.

But that is by the by. The idea of the whale is that it would travel around the UK, and that kids can crawl inside and be read stories from the Bible – particularly Jonah and the Whale, appropriately enough.

But apparently they had trouble in London in May, when the Royal Parks banned the supersized cetacean because they “do not permit collective acts of worship or other religious observances”, which apparently these days includes reading to kids next to a giant PVC model mammal.