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

#VivaVellum – the re-envelluming II

Good news first off this week for fans of antiquated printing materials and the skinning and stretching of slaughtered young animals – Matt Hancock and the Tory party have saved vellum!

Yes, earlier this week, the House of Commons voted to continue the age-old tradition of printing and recording for posterity all laws on vellum. As was reported in this column back in February, the House of Lords had originally voted to move to plain old paper, as a way of saving the public purse over £100,000 a year.

Enter our hero Matthew Hancock, minister for the Cabinet Office, paymaster general and all-round Conservative stooge; who took it upon himself to single-handedly save the tradition and, by extension, the entire vellum-producing industry.

And some people have the gumption to suggest that the Tories aren’t the party of the working class and of small business… Pipe down Port Talbot, the government’s getting to you!

So, vellum’s back baby! Almost as if it never left. Hancock’s said that he’ll find a way to make the whole thing a bit more cost-effective. No harm, no foul, right? Unless of course, dear reader, you’re in fact a baby sheep or lamb in which case, RUN! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! Also, kudos on learning to read.

Who cares though, right? Well, this column wouldn’t normally, if it hadn’t been for the fact that both Matt Hancock and (somehow even worse) one Rob Wilson, minister for civil society, hadn’t taken to Twitter to grotesquely laud this pointless victory over the commoners with perhaps the most Tory hashtag to ever grace the medium since… well, #HappyBirthdayYourMajesty. The fact that the two overlapped with one another on the same day is almost too much to bear.

During the Commons vote, Matt Hancock tweeted a picture of himself ostensibly standing amongst rolls and rolls of vellum parchment reading something – in a Manilla folder mind, no doubt printed on A4 sheets of PAPER! – saying:

 

 

#VivaVellum? There is literally no reason why vellum needs its own hashtag. The practice of writing on vellum and of tweeting are so far removed from one another in terms of the history of the printed word as to be completely alien to one another.

As if to rub salt into the already egregious social media wounds, Rob Wilson – he of the humanising neck beard and the orange socks – then also tweeted using #VivaVellum.

 

 

Just… no words. Haven’t they got anything better to do? Is this what our taxpayer money is going towards?

Won’t somebody please think of the kids!

Tip of the hat, wag of the finger

Anyone who’s ever read a novel by Charles Dickens, or seen an episode of Peaky Blinders, will know that Britain’s network of canals and rivers used to be a place where good manners were practised almost religiously – unless of course you were poor, or, you know, about to be murdered and have your body dumped in one.

Sadly, much like diphtheria, good manners have all but disappeared from the gentle waters of England’s canal network. That is, until now.

Step forward the Canal and River Trust. The organisation whose coffers are more swollen than the waterways of Northern England were around Christmas time… what, too soon?

In a “bid to encourage better behaviour on the most popular stretches of the nation’s towpaths” the Canal and River Trust has decided to introduce special “polite zones” which will apparently encourage people to “smile and say hi as you go by” and to remember that they are entering a “hat-tipping zone”.

Cyclists, joggers and recreational drug users be warned: good manners cost nothing, except millions in charitable donations, of course.

Sure, it’s fairly pointless but Diary can’t help be amused at the prospect of Sirs Stephen Bubb and Stuart Etherington being forced to grit their teeth and doff their top-hats at one another as they pass to their shared, canal-side offices.

Diary can’t imagine this is going to go down super well around Camden Lock of a Friday night, though. You can’t really doff a hoodie in the same way you can a flat cap.

Free Panto

Finally, and bear with Diary here 'cause this one’s a bit tenuous,  a whole bunch of “fun and entertaining pantomime scripts” (depends on one’s definition of ‘fun’ and ‘entertaining’) have now been made available to amateur societies to use and perform free of charge.

While there must be plenty of Am-Dram societies out there who technically, somehow, fall nebulously into the ‘charity’ category, this column is more excited by the possibility of all this in hypothetical terms.

The IoF is, for example, planning on putting on a live theatrical performance at this year’s Convention. While something has already been organised, this column is tempted to lobby the IoF to stage a full panto production of ‘Dick Whittington’ – with Peter Lewis as the titular character and, fingers crossed, Richard Taylor as his cat.

Just a thought.