Society Diary: Migratory bird forces Polish charity to stork out a lot of money

06 Jul 2018 Voices

A stork reminder that sim cards can run up huge... bills

Happy Friday to all of you dear readers. Since we last met, England actually won a penalty shoot out in a World Cup game! Diary’s not sure about you, but it’s been told by plenty of large men in the street this last week, apropos of nothing, that IT is in fact DEFINITELY coming home!

This week in charity sector satire: A Polish charity gets storked over after losing a GPS tracker; the man, the app, the legend Matt Hancock tries his hand at parkour, and a man is running 196 marathons in every country in the world to raise money for Prostate Cancer UK. 

In the zlot

To Poland first-off this week and the amusing news that an environmental charity in the country has been forced to pay a huge phone bill due to a migratory bird. 

Yes, the BBC is reporting that EcoLogic Group, the charity in question, placed a GPS tracker on the “back of a white stork last year to track the bird’s migratory habits”. The tracker was fitted with a small sim card, the likes of which everyone has in their mobile phones. 

The stork in question travelled over 3,000 miles with the tracker on its back, before the GPS system lost contact with the bird “in the Blue Nile Valley in eastern Sudan”. 

This is where the story gets interesting/hilarious. According to the story, “somebody found the tracker in Sudan, removed the sim card and put it in their phone”. They then racked up around 20 hours’ worth of, ostensibly, free phone calls. Except, of course, as they say “nothing in life comes for free”. 

Yes the charity is now facing more than 10,000 Polish zloty (around £2,000) in charges, which it will have to pay. 

Talk about a huge bill. EcoLogic don’t have a wing or a prayer’s chance of getting out of this. If you worked there, you’d probably be in a bit of de-Nile about the whole thing. A bird-brained scheme, to be certain. 

Parkour me another one

Back in jolly ol’ England next, and some yet more excellent social media work from the Secretary of State for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Matt Hancock. 

C’mon, you guys all know Matt Hancock by now, right? He coined a viral hashtag about the use of vellum (stretched and treated calf-skin); he then started his own app, eponymously called Matt Hancock which was briefly the happiest place on social media and now, well now, he’s trying parkour.

Now, for those of you not aware of what parkour is, it’s that thing you’ve probably seen incredibly thin people in baggy sweatpants doing on videos before. The thing where they run around urban environments vaulting off walls onto smaller walls, hauling themselves up walls and window embrasures and just generally doing things that make no sense, given one could just walk normally, or take a lift. It is also, ludicrously French. 

Anyway, take a look at this little video that Matt put up on his own ministerial Twitter account. Watch it, in all of its 45-second glory, and then watch it again. And again. And again. Diary wants this clip to play on a loop, constantly, at its next birthday. Diary wants this to be projected onto the walls of Westminster Abbey, when football comes home. Diary wants the Queen to play this clip to foreign dignitaries. 

Yes, it’s Matt Hancock, in shorts, doing slow motion vaults over, onto, and around, what could be best described as “a very low wall”. Or, if one’s feeling slightly more generous, “quite a big, stone bench”. All this before then having quite an awkward conversation with Sebastien Foucan, the president of Parkour UK. 

Say what you like about Matt Hancock, Conservative MP for West Suffolk – and, to be fair this column has, quite often – but he’s certainly committed. He doesn’t do anything half heartedly. Be it playing cricket in a south London comprehensive; riding a horse in full jockey get-up; greeting his French counterpart at whatever the hell the #FranceUKDigitalColloque is, or launching his own, self-titled app. 

He is a gift from the Gods. A man so eminently ludicrous as to be almost immune from satire. How can you satirise a man who seems to have based his entire personality on Alan Partridge? 

If only he wasn’t such a Tory. 

Marathon man

Finally this week, we turn to the rather extraordinary story of 28-year-old Nick Butter who is currently somewhere in Africa, 50-odd marathons into his journey to run 196 marathons in every country in the world. 

Butter’s journey started in London on 6 January this year, and according to his last update on his JustGiving page (which was over a month ago now) he was somewhere in Africa, 50-something marathons later. 

He is conducting this feat for a man named Kevin Webber, a man who Butter meant while running an ultra-marathon in the Sahara Desert. Webber had been running the marathon, and ended up sharing a tent with Butter and told the young man that he was suffering from terminal prostate cancer. 

Now Nick Butter is trying to raise over a quarter of a million pounds for Prostate Cancer UK. 

If you’re interested in donating, visit Butter’s JustGiving page, or Prostate Cancer UK

 

More on