Happy Friday to one and all and, what a week it has been. Clearly the most important thing that has happened this week is that the perennial battle between the colonised and the coloniser over the rights to a tiny urn full of charred pieces of wood has once more erupted south of the equator.
Yes, The Ashes kicked off on Thursday in the sweltering heat of Brisbane, Australia and Society Diary couldn’t be happier frankly. What better way to distract oneself from the suffocating proximity of friends and family over Christmas than by staying up until 5am watching a bunch of men in whites throw and hit a tiny ball made of leather on a giant grass oval? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way.
This week in charity sector satire: Charities try and muscle in on all the Black Friday deals, leaving the people over at #givingtuesday miffed (probably); The #poodate guy is donating money to charity, and the Hinton lecture held in two places at once.
Deck the paws with bow-wows of doggy
First up this week, yet more charity Christmas news and, unsettlingly terrible puns aside, the girls and boys over at Guide Dogs are trying their best to get in on some of the sweet consumer action which has come to define Black Friday.
You know, Black Friday? The day after Thanksgiving – i.e. the most American of holidays in that, in the UK at least (and indeed in the rest of the world) it’s not even a holiday. In many ways, Black Friday is like Halloween, but slightly better for the high street as, opposed to cheap zombie facemasks and butternut squash, people will be furiously impulse buying flat screen televisions, computer game consoles and white goods. God bless consumer capitalism, eh?
Anyway, despite all of CAF’s good work around #givingtuesday – which is next week people, let’s not forget – a number of charities have been trying to get in on Black Friday with special offers. Indeed Guide Dogs are offering up to 50 per cent off on not one, but “four fabulous gifts” from its amusingly titled ‘Dogalogue’. It’s like a catalogue but more… well, you probably get it.
The charity’s “gorgeous sleeping Labrador wine bottle cooler” is now just £12.99! It, and Diary quotes “holds two bottles at once and is sure to be a much-loved Christmas gift for any wine lover!” Or, indeed, anyone who needs to keep two bottles of wine cool at the same time.
The ‘Dogalogue’ also offers 10 per cent off deals on dog-themed hoodies, a large Labrador puppy cuddly toy and a “Scottie Tote Bag”. All of which may be adorable, but are all more expensive than the wine cooler and also, crucially at this time of year, neither hold nor cool wine. Well, technically Diary supposes the tote bag could be used to hold wine but, yeah, it presumably doesn’t come with thermally insulated lining…
Anyway Diary digresses. If you know any dog lovers that are crying out to indulge both their darkest capitalist urges whilst also doing good for a charity, than tell them to get their paws on some Guide Dogs stuff.
Or, just in time for the festive season, Diary’s got a hot tip that Camila Batmanghelidjh’s tell-all book Kids has been reduced in price to just £5. A perfect stocking stuffer for all the family. It’s bloody heavy at least.
On the second day of Christmas, my true love sent to me: Poo turtle doves and some money to charity! *
In broken window/faeces flinging news update now: the guy who set up a Gofundme page to fix his broken window after his date got stuck between two panes trying to retrieve a turd that would not flush has said he’ll donate the excess cashola to two charities. Talk about stained glass.
Liam Smith and his still unnamed date became internet sensations earlier this year when it emerged that he’d been forced to call out the fire brigade when his lady-friend became stuck in a window trying to retrieve some poo.
Smith, a student, started his crowdfunding page with a £200 target to ostensibly replace his window after it became damaged in the ‘poohaha’ incident. However, when many media outlets picked up on the story, it began trending on social media, with the obvious hashtag #poodate.
The media impetus behind the story meant that Smith has now closed his page having raised some £2,800 and he has said he’ll donate the remainder to two charities: water and sanitation initiative Toilet Twinning and the Fire Fighters Charity.
Lorraine Kingsley, chief executive of Toilet Twinning, said the charity was “extremely grateful” to Smith and said his decision to donate had been a “public-relations gift”. While Dr Jill Tolfrey, chief executive of the Fire Fighters Charity told the BBC the charity was grateful “whatever the circumstances” in which the money had been raised.
Nice to see that this story has had a happy ending. Good to see that Smith won’t just be flushing all that excess cash down the drain…
*(Sung to the tune of 12 Days of Christmas)*
Which Hinton lecture did you go to?
Who says the charity sector is full of duplication when there were merely two annual Hinton lectures taking place on Tuesday night, in London.
Readers are hopefully familiar with NCVO’s annual Hinton Lecture, held each year in memory of its former director, (if you aren’t one of Diary’s colleagues wrote about it here) but less familiar with the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Hinton Lecture (well we weren’t anyway), held in memory of Lord Hinton of Bankside, who was heaviliy involved in the RAE. There's apparently no common ground between the two men, and it was but a happy coincidence that the two lectures with the same name were taking place in the same city at the same time. Fortunately on different topics.
Maybe someone should call for the merger of the two Hinton lectures? Does the charity sector really need two lectures with the same name? Sure they were set up completely independently, have no relation to each other and serve different audiences. But they sound the same… and that’s usually a good enough reason to demand merger talks begin.
Anyway the existence of another event was all enough to cause Baroness Warsi, this year’s lecturer, considerable concern for she opened with, “I’m really relieved to be here in the right place, giving the right lecture to the right audience,” before promising to be “challenging”.
This was great news for journalists in the room, for she definitely delivered on the promise. It was less good news for the good folk from the Charity Commission, who had turned out in force. And it’s fair to say that Warsi gave the regulator and its chair a bit of a kicking.
Commission staff were surely wondering it was too late to zip across London to the other Hinton Lecture. This was being given by the former chief executive of EDF Energy, Vincent de Rivaz, for he surely couldn’t have a bad word to say about them… sadly we’ll never know as we weren’t there either.
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