Thursday, December 15, 2016

RWC Does Christmas



Tonight we had the last Writers’ Circle meeting before Christmas. We planned our usual writing exercise for this time of year – a kind of writers’ ‘consequences’ – each person writing one paragraph of a single story.  With nine of us in the room, we decided on passing our paragraphs a maximum of five times.  But to add a bit more challenge, we were all given the same starting sentence, and had to include a different, randomly selected word each round.


So – nine writers – nine different styles, five different writers per story, each round just five minutes (seven for the last, time to wrap it up!).  Then they were all read out.  Steve laughed so much he could not see to read and passed his story to me. I started laughing so much I could barely read it either, especially when it came to the nose flying past the face after the carrot exploded.  Perhaps everyone can write down their stories, so we can share more. But in the meantime, here’s a summary that sort of tells you how RWC ‘do’ Christmas… 

On the 15th of December, thus wrote RWC…
Nine laughing writers
Several explosions
Six soft drinks (no alcohol needed!)
Five household chores
Four brutal murders
Three dead pets (we want to rename the group ‘The Dead Pets’ Society’)
Two prosthetic legs
One flying nose
And a mouse in a Christmas treeeeeeeee

Anyway, to give you an idea of how this mad exercise actually works, here’s the story that I started.

‘Twas the night before Christmas and the mouse was hiding. Fed up with being made to perform every night, he hid behind the Christmas tree and the star. He could hear his mother calling, “Alejandro!” but he ignored her and just hunkered down even further.  The tree was lit by small twinkling lights that annoyed him. Sometimes they were yellow like the sun, or red like fire, or green like the tree.  He liked the white ones a bit – they were calm and unpretentious.  “Alejandro!” he almost jumped out of his skin.

Scurrying up the tree, he wove his way through the decorations, swinging on the tinsel, bouncing off a soft, portly Santa and eventually arriving at the very top. He peeped out behind the star and chuckled at the freshly shed carpet of tree needles he had created. The lady of the house would grumble at how easily these trees shed nowadays when she came into the living room in the morning.  It was a very tall tree but it was nothing to a daredevil like Alejandro. He stood on his hind legs and surveyed the room.  

But this year for the first time, Alejandro lost his footing on the top branch and was in danger of falling. The only way he could save himself was to wrap his tail around the angel’s left foot.  What was more disconcerting was that he was now visible to the humans sitting around the cosy warm room drinking whisky and other drinks.

He was sitting sprawled in the chair, wearing the Christmas jumper depicting a jolly Santa laughing, hands on his belly.  “Oh look Mabel, that tree’s swaying.”
“Oh Mabel, that angel’s got a pet dog on a lead.”

“Oh my god, Mabel. MABEL! The dog is pulling the angel off the tree!”
There was an enormous crack, a tiny squeak and a loud scream. Santa’s belly could be seen no more, the human was beneath the fallen tree.  Alejandro ran.

Talk about complete chaos. When can we get the place tidied up? Think I’ll have a coffee just to see if it gives me a new lease of life. Do I hear singing in the distance; is it the church choir doing a bit of collecting for charity?

As you can see –  nonsense, but imagine nine of these mad stories, including everything from a Santa does 50 Shades to spooky child murderers, and you get just a small insight into why the Royston Writers Circle is a great place to learn, to write, and to have fun.

Sunday, October 23, 2016

Proud to be a fundraiser


Virtually everyone accesses charitable services at some time in their lives, whether it’s receiving advice on debt, mental health support, playground equipment for children, protecting vulnerable individuals or supporting people with life threatening diseases.  Seriously – take a close look at your life and you will find multiple interactions with organizations that you may not even realise were charities.  In these times of austerity, the government are relying more and more on charities to deliver key services, whilst at the same time cutting the funding available. 

I studied for the IoF Diploma in Fundraising in 2015

Charities need a way to achieve their charitable objects; whilst the use of volunteers is invaluable, you cannot run the sector on volunteers alone.  Finance, for example, is not a job for the enthusiastic amateur, especially where a charity’s turnover may run into millions. There are roles within charities that can be very well performed by volunteers, and there are roles that need professionals with specialist skills and expertise.  Charities need to be managed effectively and efficiently, and they need the right staff and tools to achieve this. They all face their different challenges – for a charity that delivers mosquito nets to Africa, for example, your donation must not only cover the cost of a net, but the procurement, storage and transport of the net, secure money handling (and measures against corruption along the way), and the staff needed to complete all the processes needed to ensure safe delivery to the beneficiary.  For a charity that helps homeless people, they need premises, utilities, food, health and safety for the volunteers and staff, and sometimes even protection from those they seek to help. To support medical research, you need a charity that understands the science and can allocate your donation to the most promising research; it would be exceedingly hard to give directly to medical research without expert knowledge.

Charities come under fire for professionalization of the sector, but without professionals, your donation could be less effective.  

In order for any charity to have the funds it needs to deliver its charitable objects, most charities must ask for the money it needs – whether that is from governments, trusts and foundations, wealthy individuals or the general public.  

I am aware that there are scammers and poor practice in all sectors, but it is by no means as prevalent in the third sector as the media implies.  ‘Charity does good job, helps people’ rarely makes an interesting headline.  You can research any charity on the Charity Commission website and you can also get an idea of what their overheads are from Charity Choice.  But you can’t just estimate the effectiveness of a charity’s work through how much goes ‘directly’ on the cause, look at what the charity deliver (a service charity will have a much larger staff salary, for example). Also, look at who is funding them; big funders have strict criteria before giving their money away.  

I am a fundraiser, and I’m proud to be a fundraiser.  I will defend my sector, and defend the professionals who work for a greater good.  These are my personal opinions, based on the bias I have developed through working for amazing causes, with fantastic people, doing terrific jobs. 

Further reading/references:


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Here’s a small selection of charities you may not have heard of:

Thursday, September 22, 2016

No queue at Kew



A few weeks ago, one typical British summer day (wet and warm), my friend and I spent the day at Kew Gardens. My last visit there was around 1969 or 1970. I remember going on a school trip from Queenswell School in Barnet, with our teacher Mr Smith asking for “22 tuppences please” from the Conductor.  Though we had to queue to get in back then, thanks to my friend booking in advance, we didn't have to in 2016.


The Hive
We enjoyed wandering round the garden and saw the Hive, an impressive art installation mimicking nature in design, and powered by the energy of the bees. The Great Palm House is exactly as I remember it, and the borders full of flowers beautiful and fragrant.  I remember very clearly bringing home a postcard of a Bottlebrush flower for my mother, and her delight as it was a flower she'd known as a child in South Africa.

I didn't see any flowering bottle brush this time, but I was particularly happy to see the ‘Heritage Trees’ – those mighty personalities that have stood witness to hundreds of years of history.  I enjoyed ‘meeting’ the Weeping Beech and Turner’s Oak.  Going into Palm house, I looked at a lot of the plants with an different eye, because thanks to the last two years of my job, I have a greater understanding of their importance as medicines.


Plants provide so much medicine for humanity – both in their natural state and as the basis for pharmacological medicines too.  I’ve learned a lot about how wild plants provide a natural pharmacopeia for millions of people who have no access to modern medicine, and how many rely on wild plant harvesting for their livelihoods as well. 

Here’s a few that I saw at Kew, with a little bit about some of their amazing properties:

The barrel cactus is used generally as a food and a medicine.
I first saw them this size in Arizona at the beautiful
Desert Botanic Garden.  (I learned a lot about cacti in Arizona!)

Magnolia - the bark and the centre of the flowers are used
extensively for cough and other medicines.
It's well used in Traditional Chinese Medicine.

The beautiful, tall and elegant Corsican pine is
used to make turpentine – all resin from pine trees is
antiseptic (hence it’s a typical ‘flavour’ in household cleaners). 
It’s also used to treat kidney and bladder complaints
as well as being useful for skin treatments.

Ayurveda, the traditional Hindu system of medicine,
uses lots of exotic and unusual wild plants.
It also uses black pepper.  The heating properties
of
black pepper help digestion and is also a stimulant.
It tastes good too!

Beehive Ginger – what a descriptive name!
The major compound found in this unusual plant has
been found to be an effective cell growth
inhibitor in specific colon carcinoma cells.
 

The plane tree – one you will see commonly in
London as (by shedding its bark) it can survive the polluted air! 
Its leaves can be used for sore eyes or made into a
cream for healing wounds.  It’s also handy for
treating dysentery and diarrhoea.

All photos (C) Carolyn Sheppard