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

Won't listen to the AA? What about the DD?

There’s been a bit of a, well, an upsurge, in stories about boobs in Society Diary recently.

First we covered the marvellously named Boob Aid Squeezathon in Japan, a charity event which involved - well, you can probably guess from the name, to be honest. Now, it appears that breasts are once again being used to back a charitable cause: getting people to wear seatbelts.

The new charitable initiative, called #seatbeltb00bing, was launched by the Romanian Automobile Club, the country's equivalent of the AA, but has now been taken up by road safety organisations across the world.

Its message doesn't appear to be very complex. In fact, it can be summarised thus: here is a film of women with, um, rather handsome decotellages, wearing seatbelts. Not entirely SFW, by the way.

If you too wear a seatbelt after seeing the video, the campaign suggests, you will magically obtain some kind of undefined benefit – a sort of mystic tantric boob energy. Although wisely, it makes no promises as to exactly how.

It’s asking other well-endowed young ladies if they, too, will send pictures of themselves belted up in a low-cut top. These will then be posted to the campaign’s Facebook page, where people will have the opportunity to like them. And also Like them.

The organisers said: “The campaign aims to make wearing the seatbelt a cool and sexy thing amongst women, and make the message hard to ignore for men, who usually ignore any piece of advice.”

Well, it doesn’t make any sense. But it’ll work, nonetheless.

You reap what you sew

Last week, Diary became one of the few corners of the charity sector to contain absolutely no mockery of Brooks Newmark, the new charities minister, after he said charities should “stick to their knitting” and stay out of “the realm of politics”.

Diary would just like to make it clear that this was not an accidental oversight, but a deliberate omission, based pretty much on the fact that by the time last Friday rolled around, he’d had a pretty good kicking on Twitter from about 5,000 people, and putting the boot in further seemed pretty unnecessary.

Anyway, it looks like Newmark was guilty of an amateurish gaffe, rather than deliberate ill will. During the time since his remarks, he’s moved slowly from getting needled, through a period of woolgathering, to looking pretty sheepish, and has gradually made it clear he meant to say something completely different, but in such a disorganised way - so unlike the usual PR offensive - that Diary actually believes him.

To his credit, Newmark didn’t complain about being sewn up by the press either, even though it appears he’d been fed a line by a Times journalist and just naively repeated it back to them.

During his first Cabinet Office questions, during which he was asked the odd question about knitting needles and the like, he seemed to be taking it in pretty good humour, and even tentatively followed in the footsteps of his predecessor, Nick Hurd, by essaying a joke about stitching together a reply.

Has Newmark succeeded in rowing all the way back to the edge of his stormy teacup? Answers on a postcard please.

This dreaming spire has been mutualised

So Oxfordshire is now a social enterprise place – the first county to be so designated.

It’s not quite clear what this means, but it doesn’t necessarily seem like a match made in heaven. In Diary’s experience, social enterprise places tend to contain a lot of passionate people talking about triple bottom lines and impact and how charity is old-fashioned and the trials and tribulations of the hero who strikes out on his own against society and is told that something can’t be done, before overcoming adversity thanks to pots of hard work, bull-headed determination, and occasionally a grant from the Cabinet Office*.

Oxfordshire, on the other hand, mostly contains pretty villages, rolling hills, golden stone, and a place that toffs from Eton go briefly to study PPE, before going back to London to get a job in their mother-in-law’s company and then run the country.

But then we here at Civil Society Towers are not in the business of propping up these lazy stereotypes. And anyway, Diary is quite taken with the imagery of a social enterprise takeover in Oxfordshire. The mind’s eye conjures up a ridiculously self-confident bloke in a loud shirt strolling in and shouting “This dreaming spire is now co-operatively owned and will henceforth be dreaming about full employment for disabled people,” or something similar.

And anything that gets more people starting social enterprises and helps politicians understand it, instead of their more typical reaction (getting very excited and loving it, but having no idea how it works) is extremely welcome.

So best of luck, Oxfordshire. Let us know how you get on.

* The last appears to be more likely if you have no track record of success, but you name your organisation after a currently fashionable Tory policy.