Welcome back to this week’s Society Diary, where we discover that, against all odds, things are okay.
This column is written against a backdrop of calamity, and the apparent self-destruction of our society as it wrestles with the backlash of human anger and helplessness against a tide of supranational force.
But it’s worth remembering that history is actually the tale of more or less unalloyed progress, growing prosperity, and a tendency towards greater and greater peace. And you, reading this, are almost certainly richer and safer and healthier than almost any human being who has ever lived, including most on this planet right now.
Diary can understand why some citizens of the UK are miserable - those on Universal Credit, for example - but it's not clear exactly what's wrong with everyone else. As the barman said when the whale walked into the bar, why the big sighs?
Still, that’s enough optimism. Let’s return to the rich tapestry of human weirdness and failure that keeps this column rolling.
Chocolate massages
In terms of weirdness and failure, it’s hard to look beyond Camila Batmanghelidjh, the oddest of them all, who has catapulted herself back into the limelight this week with the launch of a new book which, like crime in a multi-storey car park, is wrong on many, many levels.
Diary would like to avoid the broad canvas, though, and focus down on the details which really matter. In this case, chocolate massages.
Batmanghelidjh’s appearance on the Victoria Derbyshire programme this week was like watching a car crash in extreme slow motion. It was notable, among other things, for her assertion that it was a secret and unnamed cabal of civil servants who had brought down the charity because of concern over its See the Child, Change the System campaign.
Which seems implausible to Diary because a) it’s not clear that a cabal of civil servants could really get themselves organised to close a charity down deliberately and b) the See the Child campaign was absolutely useless, and had achieved nothing whatsoever by the time the charity closed.
But this tale of incompetence and delusion is now well worn. The new information to emerge from the programme was that Kids Company had paid out a substantial sum of money to put up a kid in a spa, and paid for him to have a chocolate massage.
Diary may be showing its colours here, but this column had no idea what a chocolate massage was, really. Did they just rub you on the back with a bar of Dairy Milk? Or were you actually dipped in chocolate? Do you get to lick it off afterwards?
Anyway, the idea provoked some Snickers.
Close our bar? We’ll sack the trustees
So there’s some entertaining stuff going on Toothill Community Centre in Swindon. Reports in the Swindon Advertiser are a bit confused, but it looks like the trustees of the charity have shut the bar in the community centre, after a dispute over whether it was being run properly. So the drinkers have called an EGM to vote them out.
There’s a great deal of doubt over whether they can do so – understanding of charity law appears pretty foggy in the wilds of Swindon – but it’s a lesson for trustee boards everywhere. Don't mess with what really matters to your members.
Also, Diary must take issue with the Advertiser. So many decent headlines, all unwritten. What's up guys? There’ll beer problem if you close our bar. It’s a rum do at the community centre. Charity kills off community spirits. Drinkers left little bitter.
We know. We know. It’s bottom of the barrel stuff.
Badger takes a nap
Finally, we bring you news that a badger was discovered having a nap in a cat bed by the Scottish SSPCA.
This column has nothing particularly cynical to say about this state of affairs, which is mildly upsetting, but what can you do? There was a badger. It went into a house. It ate some cat food and fell asleep in the cat’s bed. When the SSPCA went round to have a look at it, it got a bit disgruntled, woke up, and wandered off.
If you find a badger in your home - not that you will, we understand - call the SSPCA. Unless you live outside Scotland, in which case probably don't.
Anyway, people seem quite taken with this story. So we’ve included a picture of the badger.
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