Beavers?

So apparently a Russian charity has a print problem on its hands.

The charity’s Christmas leaflets were intended to say “Do good!” along with request for cash. Now they say “Exterminate beavers!”

Apparently a printing typo which only makes sense if you can read Cyrillic is to blame. The printers reacted with the kind of service attitude that the country is famed for, and told the charity to send the leaflets out anyway because no one would notice.

The beavers, it seems, have been left with plenty to chew on. They’re dammed whatever happens, and plan to lodge a complaint.

Good Samaritans

Diary is not normally a student of ancient history, it’s fair to say. Last week is a stretch, if we’re honest. But a chance encounter with a historian of antiquity yielded some interesting information about the Samaritans.

The charity, obviously, is named after the Good Samaritan of Biblical fame, who stopped on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho to help a Jewish guy who had fallen among thieves.

But the point of the story is that the Samaritans, as a whole, had a reputation for not actually being big fans of helping out strangers.

The Samaritans, it seems, were an ethno-religious group belonging to a faith similar to Judaism, but often bitterly opposed to it, who lived just to the north of Palestine, and who were eventually all but wiped out by a combination of the Byzantines, the Persians and the Arabs for being just so damn prickly.

A small number are still around, it seems, and continue to follow their faith, which is based on the Pentateuch, the first books of the Bible.

Diary is thinking of starting a charity to support this much-put-upon religious group. What to call it, though?

Beware of Hellenic gifts

From the Byzantine we move swiftly to the Hellenic. Not the ancient Greeks, though, so much as Nicholas Hellen, social affairs editor of The Times, who caused a bit of a fuss at this year’s Tory Party Conference.

Hellen sprawled louchely in his chair at an event on trust in charities and announced, basically, that you shouldn’t be allowed to call yourself a charity unless no one who worked there got paid.

It’s fair to say that trust and confidence in Nicholas Hellen took a bit of a hit at this point, and the folk of the room essentially stopped talking or thinking about whatever they’d been doing before, and started thinking about ways to tell Hellen that he was wrong. Dead wrong.

Which is perhaps not surprising. Apart from your Diary scribe, whose pen is plied in an unashamedly capitalist organisation that writes news about charities, every single person in that room worked for a charity, and Hellen had just blithely proposed putting them all out of a job.

Sadly Hellen, just after finishing speaking, announced he had to be elsewhere, stood up, and sauntered off, leaving the entire room wondering if there was any way you could remain nice, charitable and polite while organising a lynching.

The disappearing minister

Hellen’s ten-minute appearance was followed by a notable absence from any further sector events, although his presence continued to hang around like a more softly-spoken Banquo’s ghost.

If Hellen was the elephant in the room, then Rob Wilson, minister for civil society, was an entirely smaller putative pachyderm – neither present nor particularly notable for his absence.

Poetry in motion

Finally, a quick note. It was National Poetry Day yesterday. The efforts produced by the voluntary infrastructure community demonstrated, for the most part, why they work in policy and not in some more literary capacity. It was, in Diary's mind, not so much haiku as haik-why?

Sadly, this column was so stunned by the work on offer that we will have to leave in-depth literary criticism for next week. You have been warned.