Happy Friday dear readers! As tomorrow is Remembrance Day, this column sincerely hopes you’re all decked out, pinned up and generally festooned with as many red poppies as is physically possible.
If you can only fit one poppy onto your lapel, best to make sure that it’s roughly the same circumference as your head. In theory, it’s probably best to wear two: One on your jacket, and another pinned to whatever you’re wearing under your jacket even if that’s you bare flesh. It’s the price we must pay now for freedom. Also, why aren’t you wearing anything under your jacket?
If in doubt, just look to Poppy Watch, the anonymous Twitter account ensuring that all Britons are being adequately respectful enough at this, the most important time of the year. This tweet is a personal favourite of Society Diary, showing the Royal British Legion the correct way to wear a poppy.
REAL patriots like @toryboypierce aren’t afraid to tell us the CORRECT way to wear a Poppy,unlike the PC lefty cowards at the British Legion pic.twitter.com/k6XUAD7Ou1
— Poppy® Watch (@giantpoppywatch) November 3, 2017
This week in charity sector satire: A charity mountain climber who thought Mount Kilimanjaro was in Wales, the National Trust releases the perfect Christmas present for your Toriest elderly relative and how blockchain will lead to fundraising washing machines.
Yeah, no idea either.
Never Welsh out on a challenge
First off this week, to Tanzania, to join up with charity fundraiser Nikki Barnett and her daughter Leanne, who scaled Mount Kilimanjaro, the world’s highest-free standing mountain, in memory of her sister Jill, who died of breast cancer.
This story has come to prominence this week because Barnett, from Whitestone, Nuneaton, only originally agreed to the feat of endurance believing that Mount Kilimanjaro was in Wales. Barnett based her assumption on the fact that, as she couldn’t pronounce the name of the mountain in question, “it must have been Welsh”.
That’s at once both greatly offensive to the Welsh and, indeed, to wherever Barnett was schooled. Clearly the geography department was rather lacking.
However, realising her mistake, Barnett refused to back down and set off to Africa aiming to raise £10,000 for Myton Hospices, where both her grandmother and sister spent their final days.
Indeed, Barnett’s humorous error meant that she smashed her original £10k target and, along with a group of 13 other volunteers, has now raised over £60,000 for the hospice. The Coventry Telegraph reports – with a giant poppy over its masthead, which is good to see - that Barnett and her daughter were “recognised in the airport toilets by an American couple who had read their story online”. Presumably not on the Coventry Telegraph.
Still a heart-warming tale of personal endurance and a whole heap of money going towards good causes. Also, Diary can’t help but think an atlas might make for an excellent Christmas gift for Barnett too.
These boots were made for grouse stalking
Perhaps you hadn’t noticed, what with it being early November, but Christmas is coming. John Lewis has only today put out this year’s Christmas advert featuring a hairy monster lurking under children’s beds. Seems an odd thing for Christmas, but whatever.
People all over the internet have been complaining it hasn’t made them weep, which apparently all the other John Lewis adverts have, so it’s bad. Diary can’t help but think these people have reached the right conclusion for entirely the wrong reason. A Christmas ad isn’t bad because it fails to bring you to tears. It’s bad because it’s a Christmas ad and, therefore, is bad by its very nature.
Anyway, whether one likes it or not, Christmas is most definitely coming. Like in Game of Thrones. But with hopefully marginally fewer undead.
With that in mind, those smart and organised people amongst us are already stockpiling presents so as to avoid the inevitable high-street rush in mid-December. The horrific press of panicked shoppers, tearing and grabbing at one another, pushing old ladies and children to the ground, trampling the last shreds of Yuletide cheer under the iron heels of their winter boots.
Truly, last minute Christmas shopping reduces all but the hardiest of souls to a weeping, shivering wreck. Christmas is hell, a living hell, Oxford street crowds a million deep, the human tide sweeping from Topman to H&M and onwards, ever onwards and you’re clawing against the tide, the faceless tide of shoppers and sliding downwards, downwards and it’s only half past three in the afternoon and yet it’s pitch dark and, dear God no, why? You're being trampled to death and the last thing you'll ever see is a wreath of holly hanging in the sky.
Speaking of being trampled to death by heavy boots, the National Trust has teamed up with a company called ‘Hunter Field’ to “present a collection of footwear exclusively designed to celebrate our shared commitment to the outdoors”.
Yes, the NT has gone into footwear, just in time for Chrissie. You and yours can walk off the last of the wild turkey your great-uncle Alfred shot on Christmas Day in your very own “handcrafted” National Trust boots complete with “iconic oak leaf print”. Striding across the bracken in your gillet. Red of cheek and stout of heart as you take in the sweeping acres of your ancient family seat. Yours for only £110.
Or, if you’re pitcturing more of an urban setting for your fête de Noël this year, why not pop on a pair of the NT’s ‘Hunter Chelsea Field Boot’ – which mixes the rugged durability of a outsdoorsmen's boot, with the sleek lines and elegant profile of Chelsea’s most famous export since Spencer Matthews. A bargain at £95.
There’s also something called a ‘gardener's clog’ but, frankly, Society Diary has grown so weak and weary of writing about Christmas already, that it can barely muster the enthusiasm to be annoyed anymore. £60.
All proceeds go to the Trust, probably. Although, to be fair, the website says nothing of the sort.
Fundraising washing machines
At a CSM conference yesterday, charity tech enthusiast Rhodri Davies apparently said that in the not-too-distant future, people will be able to use artificial intelligence to have their washing machine donate money to charity. It may or may not involve blockchain, that up-and-coming technology which will simultaneously be transformative to the sector while incomprehensible to literally everybody.
Now, Diary wasn’t there, so can’t be entirely sure what else was said. But that little sliver of information was enough to envision a not-too-distant dystopian future, in which your washing machine might be the one writing into the Daily Mail to complain about being harassed by techno-chuggers *, tapping into its mainframe through the 5G to get at its cryptocurrency. Or something.
The future is here. Washing machines control your finances and give it all away to the Dogs Trust.
* We know you'd like us to call them face-to-face fundraisers, but we'd like to argue, in this instance, that this term doesn't really apply if you're asking a washing machine for money. Face-to-door?
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