Hippo

Read about this charity which aims to encourage/enable third world (for which read Africa i think) farmers/families to grow produce they can eat directly rather than feed to animals, which are seen as destructive to the crops barely surviving on impoverished soils. As a veggie that sounds very appealing (last Oxfam goat i gift-wrap at xmas for sure!) so i am trying to get an adress & more info from them. Sadly it seems there is no-one free these past 10 days to answer my e-mail and the avowedly vegan website is poor – hand-knitted from soya yoghurt with a sprouted mung-bean border it seems. (Just joking i eat soya yog for brekkie & love bean-sprouts.) Watch this space & i’ll report back.

Miscellaneous

As to mail received since last blog it arrived in couple of lumps due to postal strike so overwhemed me a bit. Anyway, thought i would just write an overview as nothing from charities new to me & i have already commented on each individual charity previously

Cellophane windows - 14 are guilty of this crime. Only one charity was not & ironically that was Age Concern. Ironic as their client group is probably old enough not to have a direct personal interest in whether the planet survives 20 or 50 or 100 years.

 Duplication – Red Cross already on notice after asking me to bail out Tewkesbury et al when Bangladesh almost washed off the map. Is there anyway to stop a charity sending envelopes to me?

Free gifts - Listen up! Even if a gift is useful it is not why i give. I will give if i think the cause/charity is a worthwhile one. Nor will a gift  guilt-trip me into giving if i wouldn’t anyway. 

Address stickers – I am old-fashioned in many ways (eg don’t have a credit card as if a thing is worth having it’s worth waiting for & saving up) so i pay bills by post & even write proper biro on paper letters. I still write thank-you letters too. So i use address stickers more than most perhaps. But even so i am never going to use all the ones i have yet still they send me more! It’s christmassy ones now, twee-er than ever, even tho’ i am with Oliver Cromwell & the unreconstructed Scrooge on this festivity. So all of those, and the cutesy ickle animal ones are gonna be….no i can’t throw things away so i will stick one inside each of  my books. Any ideas on what i do after that, when the deluge continues? Answers on a be-stickered postcard please…

 Oxfam – Plan to spend maybe £200 this xmas on their gift-free gifts and another £100 on direct donations (of which £50 likely to be to the Guardian/Observer Katine scheme). (Give very few actual gifts and thankfully get few – which given the ill-considered crap i received for my recent 50th that really is a blessing as it’s so hard to word the thank-you notes.) But i would love to know why i recieved 2 fat catalogues on the same day?!?

If you have never shopped this way at christmas i promise you it is the best fun you can have laying on the sofa with a galss of Fairtrade wine to hand (okay, second-best fun). Plus as well as getting to feel smug all thru december, not spending hours battling round your local identikit stores buying more of the things which are leading to this planet’s ruin, not having to smuggle a roll of sellotape out of the office and so on, you get a card & fridge magnet for each gift (hmm, yes, they are things too aren’t they…) which you can send to someone. Great fun making them appropriate eg bees for busy person, health check-ups for a nurse, radios for a R4 fan (hint hint),  condoms for a teenager, and a a loo for your nearest & dearest.

Katine Village

This is  a plan (google for details if you do not read The Guardian or The Observer) to support a whole community in every way possible (incl enabling residents to use the ‘net). As i am sure this will be a success, a great thing about it, IMO, is that it is a way of refuting those (Dr Watson are you there?) who see black people as less able to do things for themselves, always needy & helpless. Lets change the circumstances for this community, rebalance the skewed odds, and then watch as their lives blossom. That will then be proof it is not the people who are lacking in any way but that they are battling overwhelming odds.

A bientot…

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