Do you see pictures in your head when you are reading? Yes.
Do you have an imagination? Yes.
Would you like me to stop asking stupid questions? Yes.
Her homework was to watch a movie with her mum and dad and talk through the story with them as it happens on screen. When she writes, I want her to ‘see’ the scenes she is writing in her head, but I don’t know why I even want her to do that – there is nothing to say you can’t write without that happening. What do I know? I’m just pretending to be a teacher.
I have been trying to volunteer with a few charities, although getting nowhere fast. I contacted one charity offering to push the disabled around the Catholic shrine of Lourdes in wheelchairs, but it required a Criminal Records Bureau check that wouldn’t be through in time for their last pilgrimage of the year, so that hasn’t worked. A homelessness charity is sucking its teeth, making ‘I don’t think so’ noises because you have to make a long-term commitment. They need help in the warehouses sorting out the harvest collection of food that’s come in to them from schools and churches, but apparently even that’s ‘problematic’ because of insurance. It’s sorting out tins – what can go wrong? (Unless I decided to make a massive Harvest Festival pyramid of tins, roll the undeserving poor into balls and throw them till not one can was left standing.) And I keep ringing the National Trust but I can’t get through, presumably because they are too busy counting puffins or selling tea-towels. I’m not that convinced I want to get through anyway. They advertised on a website called ‘Do-it’ for help assisting wardens at the seasonal tern-breeding reserve, ‘maintaining security of the nesting sites’. Unfortunately, a. I don’t know what a tern is, and b. they require ‘enthusiasm for the outdoors’ and ‘an element of fitness’.
Good deed no. 286.
Friday, 14 October
Good deed no. 287: pruned roses as a volunteer gardener in Alnwick Garden (a registered charity) and gave a handful of the rosebuds to Cecily, the Salvation Army veteran.
Saturday, 15 October
Good deed no. 288: went to two coffee mornings: one for League of Friends of the Hospital and one for Save the Children.
Sunday, 16 October
Good deed no. 289: sent an old mobile phone to the Salvation Army in an envelope.
Monday, 17 October
Good deed no. 290: pruned roses in Alnwick Garden.
Tuesday, 18 October
Have been trying all day to persuade people to let me do good. Why is this so hard? My initial meeting was with a refugee charity. The house is discreet, a former vicarage tucked away behind a church and down a little path with a five-barred gate, all in the middle of rows and rows of terraced houses in a northern city. It was busy even at eleven in the morning with serious-looking men of every shade and nationality making cups of tea and talking to the helpers. They all seemed to be wearing woolly jumpers and those thin blouson jackets that never keep you warm.
Admittedly, it is difficult because I’m not offering a long-term commitment, I’m saying, ‘Here I am – I want to do a good deed. Go on, let me,’ and I understand people who devote their entire lives to hopeless causes can be flummoxed by a wham-bam good-deed girl like myself. That said, cor blimey. The voluntary sector. You would think a good deed is as good as money in the bank. Not so.
The conversation with the director of this particular refugee charity must have lasted a good hour. If I’d been willing to fund-raise (I already have the Jam Jar Army) or set up a library of books from around the nations (shoot me now), it might have been simpler. There was a reluctance to allow me to ‘befriend’ a refugee because that’s to do with developing a supportive relationship with someone. I can understand that, but what I can offer is a break for someone. I had in mind the fact I’ve a spare bedroom with its own en suite, and I live by the sea in one of the most beautiful parts of the world. Why not send a family to me for a long weekend or a week or a fortnight? Why not get some woman and her children out of some inner-city rat-hole and let them draw breath? Let her kids play with my kids. Let them eat at my table. Let’s walk by the sea together. It’s not much in the scheme of things, but I would have thought it would be better than nothing.
The fact I write about things is immensely complicating. ‘This is just a social experiment, isn’t it?’ the director said disapprovingly, and I wanted to say, Life is a social experiment, isn’t it? When I made the point any guest would be giving as well as receiving – sharing their experience of life as a refugee as well as taking the hospitality offered, she made the point that her charity gives without asking anything back. We went round and round in circles chasing down the ethics of good deeds when a book was involved, and comparing it to a student doing a thesis, who she seemed to think was somehow a much cleaner creature – forget the self-interest of a Ph.D., ignore all ambitions to work in academia or the voluntary sector. ‘I’m nearly there,’ she said at one point as I attempted to persuade her that I would help rather than harm. Really? I wanted to reply. Because over here I’m giving up the will to live.
She wants to make the world a better place, and it turns out that such people are very hard to deal with. We finished up by her saying she would discuss it with her staff, and put it to a client. Then I’m nearly out the door and she starts talking about the ‘destitute’ – those refugees who apply for asylum status and get turned down. All benefits stop; they depend on £15 a week from the charity. It used to be £10 and a bag of food, but the refugees have to go out to the coast to check in with the immigration service so said they needed the extra £5 more than the bag of food. ‘Send me the destitute, then,’ I said – ‘I want to help.’ I bet she won’t.
Good deed no. 291: took a friend’s daughter who has just started at university out to tea. (An unexpected perk of growing up is getting to know the children of your friends. You have your friend whom you love, and with them the child of your friend who comes free, like a teabag Sellotaped to a packet of tea.)
Wednesday, 19 October
Very good news: another approach from a Sainsbury’s store, this one in Hull, saying they are interested in taking on the Jam Jar Army to raise funds through schools for Humber Rescue, the inshore lifeboat rescue service on the Humber Estuary. I am not sure what if anything happened with the Sainsbury’s stores down south and in Scotland. But I have advised Patteson’s (the Grimsby-based glass jar manufacturer), who sent me through the literature they are using to launch a ‘Wish in a Jar’ campaign in their own community to raise money for the charity When You Wish Upon a Star. The charity treats children with life-threatening or terminal illnesses to experiences like fighting Darth Vader, swimming with dolphins or meeting Simon Cowell. (I would have thought meeting Simon Cowell would finish you off, but there you go.) Their campaign, which is due to launch next year, is great. Brand-wise, it’s not as light-hearted as the Jam Jar Army. Instead of a little Geordie the Jam Jar character, they have blue and turquoise stars falling into a jar and it’s all very arty and professional, with a design company pulling it together rather than me and whoever is standing next to me at any one time. I feel like the Jam Jar Army had a baby and I’m jealous of it.
Sophie has made an amazingly generous offer to top us up to the £10,000 target. If I agree to take it, we have officially hit our target. My problem is – is it a cheat? And if it is a cheat, does it matter? A lady in Sophie’s accounts department died of cancer very suddenly – eight weeks from diagnosis to death, with her last week spent in a hospice – and my mate maintains that she wants to give more to charity and that she said from the start she wanted to be supportive of what I am doing. Perhaps I am being ridiculously purist: the Jam Jar Army always was about people giving what they can afford at a time of their own choosing; and Sophie, who is a brilliant businesswoman, can afford to give, no question. Plus she is doing a belting good deed. But it was also supposed to be a grass-roots campaign with everyone giving a little, and there is a good chance a big-buck donation compromises that. Then
again, I haven’t solicited the money and if it was just any old businessman off the street, I would be biting his hand off. I’m still thinking it through. God, I am turning into an ethical third-sector nitwit.
Good deed no. 292: OK’d new Sainsbury’s store taking up the Jam Jar Army in aid of Humber Rescue.
Thursday, 20 October
Cancelled Cryssie’s writing lesson today. I am fed up chasing a halo.
I was knee-deep in empty jam jars and plastic bags of coppers in my kitchen this morning when I rang the hospice to ask them for the official Jam Jar Army running total. I estimate that with the money we have got in the kitchen which we are about to take in, we have just under £7,000. (I didn’t mention the offer by Sophie because I want to talk it through with the Gazette editor.) When I told Angela, the nice fund-raiser from the hospice, that I thought we stood at about £7,000 currently, she said with a note of regret in her voice: ‘It’s not coming in as fast as you thought it would, is it?’ I could have beaten the phone to death on the windowsill right then and there.
Good deed no. 293: pinged through a couple of ideas to the refugee society re political lobbying on accommodation crisis and getting in clothes for refugees (which they are short of).
Friday, 21 October
I was so annoyed yesterday at the comment about how slow the money is coming in that I ended up emailing the hospice to tell them they shouldn’t be disappointed, because I wasn’t (this is a lie), that the campaign was one more way of raising the hospice’s profile (which is true), and to reassure them that the £10k would definitely come in, ‘perhaps sooner than you think. All will be well, as they say.’ I checked out my ‘all will be well’ assurance later, and it turns out I had corrupted it from the fourteenth-century mystic the Lady Julian of Norwich, who originally said, ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.’ Julian of Norwich chose life as an anchoress, living enclosed in a doorless cell attached to a church. (No one knows her real name, but the church was named after St Julian, hence ‘the Lady Julian’.) The cell had three windows: one into the church, one her servant could use to pass food, and one for visitors to speak and pray with her. Her book Revelations of Divine Love is the first to have been written in English by a woman and was written years after a series of ‘revelations’ or ‘showings’ centring on the Passion which she experienced after falling very ill. She maintained God is all about love and wishes to enfold us in rest and peace. Even my clichés are getting mystic on me.
I got a response from the nice fund-raiser at the hospice saying she was sorry she’d been ‘off’, and assuring me she really wasn’t disappointed, it was all ‘Fab’, she was an impatient person and she wasn’t up to speed because she had just got back from chemo. I’d be impatient if I had a life-threatening disease. It goes to prove you shouldn’t sweat the small stuff, and I do sometimes. I go round and round obsessing about something which next month or next year won’t even show up as a flaw in the pattern of my life’s silk carpet. I am fortunate. I am not sitting outside a radiotherapy unit waiting for someone I love to come out. I am not thousands of miles away from home with £15 in my pocket to last me all week, looking up at the skies wondering whether it will rain and where I will sleep tonight. I have family who love me, I have family to love, I have friends who cradle me in a crisis and who share my joys. ‘All manner of thing shall be well.’ Julian of Norwich told me that.
Good deed no. 294: helped out in the bar/refreshment kiosk in the village community centre for a movie-night experiment. Tea with cups and saucers, and gin and tonics without a proper measure.
Saturday, 22 October
Did an afternoon shift at the local cottage hospital in the League of Friends shop, which is open three afternoons a week. Over the last decade the League has raised £138,171 for the hospital, not just through the shop but also through events such as coffee mornings, bag packs and donations – with £40,000 spent on a minibus, £719 on an organ for the day room, £20,000 on endoscopes and £44 on vases for wards. Better than any of that, I got to wear a tabard. I don’t think I have ever worn a tabard before – it made me feel capable and sensible, like someone you could ask directions from.
There is something quietly thrilling about selling Lucozade and Fruit Pastilles, although no one was very interested in our chintzy notelet and diary sets, or the various leather goods on offer. I wanted to buy one of everything – a change purse, a comb and holder, a folding key case with small hooks, a small notebook and pen, an address book – because I loved them all. It would be like being one of the world’s top athletes sponsored by Coca-Cola, except I’d have bought everything and they wouldn’t say Coca-Cola, they’d say ‘Friends of Alnwick Hospitals’ in gilt lettering.
My companion Anne, who has macular degeneration like my mother and remains equally undaunted, wheeled the trolley of fruit gums and toiletries to the ward. I wasn’t allowed, because Matron said I couldn’t go up without a Criminal Records Bureau check. Presumably the authorities are worried in case I molest somebody’s grandad or steal an old dear’s purse. I am a middle-aged mother of three with a Samaritan complex. I am pretty confident that if you got your thrills from preying on hospitalized geriatrics, it would show in your day-to-day approach to life and an uncontrollable twitch.
While the lovely Anne was away, I sorted through second-hand books for gory crime novels for a patient, because other people dying is really what you want to read about when you are sick. And as I was sorting through the thrillers, an old lady passed by with a friend, and she was saying to the friend, ‘I haven’t had a visitor all week – I’ve seen no one.’ Then Anne came back from her rounds and searched the shelves for Steradent for some chap on the wards who’d said he was desperate to clean his teeth, which made me wonder if he too was waiting for visitors who didn’t come. We couldn’t find any, so I rang Al to pop to Boots and bring in a tube when he picked me up. ‘You want a packet of Steradent?’ he said. ‘For cleaning your false teeth?’ ‘I do,’ I said. ‘I only dropped you off a few hours ago. Have you actually been fitted with false teeth since then?’ he said. It seemed too complicated to explain, so I just said yes, I was looking at my dentures as I spoke and I was smiling.
Good deed no. 295.
Sunday, 23 October
Occasionally the day slips by, it gets late and dark, the children are asleep in bed, I reach for a glass of wine and think, ‘I haven’t done a buggering, bollixing good deed.’ I was at that point tonight when I remembered Barnardo’s wants their sponsors to bond big-time with the child they are sponsoring, and as part of the bonding want you to make your own lollipop stick figure. I am hoping it goes to the child and not to their marketing department. I dug out the children’s art paraphernalia and stuck foam rubber clothes on mine and gave her glittery pipe-cleaner ringlets and a leopard-skin belt. She was called Lulu Lolly. With some reluctance, I slipped her into an envelope back to Barnardo’s – I wanted to keep her, but I figured that would cancel out the goodness.
Good deed no. 296.
Monday, 24 October
Some days people do not want your good deeds. Usually train journeys offer great opportunities to ‘good-deed it’ – you help an old lady off a train, you talk to some harassed mother’s toddler. Today, though, travelling from Northumberland to Leeds, I offered to share my gin and tonic with a girl sitting opposite and got turned down, and then I offered to carry an old man’s case and got turned down for that too.
Good deed no. 297: put change in M&S Railway Children charity tin. (Having checked out the charity, I realize I should have gone hungry and put the money for my gin and tonic into the tin and not just the change. According to the charity, every year 100,000 youngsters under sixteen run away from home, and 30 per cent of Britain’s young runaways are twelve and under. This is a problem with the whole good-deed thing – where do you start? Where do you stop?)
Tuesday, 25 October
The St James’s Institute of Oncology in Leeds
was built at a cost of £220m and is the largest purpose-built cancer centre in Europe. It is attached to the St James’s Infirmary, where this morning I spent a couple of hours sitting around in a coffee shop. I read the paper, did the crossword puzzle, failed to do the sudoku, texted everyone I’d ever met and counted the bald people.
Good deed no. 298: took Dad for a hospital appointment.
Wednesday, 26 October
Good deed no. 299: took £537 of assorted cheques into the hospice. (Total currently stands at £7,132.)
Thursday, 27 October
Kirsty’s knee and her foot are both bad after her knee replacement earlier this year and the amount of driving she is doing, having moved from Edinburgh to some remote Oxfordshire village. Since she is a Catholic, I offered to go with her to Lourdes or Medjugorje, both sites of pilgrimage, as a good deed. I wouldn’t need a criminal records’ check and I could push her round and sprinkle her regularly with holy water and talk loudly on her behalf when anyone stopped us to pass the time of day. There was a pause on the other end of the phone and a snort of what might have been laughter. ‘That’s a serious offer,’ I said, all persuasive and honeyed. ‘The two of us together on a road trip. Like Thelma and Louise, but holier.’ ‘It’s fair to say you haven’t grasped the idea of Lourdes,’ she said, not sounding at all grateful for the offer, ‘and I wouldn’t want to be next to you when you’re hit by a thunderbolt.’
A Year of Doing Good Page 25
