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I once worked for BBC Children in Need mostly assessing applications for funding but also persuading my children I was moonlighting as Pudsey. I semi-convinced them on the grounds that you never saw me and Pudsey together in the same room. The youngest child once offered to poke me in the eye to prove my identity.
Now Pudsey’s being re-branded and re-launched which is painful for any animal, including The Yella Fella. He goes from this:
to this:
He’ll be able to move as well. Design Week quoted the firm responsible for the new look: ‘Pudsey is a fantastic icon but needed to be refreshed to work in all spaces. It was important to give him a new energy, while maintaining the heritage of BBC Children in Need’.
A heavy load for one bear to carry, especially for one who takes the eye out of Icon.
All the best to BBC Children in Need for the 2007 appeal. They give some great grants and genuinely work hard to make sure the money gets spent well. They’re less prone to projectitis than other funders and are often prepared to keep faith with causes and organisations that might get overlooked or trampled in the pursuit of the latest thing.
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Now playing: The Velvet Underground – Who Loves The Sun
via FoxyTunes
Carers week is 11-17 June.
Carers often don’t considered themselves ‘carers’. They’re getting on with looking after someone they love and care for, rather than doing it because of a special label. More needs to be done to make their lives easier. There are some networks looking out for those that do the looking after. We’ve worked with groups of young carers who are looking after family members whilst also getting themselves through school.
Sarah Jane Wood is 17 and looks after a Mum with cerebral palsy and a Dad with Crohn’s disease who’s had kidney and heart failure. She’s been a carer since she could walk.
‘Young carers should be paid, but we aren’t. We save the government loads of money because of that. Adult carers can get money, even if they work full-time. It doesn’t weigh up.’
‘I’ve done my back in, helping Mum up. Last year I strained my spine and had to stand totally upright for weeks. I’ve not been shown how to pick her up properly, I missed the course because I was doing my GSCEs. I’ve not been given training in anything.’
Full interview at: This Much I Know – The Observer
More about carers week here
How to find the real charitable you.
Intelligent Giving has a quiz going. They’ve had a deep look into my soul and have realised what others have so far missed… I am Angelina Jolie.
Epitaph on my own Friend
An honest man here lies at rest,
As e’er God with his image blest;
The friend of man, the friend of truth,
The friend of age, and guide of youth:
Few hearts like his, with virtue warm’d,
Few heads with knowledge so inform’d;
If there’s another world, he lives in bliss;
If there is none, he made the best of this.
Robert Burns
A friend and colleague, Luke FitzHerbert, died three weeks ago and his wife, Kay, sustained serious injuries. A tragedy. Those who knew him were genuinely rocked by the news. The Robert Burns piece was included in one of the tributes paid to him and it made sense to post it tonight.
Luke was a one-off. He made a room better for being in it. He was charming, generous and challenging when you needed to be pushed a bit. We wrote books with him, trained with him and agitated with him in many conference centres, town halls and seminar rooms throughout the country and beyond, especially London, Liverpool and Hungary. He was good enough to believe in us when we started out and encouraged us to make things happen.
He believed in the power of individuals to change the world for the better. And that made all the difference.
Kay wrote after the accident: As Luke would want I am being as positive as I can and concentrating, not on my loss, but on my rare good fortune in sharing 43 exciting years with such a dazzling man.
Urban Strawberry Lunch put the rap into scrap, or the funk into junk etc. They are a bit elusive, but here’s proof of them competing with large amounts of scaffolding and noise in Liverpool. Just shows what a rubbish grant can do…
Bono’s been speaking to his homeboy Bush at a prayer breakfast. It’s likely it’s not a prayer breakfast in the Cistercian tradition.
The full text was on Jim Wallis’ site, who was also quoted at the weekend in connection with another homeboy Gordon Brown.
“Look, whatever thoughts you have about God, who He is or if He exists, most will agree that if there is a God, He has a special place for the poor. In fact, the poor are where God lives.
Check Judaism. Check Islam. Check pretty much anyone.
I mean, God may well be with us in our mansions on the hill. I hope so. He may well be with us as in all manner of controversial stuff. Maybe, maybe not. But the one thing we can all agree, all faiths and ideologies, is that God is with the vulnerable and poor.
God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them. “If you remove the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the finger and speaking wickedness, and if you give yourself to the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then your light will rise in darkness and your gloom with become like midday and the Lord will continually guide you and satisfy your desire in scorched places.”
It’s not a coincidence that in the scriptures, poverty is mentioned more than 2,100 times. It’s not an accident. That’s a lot of air time, 2,100 mentions. (You know, the only time Christ is judgmental is on the subject of the poor.) ‘As you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me’ (Matthew 25:40). As I say, good news to the poor.
Here’s some good news for the president. After 9/11 we were told America would have no time for the world’s poor. America would be taken up with its own problems of safety. And it’s true these are dangerous times, but America has not drawn the blinds and double-locked the doors.
In fact, you have doubled aid to Africa. You have tripled funding for global health. Mr. President, your emergency plan for AIDS relief and support for the Global Fund – you and Congress – have put 700,000 people onto life-saving anti-retroviral drugs and provided 8 million bed nets to protect children from malaria.
Outstanding human achievements. Counterintuitive. Historic. Be very, very proud.
But here’s the bad news. From charity to justice, the good news is yet to come. There is much more to do. There’s a gigantic chasm between the scale of the emergency and the scale of the response.
And finally, it’s not about charity after all, is it? It’s about justice.
Let me repeat that: It’s not about charity, it’s about justice.”
He goes on to say how the challenge of justice remains when there is a ‘monthly tsunami’ in Africa as 150,000 die from preventable disease. The challenge of Justice remains especially for those who get to the frontierland Charity, set up their stall and stay there. Justice needs pioneers rather than settlers.
I lost some text last year on charity and justice that got swallowed up into the digital Mariana Trench. Apologies to the reading several who’ve seen it before, but it’s worth having it again anyway:
Charity
Charity is social service
Charity promotes direct services
food, clothing, shelterCharity responds to immediate needs
Charity is directed at the effects of
injustice, its symptoms. It addresses
problems that already exist.
Otherwise put: LOVE MOPS UPCharity is private, individual acts.
Examples of charity: homeless
shelters, prison visiting, provision of
material or funds for the poor.
Justice
Justice is social change. Justice
promotes social change in institutions
or political structures.Justice responds to long-term needs.
Justice is directed at the root causes of
social problmes. it addresses the
underlying structures or causes of these problems. Otherwise put:
JUSTICE TRIES TO MAKE SURE THE MESS ISN’T MADE TO BEGIN WITH.
Justice is public, collective actions.
Examples of justice: legislative
advocacy, changing policies and practices, political action.
(Tim Duffy: Justice and Peace Scotland magazine)
The DaDaAwards evening last night staged by the North West Disability Arts Forum was great fun and polemical with verbal slaps adminstered to a City Council that has only just appointed one disability inclusion officer, when it should have at least three. Not easy to be the council chief executive sitting there, black tied and a bit red faced.
Adam Reynolds who died earlier this year was honoured with a lifetime achievement award. Born with muscular dystrophy and not expected to live beyond his teens he defied all predictions to produce sculpture and public installations that survive him and are seen daily by many, not as the work of a disabled artist, but as art.
There is something very poignant in the creation of substantial sculptures born out of a life that was fragile. Adam said “I am clear that my greatest strengths stem from the fact of being born with muscular dystrophy, apparently my greatest weakness”
This came to my attention:
Strangely enough Snoopy’s theology of ‘Has it ever occurred to you that you might be wrong?’ didn’t appear to be among the spinal inches on show at Gladstone’s library at St Deiniol’s visited in the line of duty today. It’s a miniature Trinity College, Dublin or Bodleian with a pinch of Hogwarts thrown in.
Gladstone had a vision of creating a reading, thinking and writing space for ’scholars committed to serious and solid work for the benefit of mankind in inexpensive lodgings together with congenial society’. To this end he bequeathed his library of around 32,000 books and wheeled them himself in a barrow from Harwarden Castle to his new library. He read over 20,000 of the titles, and as an anal-retentive type must have kept a list of what he’d read so those who came after him would know how literary minded he’d been. Assuming he didn’t leave his mother’s womb reading Homer or Dante and we start him as a reader at say four years of age, he read around 238 books each year to get to his overall total.
Is this possible? He kept a diary allocating his use of time very carefully and worked 16 hour days, but is it possible to really read 238+ books in a year? Did he have lean years where he only managed 100 or so volumes and had to make up the deficit the following year with a reading list of 300 or 400+? Were some very, very slim like his own 29 page book On Books and the Housing of Them?
There are now around a quarter of a million books at the library – too many even for Gladstone’s speed-reading – still leaving room for a Peanuts, Schulz or Charlie Brown who aren’t in the catalogue yet.
