A Year of Doing Good Page 9
‘You can handle presentations to the City,’ I tell her. ‘Are you willing to dress up as a talking strawberry?’ and it is her turn to inhale lemon frosting.
Good deed no. 78: gave away my spa voucher for a glass of champagne when I really wanted it.
Sunday, 20 March
Sophie’s favourite place in the spa was the gym; mine was a slumber room with massage chairs which knead you from your calves up to your skull. That’s the theory. I went in and sat on one and they have little displays with arrows so you can raise and lower the footrest, and raise and lower the seat back. Bliss. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can have been doing it right, because I turned it on, raised the legs, lowered the back, started the massage and it worked for ten seconds before the legs slowly lowered themselves back down, which made reaching for the display difficult. I just about managed, raised the legs again, lowered the back again and started the massaging. It was great for another ten seconds, before the legs went slooooooowly back down. Undeterred, because I am that kind of gal, I raised the seat back and raised the legs again and started the massage and down went the bloody legs. I was determined to relax even if it killed me, so I did this about half a dozen times in this completely quiet room before the other guests began staring. Eventually, I stood up and slunk out, trying hard to look as if I hadn’t really wanted a massage anyway.
Later, Sophie told me she was prompted to do a good deed because of my resolution. She was travelling through Charles de Gaulle airport on business and noticed a Canadian woman panting with distress and on the point of tears. She said she would have walked by her normally in the way that British people do when confronted by emotion, but instead, she stopped and lent her a phone to ring the people who were meeting her, and then escorted her right through to the other end of the airport where her worried friends were waiting on yellow lines. The woman kissed her on the cheek and waved at her madly as they drove off.
Good deed no. 79: gave £1 to Marie Curie (I know – pathetic. I thought about dragging a homeless person off the streets and insisting they go to the spa instead of me – but I didn’t think about it for long).
Monday, 21 March
Good deed no. 80: fed the hungry (palmed all-day breakfast sandwich off on a student. I am pretty sure he didn’t want it, he just had very good manners).
Tuesday, 22 March
I want a bank willing to take in the jars of coins, count them and deposit them with the charity’s account. I emailed Barclays back after they sent me a brush-off message which included the warning there would be a charge for counting the money if the hospice didn’t already bank with them. I very politely highlighted the fact that most people think bankers are tossers (I didn’t use the word ‘tosser’, I said banks and bankers were ‘unfortunately at an all-time nadir re reputation’) and perhaps they might like to be tied to a ‘major charitable initiative’? If we had a bank involved, we could go national. We will see what they say.
I also contacted a jam manufacturer to ask them to put us on their labels – that way, people have a ready-made, labelled jam jar all ready to fill with money as soon as they eat their jam. Win-win for the jam manufacturer. They get to be a good guy, people eat their jam and the jar sits on their kitchen counter as a reminder to buy more jam. There is an outside chance the people on the other end of these missives think I’m mad.
Am I mad?
While I was watching Comic Relief, which made a grand total of more than £74m, I was thinking about the fact I was trying to do something similar but with an empty jam jar and even if I get 1,000 people to do it and they raise around £3 each in their jam jar, that is still only £3,000.
Good deed no. 81: lent £100 to a broke friend.
Wednesday, 23 March
Good deed no. 82: lent £20 to another mother who came out without her purse at the supermarket. I should set up my own bank and open a branch up a hill. They could call it Brokebank Mountain.
Thursday, 24 March
After I did the school drop-off, I met with Tom, a young graphic designer who has agreed to help with the Jam Jar Army. His graphic design company Chunky Orange is down a little alleyway off the main street in the local market town in rooms which have the feel of the upstairs offices of a bank. The windows were too high to see out of, but the office was light and spacious and the desks enormous. I was tempted to ask him if he’d ever shagged on his desk, it was so big, but bearing in mind I hadn’t met him before and he might have got the wrong idea, I resisted. I have, however, dangled the prospect of heaven in front of him on the grounds that raising money for charity is the ‘right thing to do’, and he says he thinks it sounds like a wacky idea.
We were exactly like Mad Men only we had instant coffee instead of Martinis and Greggs raspberry jam doughnuts instead of more Martinis. Tom is a one-man band, apart from a junior and a chap he brings in occasionally to do PR stuff, so part of me feels bad asking him to do something for free. However, it is a creative project which would be interesting to work on – particularly if we put together a trailer. Tom is suggesting a little jam jar man with arms and legs (I definitely had money on the talking, walking strawberry). We played around with a few ideas and whittled it down to Geordie the jam jar being like a family pet, miserable if he’s empty but perky, perky, perky if you fill him up with coins. I really need these graphics in place. That way, when I approach the banks and jam manufacturers, I’ll come across as much less of an eccentric – or perhaps I will just come across as an eccentric with a website.
Good deed no. 83: took two fire logs into my neighbour Stephanie’s house so she can light a fire as soon as she arrives with her aged mother.
Friday, 25 March
I have been writing about Bob Geldof for the Sunday Times Rich List, which has involved researching all the Band Aid and Live Aid stuff. Geldof saw reports about starving Africans on the BBC, and decided to use his fame and contacts to do something about it. So there’s me and a jam jar and there is Bob Geldof and Live Aid. Perhaps I could persuade the jam jar to sing. He could put out a single at Christmas. Perhaps I could get Geldof to bring out a single with the jam jar.
This evening I started sewing my charity elephant. I picked up the pattern and the cut-out pieces of cloth yesterday after I popped into the hospice to discuss my jam jar brainwave. I met Angela, one of the fund-raisers there, and she didn’t laugh at me, which is always good. She did, however, say the hospice sent out 1,000 little cardboard collection boxes last year and had a 2 per cent return. Two per cent – that is a return of twenty boxes. They aren’t doing it again because it wasn’t cost-effective. Angela was making me a cup of tea while she broke the news. Bearing in mind I was in a hospice, which is like being in a church, I refrained from shouting ‘Bugger’ very loudly. What happens if I get a 2 per cent return on the jam jars? If I got 1,000 out in the first phase a 2 per cent return with an average of £5 a jar would be £100.
While I was at the hospice, Angela gave me an elephant to sew. The material is cotton with a peachy-pink candy stripe down it and scattered wisteria. A volunteer called Susan Taylor along with forty other volunteers raised £2,000 with these toy elephants, all made with different scraps of cloth and put up for ‘adoption’ when finished. You are supposed to do a master class in elephant sewing, but I thought, ‘I don’t need a course to make an elephant. I can sew an elephant no problemo.’ Except I put it together tonight and when I’d finished my eight-year-old son casually remarked, ‘You’ve sewed it inside out, Mummy’ and I had. Which might be why my husband offered me a paltry £5 for it, despite the fact it took me hours. Hours of my life I won’t get back.
Good deed no. 84.
Saturday, 26 March
This morning, I did my most self-righteous good deed to date: I rang the police. I was taking my little girl to dancing first thing when a woman flagged me down so I didn’t hit a little red car which was reversing out of a stone wall, or what used to be a stone wall. I parked, leaving my daughter in the back, an
d walked up.
There were two women huddled together by their car, which was parked up on the other side of the road, as a stunned-looking man walked round the red car and peeled all the lower half of it away. The younger woman said to me in hushed tones that the bloke had been hanging upside down in the car when they’d come across the accident. At this point, the bloke gets back into the car and acts as if he is going to drive away, no harm, no foul – give or take a wrecked car and an enormous hole in somebody else’s wall.
The driver’s door was entirely caved in and there was no glass left in it. I bent down to talk to him and said in my most reasonable, caring and considerate voice that I didn’t think he was in any fit state to drive away. He didn’t speak, he just shook his head. I said I thought he was in shock and suggested he get out of the car and have a cup of sweet tea in a nearby cottage, but he shook his head again. I asked him his name and there was a long pause while he tried to remember, then he said he would drive the car to the garage up the A1. I kid you not – I wasn’t entirely sure the car wouldn’t collapse like a Keystone Cops car if he started the engine. I told him that it wasn’t a good idea for him to drive on the A1, but he said he knew a friend in the next village and he’d drive to him and then on to the garage the back way.
He wouldn’t call the local mechanic to recover him and when I asked his friend’s name, there was another long pause while he struggled to remember that too. He made as if to go again and I said I really didn’t think it was a good idea because he was definitely in shock and what about other cars coming in the opposite direction? If he’d had a window in his car door, I suspect he would have wound it up at this point. As it was, he ignored me and drove off so I borrowed a mobile from another driver who’d stopped and rang the police.
Afterwards I wasn’t sure if I’d done the right thing because I didn’t want to get the driver into trouble, but I know people in that village too. He was in no condition to drive, his car certainly wasn’t roadworthy, and what happens if you just let someone drive off and then they drive straight into another car full of children? Priggery? Active citizenry? It’s a narrow line.
Good deed no. 85.
Sunday, 27 March
Good deed no. 86: stood back and let a customer go in front of us in a café, despite acute and desperate need for coffee.
Monday, 28 March
Barclays have sent another email re the Jam Jar Army telling me thanks but no thanks. The ‘community adviser’ told me she had ‘referred your email to quite a number of people in the team and also the business’. She carried on: ‘I am therefore unable to advise anything further. I do hope that you have success when contacting the charities direct as they may deal with this situation regularly and be able to offer advice through their own experiences. Good luck with all your fund-raising.’ Yeah, right.
Good deed no. 87: arranged to have a child for tea when his mum is in hospital next week for an operation.
Tuesday, 29 March
The expat woman has flown back to South Africa for a couple of days to tie up a few loose ends, so I invited the expat man round for a dinner of steak and salad and French fries. I’m worried about him being lonely. This is the first time since I was a kid that I’ve had relatives living close by, and I feel a sense of responsibility. They would both shriek like shiny blue parakeets in a hot and tangled jungle if they heard me say it, because for thirty-five years they lived joyous, entirely independent, contained lives on the far side of the world, distant from any kith or kin but each other. It is true, though. It has been interesting watching the children’s relationship with them develop. It strikes me that if you are willing to love a child, the child will love you back: the best sort of bargain.
Good deed no. 88.
Wednesday, 30 March
Good deed no. 89: lent expat man a bottle of milk.
Thursday, 31 March
Incredibly windy day – the noise through the leafless trees to the side of the cottage is like an aircraft landing. The banks that hem the hawthorn hedgerows are decked gold with daffodils and the fields are filling up with tiny skippety lambs, but it is so cold and so windy that it doesn’t feel like spring at all.
En route home from school yesterday we passed a copse of sycamore and ash, and my eight-year-old son insisted on stopping to watch the ambling, gambolling lambs.
‘They’re incredibly cute when they’re little and not cute at all when they grow up,’ he mused.
I said: ‘The same goes for people, kiddo.’
I do love it when the lambs arrive, but you have to distance yourself from the reality of their certain fate – mind you, that’s also true of people. I was considering rustling a lamb as a good deed, but then it would grow up into a sheep and what do I do with a sheep? It’s not like it would pay its way – not unless I pimped it out to those with strange tastes. I could perhaps send it to tap-dancing lessons with my daughter, film it and turn it into a YouTube sensation. Would it be a good deed anyway if I steal someone’s lamb? Perhaps I could buy one and set it free in the wild. Are there sheep sanctuaries in the same way as there are donkey sanctuaries? Perhaps it is like those sci-fi movies you watch occasionally – somewhere beyond the pastureland there is rumoured to be a place of safety for sheep, where they can live without fear of the slaughterman, they just have to make a run for it when they reach a certain age.
Later, I googled sheep sanctuaries and sure enough there is an American one with pictures of sheep at sunset pootling through sun-dappled woodland. It even quotes Gandhi: ‘To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I should be unwilling to take the life of a lamb for the sake of the human body.’
Still, I’d never get a lamb through customs.
Good deed no. 90: sent fantastic scriptwriting book called Save the Cat to media student who half wants to be a scriptwriter.
Friday, 1 April
There are many glorious things about living in Northumberland and one of them has to be the weekly newspaper, the Northumberland Gazette. Last week it started a campaign against dogs pooing everywhere with a lovely picture of a squishy poo. This week it has not one but two full-colour pictures of dog poo on the front page. Presumably there is some poor photographer out night and day looking for the fattest, chunkiest poos they can find. It’s a good job the Gazette doesn’t have scratch and sniff. The story also quotes some poor public-spirited citizen wandering the mean streets with plastic bags and rubber gloves picking up the bagged poo. Should I join her as a good deed? Let me think about that for thirty seconds … No.
Mother’s Day service in church this evening. We parked up along the narrow lane with the car almost in the hedge and half walked, half ran through the lychgate and up the trodden-down earth path through the graveyard. We were late – we are always late for some reason to do with the fact we cannot ever be on time, so we had to sit at the back, which made it utterly impossible to hear a word any of the children were saying. The prayer of penitence was apposite – though downbeat. ‘You call us to do good. We seek our own good. Christ have mercy.’ I really don’t want to end up getting religion big-time because of my goody two-shoes experiment. I’ve got just enough, like salt in cabbage water – if I can liken my life to cabbage water without wanting to kill myself.
My younger son had written a limerick and a poem. According to the limerick I’m a ‘great mummy who laughs like a bunny’, which is nice though not entirely flattering, while the poem has me as a ‘love spreader, me hugger, great mum, house cleaner and children lover’. Not sure about the house cleaner bit either, but it will have impressed the other mothers. My little girl had painted a picture of me with enormous ears, eyes like a black furry spider and a down-turned mouth. One of the teachers said sweetly it looked just like me, and I scowled at her with my mean spider eyes and my down-turned mouth. I’d really like to put the picture up, but I look so damned miserable in it. Overleaf, my little girl had written:
My muymmy lucks reft me
(My mummy looks after me)
anb my mummys cisis me (and my mummy kisses me)
Sigh.
Technically, I did two good deeds. I picked up litter again en route to the service when we were waiting at a level crossing – not dog poo, though, I have my standards. Some louts had picnicked, carefully bagged up their sandwich wrappers, tinnies and the like in a plastic bag, tidily knotted it and promptly lobbed it right by the crossing into a bush. If you are going to throw rubbish away in the countryside, why bag it first? Why not go the whole hog and scatter it merrily, whistling an Olde Englishe folk tune. The children are getting used to me screeching to a halt, climbing out of the car and picking up litter out of hedges. At least they didn’t complain this time. A bigger good deed, though, was after the Mother’s Day service.
We were rewarded for our attention with tea and an iced biscuit, and since we were at the back in prime position next to the steaming urn, my husband went off sharpish to get me a cup of tea and then handed it across to me over the oak pews. My husband is a very good hunter-gatherer. Despite the fact I was parched, I gave the tea to another mother. Over her head, my husband raised his eyebrow and shook his head as if to say, ‘I got that for you, you dope.’ I am not convinced he is all that keen on my good deeds. He thinks our life is complicated enough, what with my extended family, and insistence on friends and emotional connectedness, let alone the good deeds. Men like to keep things simple: ‘I man. You woman. These children. We eat now. We sleep now. We do coochy-coochy now. Me just check on football score.’