The austerity programme that’s designed to turn the economy around while coincidentally satisfying many of the Tories’ ambitions on class warfare has seen some tremendous successes. Not economically, obviously – it’s a disaster by about every measure imaginable – but in screwing over poor people, vital services and basic hope.
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As I’ve often said, I very much believe the children are our future. Teach them well, I’ve often said, and thereafter watch them lead the way. I also very much believe when the night falls the loneliness calls. And that you should give me one moment in time.
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When last we met I was banging on about stag nights and homophobic banter, the two intertwined more closely than David Cameron’s tongue and the devil’s dirty bumhole. There was a lot of it kicking about and much of it incredibly immature. I never would have believed the word ‘gaylord’ was still in use, or that if it was it would be used so often, or that if it was and was being used often it would be by full-grown adults, or that if it was and they were they’d be using it on a non-ironic basis. But that’s the thing with homophobia: It’s basically everywhere.
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One thing I’ll tell you: No one gets into social work for the laughs. I’m in about seven months now and it’s been a relentless parade of misery and awfulness, a daily dose of systemic dickery and individual flaws and failure. It’s been punctuated by the occasional bit of progress and improvement, the odd bit of reason to think sometimes it works. I think maybe you have to be in a long time to get enough success to keep you going, to feel you’ve made enough of a difference often enough it counters all the times people charge into their miseries and all you can do is write about it.
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Generally I prefer not to write about current scandals and upsets, I prefer not to jump on media bandwagons or scrap around in tabloid hubbubs. Go too far in that direction you’ll find yourself with a site people think of as relevant, topical and interesting. But these past few weeks, with the death of Jacinta Saldanha, I’ve had suicide on my mind.
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You’ll have noticed I have a kind of love/hate relationship with fundraising, a relationship typified more by hate than by love on account of how I can’t fucking stand it. I can’t stand it on two counts: first, because I want you to give me your money without having to do anything for it; and second, because it brings out the inner twat in otherwise tedious people.
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So there I was, all ready to announce Kiva as the Chazza of the Month for a second non-consecutive time when what should appear but a classic spot of Zero angst? You’ll recall how Kiva is a microfinance outfit offering loans to people in developing countries and how I’ve bigged them up a couple of times already. But after that last rant about payday lenders being arseholes the worries I’ve had about microfinance went from being vague floaty things at the back of my mind to being slightly less vague, marginally firmer things on a list of other things to consider thinking about at some point in time when I can be bothered.
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Having signed up for a life as a Zero I am duty bound to do good, to right wrongs both large and small, to meddle in events both global and local, and to take credit for any good thing that happens within a four mile radius of me and anywhere else in the world and also throughout history. But even with my in-built awesomeness, even with my devotion to the cause, even with my principal principles well in place, these things can drift. People, it’s time for a do-gooding audit!
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The thing with this here social work is you see an awful lot of people’s awful lots in life. The stuff you read about and don’t think about and mostly never see. Child abuse, obviously. Domestic violence, like how we talked about. Poverty. Real poverty. Bare floorboards poverty. Eating food or making rent but never both poverty. Oxfam reckons 1 in 5 people in the UK are living below the poverty line, living hard and unhappy lives made harder and unhappier by cuts to services that mean the help they used to get isn’t around any more.
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When it comes to genitals I’ve got the male set, an untidy cluster of appendages that when looking at the world both past and present generates a sense of embarrassed responsibility, being as how men have been, in general, total shits. Domestic violence is one of their ways of being. We’re talking controlling behaviour, financial dickery, manipulation, intimidation and threats, building to physical and sexual assault and murder. Women’s Aid reckons there are 13 million incidents of domestic violence every year, that one in four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime, that every week two are killed by their current or ex-partners.
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Fans of our regular Charity of the Month feature will have been dismayed, possibly distraught, probably driven to homicidal rampages, to note its absence in February, March and the pretty big amount of April we’ve got through so far. As planned all along, I am now proud to announce the first official Charity of the End of Quarter Four Financial Year 2011-2012.
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I was in Amsterdam for new year (tamer than you think) and whiled away my time eating waffles and pancakes and cheese and lusting after the hot dogs my meat-eating companions devoured like shaved lions to a bun-based zebra snack. I did the odd bit of grown up stuff too, looking at buildings what were nice, looking at paintings that were painted good and generally getting cultured up to my tits. The highlight, in a colossally awful, depressing kind of way, was the visit to Anne Frank’s house at Prinsengracht. And so we begin the awkward segue from jokey intro to heartfelt reflection…
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