I decided to spend ten days off my tits with fever, and then most of March struggling to breathe, and then half of April self-isolating while I downgraded my cough from persistent to lingering to socially awkward. It’s been frustrating. But I’ve been up and about for a few weeks now, and the old nagging feeling that I should be doing more is kicking back in.
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As long-time readers/fans/stalkers of The Zero will recall, I recently became fully obsessed with trees. Trees are a relatively recent innovation in which upright wooden cylinders are placed beneath a cluster of small green photosynthesis machines, to both produce oxygen and unproduce carbon dioxide.
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Devoted as you are to yer man The Zero, and as closely as you monitor my good works, you’ll be aware I do the odd bit of fundraising in spite of hating it almost completely. The past few years I’ve been meddling with Yaknak Projects, a small charity set up by a few friends to run two children’s home in Nepal. They need £16,000 a year to keep the homes running, a delightful spot of constant pressure that cheers them greatly.
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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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And so, with 2012 behind us and the Mayans looking like some sort of primitive culture that didn’t have everything figured out and their modern-day followers looking like some sort of bucketload of twats, one’s attention naturally turns to one’s achievements across the year and to the resolutions rushed out in the interests of filling a page.It’s been a bit of a lean year for the old do-gooding, the tail end of the social work degree stealing my time, energy, interest and imagination the way a Kevin Costner movie does.
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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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With the Olympics all done with and the Paralympics prepping itself for interest considerably less feigned than usual, it’s time to reflect on the heroes at whom we marvel, the champions who capture our hearts, the icons who inspire a generation. Jessica Ennis. Usain Bolt. Me.
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