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Oliver Cross: Do right man
WHAT a lovely weekend I had, doing interesting things while feeling as charitable as Jimmy Tarbuck at a charity golf tournament.
It was a shallow-end introduction to charity work, which I suppose means helping people you don't know personally, or, which we'll come to later, supporting likeable insects.
The first was achieved at Mitzvah Day on Sunday, an international do-gooding event, the local version of which was held at the Marjorie and Arnold Ziff Centre in Stonegate Road, Leeds.
(And I can hear you saying 'We don't like do-gooders' but you are wrong – what you don't like, unless you are exceptionally perverse, is do-badders).
The day acts as a sort of favours exchange, where people do favours for others, such as collecting items for Women's Aid, planting communal gardens or doing small tasks for the old and infirm, while rewarding themselves by having a more interesting Sunday than usual and achieving a small bump – well, pimple really – of self-righteousness which is unlikely to go to their head and undo all that good work by making them insufferable.
Last year things went a bit wrong because of my daughter-in-law Sara, a major force (actually, I think that should read the major force, but I don't want to be accused of family boasting) behind Mitzvah Day.
She decided the best Mitzvah task for me, meaning the task where I was least likely to break something or otherwise let myself down, was to help to provide an audience for a series of talks by enthusiasts and specialists, whose own Mitzvah task was to entertain and spread enlightenment, which of course they couldn't do without an audience.
Which sounds like a virtuous circle, but I managed to break it by enjoying the talks too much, thus missing out on the element of self-sacrifice necessary to achieve a Mitzvah favour.
Next year, I will suggest that Sara collects a series of ignoramus speakers with boring or annoying voices and tedious views so the audience will have to suffer to create that sense of virtuousness which can be achieved by failing to strangle someone who deserves it.
On Sunday, though, Lynne and I had the very pleasant task of painting a tiny piece of kitchen wall for a nice old man ('And what's 'old' got to do with it, you ageist pig?') who couldn't do it himself because his eyesight was bad (because of his age, since you ask).
Anyway, it turned out to be an ideal Mitzvah Day task, too small to be done by any public or private organisation but easy enough for any well-meaning amateur to do – a question of mucking in, really, rather than proper charity work.
Now back to likeable insects, in this case bumblebees. From time to time, an organisation called the World of Leather holds a musical evening in the Chemic Tavern in Woodhouse, Leeds, and this time all proceeds (which can't have been much because it was free) went to the Bumblebee Trust, which, I thought, is the sort of charity you have to support, because if you can't trust fluffy and ecologically vital bumblebees, who can you trust?
The event (which included the handing round of bumblebee-friendly flower bulbs) was initially conceived as a homage to Last of the Summer Wine, using musical styles from around the world to express the programme's key motifs, such as falling off wheelbarrows and drinking cups of tea, or indeed drinking tea while falling off wheelbarrows.
Just in time, however, one of the brighter World of Leather executives realised that this was a very, very stupid idea and made it a Bee Night instead.
This opened a huge range of possibilities in selecting items for the musical programme; There'll Always Bee an England, for example, or anything by the Bee Gees.
They even managed to sneak in a very disrespectful version of Blue Moon by adding a verse postulating a homo-erotic attraction between Buzz (as in bee) Aldrin and another member of the Apollo crew on the Moon, which I thought was an awful long way to go for a cheap laugh.
I really don't know, given the World of Leather's impressive range of musical skills, including playing strange eastern European instruments you've never heard of, why nobody attempted a version of The Flight of the Bumblebee.
I can only assume it was because they had destroyed too many brain cells thinking about their Last of the Summer Wine project.
* For more Oliver Cross wisdom read his column every Friday in the Yorkshire Evening Post
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Weather for Leeds
Sunday 12 February 2012
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