BLANK VERSE

CORONAVIRUS begat the lockdown

Which necessitated working from home

Government national and regional

Promptly withdrew from customer contact

Without supervision clerical drones

Were ever more loth to answer the calls

And when they did all the background noises

Made them impossible to comprehend

On TV or live kids and animals

Obscuring the accents of Mombasa

Or Chennai and sometimes Wolverhampton

So we knew not whether Whitehall functioned

Though a reasonable argument says

That the country will work all by itself

The preprogrammed systems will just roll on

Until the gaffes surface twenty years hence

Utilities are another matter

We depend on them for our well being

When you ring there are none in the office

And at home forty minutes to reply

Then you get a menu to interpret

Subdivisions to each option offered

After ending back at your starting point

There is always a helpful suggestion

You could have saved the time you just wasted

By logging in to the company’s site

Where you can track your order, pay your bills

Check the balance on accounts they have closed

Or chat to androgynous clones online

Herded like sheep to the WiFi meadow

Lacking broadband equipment and support

Save money for suppliers not buyers

If you’d stayed awake in the Sci Fi years

You would have known that LIFE IS JUST A SCREEN a million strong (950,000 workers) - about twothirds the size of the NHS workforce - and has grown by more than a quarter (27%) in the past decade.

The sector’s total income in 2019/20 was £58.7bn. The sector spent 97% (£56.9bn) of its income, with most of the spending (71%) going towards delivering charitable activities. The remaining amount is spent on grants (15%, £8.8bn) and on fundraising activities (13%, £7.7bn). Compared to the previous year, the cost of charitable activities rose by 3%, while fundraising activities fell by 6% and grants rose by 13%.

Out of a total of 165,758 voluntary organisations in UK, the majority (80%) are small. However the number of charities with income below £100,000 are declining, and the overall number of newly-registered charities is also falling. For example, charity registrations were almost 6,000 in pre-pandemic 2019, compared to almost 4,000 in 2021.

Now, let’s leave you with some thoughts…

Sparing just one or two hours with a local voluntary group could make a huge difference to you community. As you know I am a volunteer working on this magazine, and I’m the Chair and a presenter at Eden FM radio station, which is a not-for-profit organisation that is run entirely by volunteers, 24 hours a day and 365 days of year, and we need more people.

As a station we are not alone, and that is why I found a few more hours to help the Penrith Lions, because like Eden FM and most of the voluntary groups in the Eden Valley, they all need more hands to help. Imagine if from the thousands of doors Eden Local reached, we found one hundred volunteers helping local groups for just two hours a week.

Imagine what impact 10,000 new, community hours would have on the place where we live over one year?

Rex di Noci

February 1st 2023

For all those volunteers out there, this is for you…

To be continued

Reference www.ncvo.org.uk