Are Stonewall and Mermaids charitable?

Iwas once asked by a colleague to sponsor him on an undertaking designed, he said, to raise money for a very good charitable cause. I can’t remember what the cause was – cancer, maybe, or mental kids – but I do remember the nature of the undertaking. He intended to walk a number of miles down the Great Rift Valley in Kenya.

Why not, I suggested, just donate the enormous amount of money such a trek would cost direct to the charity? It would easily outweigh the amount raised, not least because miserable bastards like me would probably decide it was not a charitable act at all but first-world grandstanding with a smug hubris masquerading as kindness.

A few years later someone asked me to sponsor them on a walk across Greenland – another example of a jackass desperately wanting to feel good about enjoying the holiday of a lifetime. I hope a polar bear got him. Mind you, I half thought about jumping on the bandwagon, by getting people to sponsor me for completing a gruelling weekend in Amsterdam’s famous ‘De Wallen’, as I ploughed through Lieke, Elsa, Beatrix, Esmee etc, while whacked out of my head on Ketama Gold. ‘All the money raised will go to the little handicapped kiddies, probably,’ I would assure friends and colleagues. ‘I’m aiming for 36 whores in 72 hours.’ Never did it, though, and I fear it is too late now.

None of that stuff is charitable, of course, in the proper sense of the term. However, it now occurs to me that it is substantially less odious than the industrialised charities which comprise our ‘third sector’ and which – in the majority of cases – are not remotely charitable at all, but vehicles for self-righteous idiots to breast-beat, advance their own imbecilic agendas and experience the warm glow of feeling superior to everybody else.