Can there be anyone curmudgeonly enough to take against Save the Children’s Den Day, a heartwarming event? – actually, make that an entire week, 29 May to 6th June – in which little children are ‘being sponsored to transform their sofa, school desk or even a boring cardboard box into magical super dens. And the money they raise will help to save lives around the world.’ What could be nicer and more harmless than to inculcate philanthropy in the young? Especially to help children like little Annie Mae in the Philippines, on the Save the Children website, made homeless in a typhoon and presumably obliged to make a den of her own, though not at all for fun.
Actually, I do think this kind of thing is pernicious, and not just because it’s the kind of thing my children’s school is horribly likely to take up. There is probably no human instinct more deep rooted than den-making. My children, taken on a trip to Glendalough over Easter, no sooner found themselves among trees, than they started propping up branches against a trunk and filling in the gaps with bits of moss; it was like something out of one of those Observer lists of things that children don’t do any more, on account of being so divorced from nature. I used to do it too. Indeed one of my earliest memories is of setting myself up in a gap between the sofa and the wall at home, snugly covered by cushions, and playing houses that way; I expect early hominids would have felt much the same.
So, making dens is a fine and natural impulse. Which is precisely why it shouldn’t be hijacked for other ends, but left as an end in itself. One of the features of modernity is the way our normal activities become someone else’s marketing opportunity, charitable or commercial. An interesting new book by Matthew Crawford, The World Outside Your Head, points out the extent to which much of our available public space, aural and visual, is being taken over by advertisers, to the point where we’re never left alone. Well, utilising den-building as a charitable opportunity isn’t quite that pernicious, but it is yet another incursion on private play and private space.
Actually, I’ve had it with sponsored philanthropy all round. If I want to contribute to a noble cause, I shall fund it myself, thank you, once I manage to pay off my debts. I don’t want to pay for someone’s holiday in Grenada by sponsoring them by the mile for cycling round the place; it’s simply paying for them to get fit and have a lovely time at other people’s expense. Similarly, if children want to make dens, let them get on with it rather than getting a spurious glow from doing a pleasurable activity and charging other people for it. If they want to sponsor little Annie Mae in the Philippines through Save the Children – and I can think of few better causes – let them pay for her out of their pocket money.
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