I have always had a soft spot for the British Heart Foundation. My mum was part of the shadowy but powerful Penrith widows' volunteer force. She and her friends helped out in the BHF's charity shop there, pricing and tutting, serving and chatting. When she died we released some of her stuff there, back into its natural habitat.
I also like the BHF because the van driver posts a thank-you card when you leave a bagful of donated clutter out for them. It's not the politeness I appreciate, it's knowing that the old clothes, books, toys and a Marillion CD that was inexplicably in the house have been collected by a charity and not by two random toerags in a Transit.
Charities survive on good will. We all deeply appreciate their work, there but for the grace, etc. Charities help people, and that's more important now than ever, what with the government demonising swaths of the population for their poverty and banging on about how much it costs the country to look after those grudgingly deemed unfit for purpose.
So it was with expletive-flecked incredulity that I read BHF's latest pronouncement – that smokers "cost British businesses £8.7bn a year in lost productivity". The average smoker apparently takes four fag breaks a day of nearly 10 minutes each, according to research commissioned (for how much?) by the charity. Yeah, plus those shiftless smokers take nearly a whole sick day more a year than your non-smoking employees, sneers the BHF loftily to its new corporate mates. The whole thing has the tone of a CBI press release.
It's nonsense anyway. Nobody's productive 100% of the time. We gossip. We have cups of tea. We sometimes take a newspaper into the toilet, as my own anecdotal workplace research reveals.
Some people will say that anything is permissible in the drive to eradicate smoking, and they're wrong. Of course we all accept that in these austere times charities will be more strident, more competitive, more intrusive. We're used now to the idea of a charity following us into the bathroom: "Blimey mate you're carrying a bit of weight, you want to watch that, no good for your heart is it?"
And into the garden: "Still smoking, I see. Oh you have children? Then you're killing yourself and murdering them!" We're used to charity sub-contractors accosting us on the street with their aggressive guilt-trippery.
But really, following us into work? Then ignoring us altogether and going straight to the boss's office like some time-and-motion consultant, some quisling nark? Calling us an economic liability? That doesn't seem very bloody charitable to me.
