Sanity Clause, Anyone? – Christmas Eve & Boxing Day
Janie and I are not exactly model celebrants of Christmas. In recent years we have made it our habit to volunteer, primarily for Crisis at Christmas, which is a wonderful charity.
Yet Janie does have a fondness for unusual Christmas decorations, and has long-regretted not photographing the “Christmas Gnomes Tea Party” we drove past on Popes Lane two or three years ago.
But we did stop and snap the above acrobatic (or possibly desperate) Santa on Boston Manor Road, setting aside our santaphobia and praising the owner of the house for his stunning fandangle.
As if that wasn’t excitement enough before Christmas, we also did our first Crisis shift of the year on Christmas Eve:
We are Ged & Daisy for our Crisis shifts. Daisy here was sporting Christmas (and for that matter Z/Yen corporate) colours.
Daisy, for reasons known only to her, tends to pronounce the word “crisis” as “crises”, as if one massive homelessness crisis at Christmas isn’t enough.
Daisy was tempting fate this season with her plurality, in my view. Indeed, we swiftly found ourselves embroiled in a second crisis. The Duchess of Castlebar (Daisy’s mum) had yet another nasty fall on Boxing Day, not even two hours after we left her. So that’s hospital again (the third time since the start of November) and all the palaver that entails.
All Isn’t Quiet On New Year’s Day
On New Year’s Day, we were back to Crisis. A smaller team that day with plenty to do; we ended up running the coffee stall / canteen, the clothes store and delivering food to rooms on that shift.
For those who might be blunt or snide enough to throw the “ah, but could he run a coffee/food stall?” question in my direction, the answer is, I believe, “yes” – as evidenced not only by our Crisis volunteering but also by the FoodCycle volunteering Daisy and I have been doing since the start of the pandemic.
Running the clothes store was a different matter.
On Christmas Eve, there was masses of donated stock but it was difficult to find individual items of the requisite type and size for each guest, so some people were taking/writing down orders in the “clothes store”, others were fulfilling them from stock in the basement and then delivering the clothes orders to the rooms. Time consuming but basically a systematic sequence of tasks. Daisy and I worked on fulfilling and delivering clothes orders on Christmas Eve.
New Year’s Day was different. Stocks were running low, with mostly super-large and super-small sizes remaining available. Almost all of the stock had been moved upstairs to the clothes store.
After our session running the canteen, Daisy and I were allocated to the clothes store. That is when we met The Sartorialist; a guest with a particular interest…you might even describe it as an obsession…with the garb on offer.
Daisy tells me that I handled the situation with great patience, but I suspect that my face was betraying whatever my words and tone were belying – I’m not a naturally patient chap. Perhaps sensing my frustration, The Sartorialist kept apologising to me for his persistence, without ever tempering his resolve to see just one more garment, in case it turned out to be a size/colour/style/brand that suited him.
At one point he said to me:
You’re well dressed – why shouldn’t I be?
I pointed out to him my tracksuit bottoms and trainers, similar to those I had worn for tennis a few hours earlier (see below).
I was talking about your top. I don’t wear tracksuit bottoms and I would never, ever wear training shoes.
I thought about my choice of jumper for my Crisis shifts (see above). It must be more than 25 years old. Daisy and I bought it when visiting a provincial town; the weather had turned unseasonably cold on us and I wanted a cheap, comfortable, washable pullover to use as layering.
I also wondered what The Sartorialist might have made of my choice of top – in particular headgear, for tennis (see below).
At that juncture, I thought it best to hand the customer-facing side of the Crisis clothing emporium over to Daisy.
Consummate professional salesperson that she is…
…at least in the matter of selling…by which I mean giving away by dint of talking up…charitably-donated goods…
…Daisy successfully persuaded The Sartorialist to take three items of clothing and move on, enabling us to progress with other customers, who were forming an increasing long, yet surprisingly patient, queue.
4 January – A Charitable Keele Connection On Our “End Of Term” Shift
One of the good things about Facebook is the way it informs you about connections with other people who know your friends. On Holiday Monday I joined the relevant private Facebook Group for people who were doing Crisis volunteering shifts in our slot, to spot that one of the volunteers, Amber Bauer, is a friend of Sally Hyman, whom I know from “back in the day” at Keele.
Sally runs a wonderful charity, CRIBS International. It turns out that Amber knows Sally through that charity.
I wondered whether Amber would be on our 4 January shift. I didn’t spot anyone named Amber during our pre-shift briefing, but that “end of term” briefing was…very brief.
But soon after the briefing, one of my first customers when I was staffing the canteen/coffee stall again, had the name badge Amber, so we connected in person.
A little later, Daisy and I took over from Amber on outdoor duty…
…yes it was punishingly cold doing that duty once the temperature had dropped that evening…
…enabling Daisy to take pictures of a very chilly Amber handing over to a not-yet-but-soon-to-be-chilly me:
Amber and I both reckon that the above picture and story should make Sally Hyman smile – not least because it includes a soft plug for Sally’s wonderful international homelessness charity.
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