Cast:
Rolf : Ed Chalk (Brasenose)
David: Alex Bowles (Mansfield)
Polly: Hannah Roberts (Hertford)
Creative:
Director: Will Maynard (Oriel)
Writer: Xenia Elsaesser (St Anne’s)
This radio play was written, rehearsed and recorded within 24 hours, as part of OUDS’ 24hour theatre festival in 2009. The cast have all since graduated.
Following up a novel as highly acclaimed as Joe Dunthorne’s 2008 Submarine, which was adapted recently into a successful film, can’t be an easy task. Like many coming of age novels with precocious but flawed teenage protagonists, the book attracted comparisons with Catcher in the Rye and Adrian Mole, and Dunthorne’s sharply humorous and poetic style of writing flagged him up immediately as a bright talent.
His new novel starts, as his debut did, with young people discovering themselves, struggling with first love, A Levels and squabbling parents, but the twist is in the setting: Albert and Kate live in a Welsh commune dedicated to “alternative living”, started up by their parents and their friends, where drugs are something that “old people do”, mobile phones are switched on only in emergencies, showers have to be timed and TV adverts are covered over with a thin curtain. As Don and Freya’s marriage disintegrates and the community seems to be crashing around them, a giant rave is planned, serving partly as a publicity stunt, partly as a necessary bid for salvation in the face of everyone’s internal apocalypses.
Wild Abandon shares many of the elements that made Submarine such a success. Albert is a wonderful creation, an eccentric and articulate 11 year old masochist with a smooth telephone manner. The writing is excellent and is what makes the book such a delight to read, each page-turning page packed full of unexpected and vivid similes. Dunthorne’s well-honed knack of getting into the minds of his teenage (and non-teenage) characters makes the story constantly believable, and allows the shifting third person perspective to work well, although perhaps the story of drug-fuelled, lovesick Patrick is not as absorbing as that of Albert, led by the Mayan calendar enthusiast Marina to believe that the world is ending, or Kate, who seeks solace in nearby suburbia with her boyfriend Geraint and his family, rebelling from the rebellion. The hopeless idealism of patriarch Don and the sense of despair of his wife Freya are counterbalanced emotively, as real issues and relationships are deftly dealt with alongside humorous vignettes from commune life, such as Don’s attempt at a man-to-man chat with the disgusted Albert.
The book is clearly well-researched, and moves gradually but enticingly towards a fitting climax. The psychological problems of all the characters do not make them any less endearing, a word which Albert, who “doesn’t understand cute”, is said to hate. Joe Dunthorne has pulled off the proverbially difficult second novel. Wild Abandon is original and absorbing, and full of laugh-out-loud moments: read it before the inevitable indie film gets in the way.
The Bodleian Libraries, in conjunction with mobile application developer Toura, released their first mobile app last week.
The app, entitled “The Making of the King James Bible” is the first in a series designed to enable the Bodleian to share some of their greatest collections in new formats. It is being launched to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible, and the summer exhibition, “Manifold Greatness: Oxford and the Making of the King James Bible”.
Many documents and books relating to the King James Bible translation are being brought together for the first time, such as a copy of the infamous “Wicked Bible” of 1631, which contains a misprint in the seventh commandment which commanded readers to commit adultery, with most copies having been subsequently burned.
The app also includes commentary from the curators and fellow of St. Cross College Diarmaid MacCulloch, a leading authority on the history of the Church.
Whilst this is only the first app released by the Bodleian Libraries, it is part of a wider move to embrace emerging formats of distributing and displaying the Bodleian’s vast collection. The Gough map, the earliest surviving map of Great Britain, was recently released in a digital format for the first time by the Bodleian Map Library, as was reported on by Cherwell this week.
Andrew Teal, a fellow in Theology at Pembroke College, said, “I think all new ventures that make learning more interactive and less passive are good … there are already quite a variety of technophile resources (podcasts of lectures etc).”
“The Making of the King James Bible” has been made available for Apple and Android devices, for £0.69. The next app in the series is due to be released in autumn, and has been described as “a browsable collection of some of the Bodleian’s greatest treasures including the newly-acquired Jane Austen manuscript, ‘Magna Carta’, Shakespeare’s ‘First Folio’, Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’.”
So you want to get off the beaten track, immerse yourself in a completely different culture and find yourself on the road? When I thought of South East Asia, I thought of the meandering Mekong, chanting Buddhist monks, misty rice paddies…
(I have assumed knowledge of last year’s viral Gap Yah video on YouTube, so for the uninitiated I suggest a watch — one is enough to get a handle on those irritatingly quotable one-liners.)
If you are in fact on your gap year, chances are that you will become one of the following:
Exhibit 1: The Gap Yah Girl
Baggy white printed Thai beer vest, with arm holes almost large enough to let their midriff escape. Frayed denim shorts that pretend to cover their bikini bottoms. Messed up top knot. About 20 bracelets on each arm. I mean it’s, like, helping the local economy. Ray Ban Wayfarers, could either be Phnomh Penh’s finest fakes, or bought by Daddy as a farewell present. A tattoo resembling a black blob. Up close it could be a prayer wheel? Slightly orange tan, speckled with white mosquito bite scars, and a large infected scab from that token motorbike accident. Havaina flip flops.
Exhibit 2: The Backpacker Boy
In The Tubing, Vang Vieng, Laos vest. Everyone has floated down the Mekong in a rubber tyre, so everyone just has to buy the vest to prove that they drank too much Lao Lao and almost drowned in the murky river. Neon swim shorts, with Full Moon Party printed across the butt. Casio wrist watch – an Argos cheapie with a button that lights up the screen, or the Vietnamese version. That is, neon, with lots of flashing lights. Neon green plastic aviators – large enough to cover the pink eye that you got tubing. A tattoo in Thai. It says ‘I Love Thailand’. At least that’s what that Thai bird said before it turned out she was a he. And all the Thais crack up when they see it.
And they’re everywhere. I mean like EVERYWHAH.
Now: a typical tale. It was about 7am in Luang Prabang, Laos, the morning after the Dutch had won another world cup match, and I had wished I was wearing orange (having said that, the Dutch are very amenable to letting you forget your English woes and become a Netherlands native for a bit). My sister and I had already abandoned our porridge to make a mad dash back to the hotel toilet, much to our parent’s bemusement. Note – parents are not suitable Gap Yah accessories. Father had pitched up at the match last night, and we’d had to pretend we were on our second Lao Lao cocktail, not our seventh. Luckily for me, that was to be the last of the day’s chundering. My sister was not so fortunate.
An hour or so later, and we were astride an elephant, swaying majestically through the Laos jungle, while the sun burned bright above us through the leaves, and brightly-coloured birds chattered around us. I mean, it really gave us a moving sense of the intricacy and delicacy of the world’s fragile ecosystems. It was like, we were like so small… and the elephant was like, so big.
And then my sister just chundered everywhere. Off the side of an elephant. Impeccable aim, unlike our football team.
To prove you can’t keep a good British girl down, my sister has been on her own Gap Yah odyssey this year, breaking locals’ hearts in salsa bars up and down Latin America. She and her Norwegian partner-in-crime were particular fans of the Peruvian city of Cusco, start of the Inca trail to Macchu Piccu, where one goes to search for the mythical Andean Vomcano.
Back on the trail in Asia, no trip to Thailand is complete without a pilgrimage to that shrine of wankered Westerners – the Full Moon Party on the island of Koh Phangnan. My advice is as follows:
1. Start the night in one of Had Rin’s finest eateries. Pad Thai is just the ticket for lining the stomach, and the endless reruns of Family Guy are perfect for predrinks.
2. Wear a bikini and not much else.You need plenty of skin space to plaster with glo-paint, and you may be sprinting into the waves to take a few tactical chunders. And don´t go out of your depth while drunk – there´s a mean riptide that claims a few Westerners every party season.
3. Don’t be discerning with your drinking.There are over 50 stalls that eloquently differentiate themselves with slogans such as:
SillyFuckingBuckets.
FreeKissFreeSuckySuckyWhenYouBuyFromMeMeLikesWhiteBoys. ExtraHappyHammeredLovingLifeBuckets.
They all sell the same thing, and everything tastes the same after a few glugs anyway. Buy the cheapest 350ml bottle of Thai Rum-skey with Red Bull for that dance ‘til dawn boost, and down from the child’s plastic bucket to your heart’s content.
4. Don’t try to find that ‘fit’ Australian from the Vietnamese pool party. You’ve been there and done that, and with 10,000 people partying on one beach, chances are he’s probably getting with a Swedish girl as we speak. Plus when and where are you going to get a chance to play the ‘how many nationalities in a night’ game again?
5. Pace yourself. My friend made the tragic mistake of peaking too early, and what started out as a tactical chunder turned into falling in the sea to vomit every half hour until dawn. We put her in a tuk-tuk home at 7am where she got distracted by a gentleman who she classified merely as ‘Northern’, and returned to our cabins an hour before the ferry to the mainland.
6. On that note, don’t leave the morning after. The beaches are white and the sea is crystal-clear, so give yourself a chance to enjoy paradise by day. More realistically, you will want to lie in a darkened room for 24 hours.
It’s not all party, party, party though. Well it is, but your itinerary can take in the cultural (and spiritual and political) on the way. You can admire the fabled temples of Cambodia’s Angkor Wat by sunrise, examine the horrors of the War Remnant’s Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and the Killing Fields in Phnomh Penh, Cambodia, pick leeches off your legs while scrambling up waterfalls in Laos’ northern jungles, and watch hundreds of Buddhist monks collecting alms at 6am in the elegant, French-colonial streets of Luang Prabang in Laos.
But you’ll probably just want to line your stomachs in preparation for uni, and watery Vietnamese street beer is 10p a pint. After all, where else in the world could you literally chunder off the side of an elephant?
American students taking part in an overseas study programme based in Trinity College were reportedly told not to venture outside the college gates on Wednesday night, in case the rioting seen in other parts of the country spread to Oxford.
Although the porter on duty was unable to confirm this when contacted by Cherwell, the report claimed that those in charge of the programme, which caters for students from four US universities, decided that it was safest to keep all the students within their respective living quarters.
Though Oxford has not yet seen widespread riots like those in the UK’s larger cities, it has experienced several ‘copycat attacks’.
An attempted arson attack on the Headington branch of McDonald’s took place in the early hours of Tuesday morning, and two youths, aged 18 and 16, have been arrested in connection.
Fires were also lit around Oxford on Tuesday evening. A 48-year-old man was hospitalised after a blaze outside a block of flats in Cowley, a bin in Botley Road and a skip in Mansfield Road were set on fire, and police officers found an Audi A4 in Great Clarendon St with a damaged petrol cap and a rag stuffed into the fuel tank which had been set alight but failed to spread.
Meanwhile, Oxford students have told Cherwell of their experiences in other parts of the country. Joseph D’Urso, a second year PPE student at New College who lives in Birmingham, described Monday night’s riots in his home town, saying, “a huge number of people gathered, and started rampaging through the city centre, smashing up shops and looting. Public transport was cut at about 10pm and it was impossible to get taxis so the entire inner ring road was like a warzone, poorly policed and with no transport. Looting continued until 3ish.”
Dominic Parikh, a second year at St John’s, spoke of his dismay at seeing images of brutality in a familiar neighbourhood, telling Cherwell, ‘I used to live near and travel through Clapham Junction and it was sickening seeing the area trashed so mindlessly. I was pretty disappointed that there weren’t enough police to do anything more than watch.”
Alex Coupe, an English student at Corpus Christi, described the atmosphere of tension in South London following Monday night’s riots, saying that there is “lots of smashed glass in Brixton and empty shops, a few of which are burnt.” He added: “it’s just eerily quiet, with most shops in Wimbledon and Tooting closed and shuttered. I saw two guys get off a train with what seemed to be looted computers. A man confronted them, saying, ‘Are you f***ing happy now, greedy p****s?’ That kind of reflects the general mood.”
A second year student at Brasenose who watched violence take place in Ealing in West London on Monday night commented, “What we have here is just a bunch of anarchists trying to get their hands on as much money as possible. I don’t think they have any particular political message”. He called for a harsh punishment on those involved, insisting, “I really want to see these people humiliated, since they have brought shame to our capital and have brought pain to so many people’s lives.”
James Lawson, President of the Oxford University Conservative Association next term, also refused to ascribe any political motivation to the rioters, commenting, “This has nothing to do with protest and is simply opportunist criminal action: a classic example of the ‘Broken Britain’ the Coalition has to repair.”
Nicola Sugden and Colin Jackson, co-chairs of the Oxford University Labour Club, though condemning the riots as “unnecessarily destructive”, described them as “manifestation of the valid fears many of Britain’s youth have about their futures”.
Permission granted last week to develop two new medical research labs in Headington costing the university £57m is already up for review, due to the dissatisfaction of residents.
The aim of the labs is to turn the Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Science into ‘the largest research centre in its field in the UK and probably Europe, able to translate basic science into new therapies in multiple diseases’ according to Professor Sir Marc Feldmann, head of the Kennedy Institute Of Rheumatology.
Locals are opposed to the current plans, and the planning permission has been called in for review on 30 August.
Councillor Ruth Wilkinson commented that ‘the research building is very high’, sharing concerns that it is not in keeping with local architecture.
With no new car parking planned, and 150 new staff, the fear is that staff may park in nearby residential streets and local roads may become “rat runs”.
A University traffic assessment claimed that none of the new staff will travel by car. Currently 45% of staff at the site travel by car, and the Highways Agency predicts this will remain constant.
A researcher who currently works at the site highlighted the fact that the new buildings ‘will bring together researchers, which is very important for efficient to scientific research – not to mention getting new treatments to patients for more quickly’. She also said that ‘the new design fits in well with the more modern buildings’.
One local councillor, David Rundle, agreed with resident’s concerns but maintained he is ‘in favour of the principle of building on this site’.
If the plans go ahead, the two three storey buildings will be built on the Old Road campus site, near Churchill Hospital in Headington.
Picture this. It’s 30 years in the future, and your child/grandchild (for the sake of argument lets call her Geraldine) is sitting an A-level in Historical Studies. The module is ‘The Shit That Went Down In 2011’. She never got to grips with the Murdoch saga, passes on the Greece question, doesn’t like the question on the US debt deal and has literally no idea who Usama bin Laden is. But you can see the relief in little Geraldine’s eyes when she sees one question in particular. “What caused the England Riots of August 2011?”
She could argue that it was the shooting of Mark Duggan that caused rioting in areas as diverse as Walthamstow, Clapham, Liverpool, Birmingham and Bristol, but she’d be marked down for showing only a superficial knowledge of the issues. She could argue that there are socio-economic reasons for the riots, and that the cuts and a feeling of disenchantment have fuelled discontent.
But the riots lack a political message, so this can’t be it. Only one phrase will guarantee our Geraldine the A*+ she so needs to get into her PHEF (private higher education facility) of choice. For the examiners see “out and out criminality” as holding the key to explaining the devastating and shocking violence of the last few nights. Throw in a paragraph on the role of Twitter in organising the rioters, as if the Met could have seen #maraudingimbeciles trending and seen where was to be targeted next, and she’d be well on the way to full marks.
Or maybe, maybe, that’s not how it works. “Out and out criminality” is a reassuring phrase, as it writes off huge swathes of society as lawbreakers who deserve what is coming to them, but it fails to do two things. Firstly, it doesn’t offer an adequate explanation as to why people are rioting now when they weren’t a week, a month or a year ago, and second and more importantly, what is to be done to stop future rioting, and what we should do with the rioters. Because clearly, out and out criminality is a trait of out and out criminals, and we all know there’s one place for out and out criminals — jail. But jail doesn’t really seem to solve many actual problems — eventually, these kids will be released, even more disaffected and unemployable than before.
However, the unmitigated and total “bleeding-heart liberal” approach is a tough sell. Socio-economic conditions also fail to explain many things, such as the riots’ timing, and the anger in Tottenham over Duggan’s shooting has been exploited for opportunism in unrelated areas. Amnesty for rioters is not an appealing prospect when the thing that is fuelling these riots is the sense that if you break into a shop and nick a soundsystem you won’t be held to account.
It is not being fuelled by ideological conviction, and, for example, if we tried to map out areas of rioting, we’d see a correlation with retailers of expensive electrical goods and jewellers rather than with tax-dodging companies or areas of particular social deprivation. And this becomes more true the more copycat rioting springs up. Chief Constable Chris Sims put it bluntly when talking of the looting in Birmingham city centre on Monday night. ‘This was not an angry crowd, this was a greedy crowd.”
And more’s the shame. If only it were an angry crowd! What I’d give for an angry crowd at this point in time. People have so much to be angry about! A stagnant economy, a media unbounded by law, destructive reforms in both health and education, and to top it all off an arrogant government that shrugs off most criticism with a jibe and a laugh. People like David Mitchell defended criminal damage at Millbank on the grounds that when people are angry, they can target their anger and do so in such a way that people don’t get hurt: taking out the Tory HQ is a somewhat more powerful way to make your point than mutely marching to Westminster. The latter option involves remaining nice and peaceful so you can round off the 6 o’clock news bulletin without comment, be thoroughly ignored by parliament and as the saying goes, “tiptoe through life, so carefully, to arrive, safely, at death”.
The claim of politicians that the rioting was the work of “professional anarchists” rung false in the Millbank case as the political class once again seemed hopelessly out of touch with the real and legitimate anger of young people. Oh, what it it was to have something to fight for! “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!” Now to be young is to be smashing in a Footlocker.
Those words written about the French Revolution are poignant, as they reflect an idealism completely absent from this week’s anti-revolution. Even the riots of ’81 are being looked at through the rose-tinted glasses: that that was a movement, and this is no such thing. But isn’t that part of the problem? The fact that people don’t see themselves as having a role to play in society, even if it is ultimately trying to bring it down?
There is a genuine issue of deprivation at the centre here, however mindless and unjustifiable the violence. Riots are scary because they threaten order, order is so valuable because it helps us protect what we have. If you don’t have anything to protect — money, property, a “stake in society” (whatever that is), then the question turns from being less a case of needing a reason to riot and more a case of why the hell not riot? You could even bag a free Nintendo Wii out of events, as well as a misplaced sense of empowerment. EMAs provide an example of something which, though small, deprived kids could hold onto as a reason to stay in school, and gave them something that needed protecting. Ken Livingstone tried to suggest that there was a social context to what was happening, and got vigorously and unartfully interrogated — but wasn’t this all just a case of “out and out criminality”? Yes, he reasonably answered, it was. But a social context for criminality surely isn’t so incongruous an idea so as to be dismissed totally by our media, albeit one which has never been adept at incorporating nuance into reductive narrative.
That people are naturally conservative (in the non-loaded sense of the word) is no surprise. But one thing scarier than a riot is a mindless riot, as the targets are more arbitrary. At Millbank, if you weren’t a Tory then the chances of having your property ransacked was greatly reduced. Indeed, other companies used the same building, and there was a sense of injustice when they were adversely affected. Here, it’s all injustice. You live above that carpet store? Tough shit. You own that furniture store in Croydon, that Richer Sounds in Bromley, or that barbershop in Tottenham? Oh well. All martyred in the cause of… nothing.
In the one interview I have heard with a rioter (the media doesn’t give too much time over to that side of the story), he was asked why he was looting shops. He said he didn’t have much and that stuck-up people don’t understand. He was then asked about how he felt about the livelihoods that have been destroyed by these riots. His reaction was a shrug, and a  mumble along the lines of “that’s the way it goes”. No it’s not. You can protest the shooting of a local man on dubious grounds, absolutely. You can riot if you feel let down by your police, that is understandable. You might even think you can steal things because the people you steal from are richer than you, if you’re some sort of neo-Robin Hood who doesn’t believe in progressive taxation (and presumably doesn’t believe in sharing). But you simply cannot burn down people’s businesses and homes because “that’s the way it goes”.
In doing so, you riot because you have nothing and so you reduce people’s businesses to nothing. You riot because you’re angry at stop-and-search, and thereby bring about a situation where every young person in those communities will receive hassle from the police for the indefinite future. You riot against the treatment of the young people by authority, and thereby cause authority to crack down on young people further. You may riot with a point — it is lost in the wind of mindless destruction.
Like all good old-fashioned riots, anyone who has followed it, anyone who has listened, has been angered. Anyone who has heard a member of the Reeves family speak, or has seen certain Guardian photoblogs, or knows anyone who lives in any of the boroughs affected, has been angered. Angry like this lady. Angry at the rioters themselves. And if you had told me at the start of the summer I would be angry over a riot, I didn’t think it would be this way around.
A local planning review committee has decisively rejected a 74 room housing development on Osney Lane, intended for students of Bellerbys College, a local education institution. This has possible ramifications for University housing.
Amanda Whiting, resident of nearby Mill Lane, said, “It’s a normal Victorian street, and we would have had a massive monolithic structure which would not have been in keeping with the rest of the street. I don’t have any problems with students at all, it was just too big.”
This is the latest in a line of disputes concerning the expansion of student housing developments outside the city centre.
An agreement between Oxford City Council and both Oxford Brookes and the University of Oxford states that each university may only expand its research facilities if it manages to keep the number of its students in private accommodation below 3,000.
This is because of a widespread desire to maintain ‘balanced communities’ and to ensure there is sufficient housing stock for local families. Oxford has met this target, but Brookes is still working towards doing so.
Brookes Communications Officer Edward Reed told Cherwell, ‘It clearly makes sense for the council to draw up and implement guidelines for development across the city to ensure a balanced community, whilst enabling the number of students living in the private rented sector to be reduced. Oxford Brookes University is supportive of measures to achieve this, for the benefit of both our students and the wider community.’
Halls of residence are seen as one solution to the problem of students taking up much of the city’s limited housing stock. Oxford City Council is leaning on the universities to cooperate with this.
Councillor Joe McManners, Executive Member for Housing Needs, said that the proliferation of halls is a good idea because doing so “frees up private housing and takes students away from residential streets, something residents wanted.”
There are no plans to push the number of students living out of college in private accommodation any lower.
People often bemoan the idea that private charity should start playing a bigger role in the UK, claiming that people already give to and do enough for charity. However, the truth is really that charitable giving in the UK is not nearly at the level that it should be, and as a result many good causes are underfunded, and many institutions or services are too reliant on the government for their survival.
Whilst the UK is slightly more charitable than other European countries such as Germany or the Netherlands, it still lags far behind the charitable behemoth that is the USA. In 2006 2.2% of the USA’s GDP was given to charity, double that of the UK. Whilst there are strong incentives towards charitable giving in the American tax system (with charitable giving being tax deductable), this does not entirely explain why Americans give more. Particularly, one might note that whilst the UK tax system is not as generous towards charity, charitable giving is still tax deductible for higher rate tax payers and charitable giving can be topped up by government funded gift aid. It seems rather than being entirely to do with the tax structure, it is much more to do with culture.
I’m not talking about the culture of the super rich, as the UK has some notable historical charity giants such as Joseph Rowntree that rival Rockefeller and Gates in their generosity. Rather it is the culture of the quietly wealthy. This is primarily because most people in the UK have an entirely inaccurate perception of how wealthy they are, often tinged by mistaken notions of class, or who exactly are ‘middle earners’.
A poll conducted in April this year by YouGov showed just how skewed perceptions were. Individuals were asked to rate themselves from 1 to 10, with 10 being the richest 10% of the population and 1 being the poorest 10%. Staggeringly only 24% thought they were in the richest half of the population and almost no one thought they were in the richest 20% of people. This perhaps explains why the UK is bad at giving. Why would you give if you thought you were relatively poor?
One only has to look back to when the ‘additional’ 50% rate of income tax was introduced to again see how flawed perceptions are. The number of journalists that decried this attack on ‘middle earners’ was illustrative, as of course people earning over £150k a year are not middle earners. Yet in the eyes of the journalists and pundits, who of course viewed themselves as middle earners, they were. One could also notice the criticism levelled at the Liberal Democrat ‘Mansion Tax’ idea, with many seeming to operate under the ridiculous illusion that a house valued at over £1m was unexceptional.
It is interesting to note again that figures from 2006 show that the richest 10% in America gave 50% of charity, whilst in the UK they gave a pitiful 21%. Wealthy Americans seem to have a better perception of how wealthy they are and thus their duty to charity. I know many people who have worked in university or private school phone campaigns who have found in their calls that many people who are clearly relatively wealthy often claim they simply cannot financially support their alma mater because either they’re too poor and there’s richer people to do it.
The contrast with American institutions’ fundraising clout puts the UK to shame. Indeed many American private schools actually factor fundraising into their general budget, since it is such a reliable source of income, and don’t just using it for unique projects or bursaries, but rather to keep the lights on and pay the teachers.
The UK is not living up to its charitable potential. Those who claim they are far too poor to give to charity on top of other commitments need to appreciate just how fortunate they are for charities to get their fair share of cash in the UK. People in the UK need to start acting their wealth.
(For the reference of readers, a household income of above about £75,000 puts you in the top 20% and the mean income for an individual is about £23,000 a year).
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