Personal Posts
Posts, mostly older, that are about me or express my views on a variety of topics that are of interest to me personally. They have nothing to do with our apartment in Carcassonne.
-
Penny for the guy?
What’s the longest-lived and most successful fundraising ‘ask’ ever? It has to be “Penny for the guy”. Boys in England have been asking for money from strangers in the street using this phrase for, possibly, hundreds of years, raising the equivalent of millions in the process to pay for their fireworks and festivities on the fifth of November.
-
My New Love
Okay, true confessions time. The real reason why I have lost so much weight in the past 18 months is because I have found a new love. I’ve not really tried to keep it secret. My family knows all about it. In fact my wife is quite keen on my new love, too, even if she hasn’t gone exactly head over heels, as I have.
-
Ovine Metathesis
I play in a Salvation Army band, and I have on and off for sixty years. At band rehearsal this week we warmed up with Lois Bourgeois’s 16th century hymn tune known as “Old Hundredth”. Nowadays churchgoers sing the doxology “Praise God from whom all blessings flow” to Old Hundredth but mostly associate it with William Kethe’s paraphrase of Psalm 100, “All people that on earth do dwell”. Hence its name. In his devotional thoughts just before we started playing, my friend Gord mentioned the Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational, which asked readers to take a well known word and alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply…
-
A passport service ‘without let or hindrance’?
A passport service ‘without let or hindrance’? – Expat – My Telegraph Here’s some more information relating to my previous post about Brits abroad and the difficulties they experience in getting passports.
-
My Life in Politics and its Lessons for Fundraisers
Last Friday I delivered pamphlets on behalf of a candidate for the city council here in Toronto. I did the same for our local MP at the last federal election, and then acted as a scrutineer when the votes were counted. That’s it! My career in local and national politics came to not much more than a few hours delivering bumf. But what I learned from it will be longer-lived for sure.
-
“British citizens top list for visa-free travel” (unless they live in Canada)
British citizens top list for visa-free travel – Daily Telegraph I have to admit that I have never had a problem travelling in Europe using my British passport. Behind the old iron curtain, too, the words ‘Her Britannic Majesty requests and requires…’ inscribed in the large blue-black passport got me where I wanted to go. (This, fortunately, was always where the authorities wanted me to go.) Travelling in Africa gave me no more difficulty than my Canadian travelling companions experienced, even with one of those new-fangled eurobrit-style passports.