The Big Society Explained..... part one

Noticing a bin bag ravaged by foxes at the entrance of the school, its litter strewn around the cordoned housing of an electrical block with ‘Danger of Death’ signs pinned to its fencing, I took a last tug on a roll-up and walked into the school playground.
‘What sort of person leaves their rubbish at a school gate?’ I asked myself. ‘And what sort of school has an electrical block at its gate?’
In my fourth week on a course of Citalopram, which I have playfully renamed Clitoralpram to sweeten the pill of acceptance that I might well suffer from depression, these grey thoughts disappeared as I walked from the mangled mess at the gates of education.
Once inside the building, I waited at reception to be buzzed through to the classroom.
There’s usually someone there but not today, so I looked at the billboards to entertain myself.
On one, pictures of cartoon characters depicted each of the fifteen staff with a brief job-description, complete with unforgivable spelling mistakes throughout.
Of the fifteen, two were men (Mowgli and Shaggy), or ‘Fred the maintanence engineer’ and ‘Dave the hygeine technician’.
Being the only man at the parental course I go to every Friday is quite an eye-opener and I’m enjoying the company of the fairer sex.
The course is very informative and should serve me well for when I get to see my children again, but it’s quite disheartening when the facilitators hand out homework for us to do with our children for next time.
They know I can’t see the girls and quietly say, ‘You won’t need to do this, Richard’.
They’re very sympathetic, and I’m not being sarky or facetious. They are, but I feel like such a dork sometimes, sat there listening to all the ways in which our children can get to know where they come from while my ex is brainwashing them to despise me.
It gets me down thinking of all the new things I’m learning; how to expand the girls’ minds, freeing them up to learn and not fear things that aren’t really important, understanding how to empathise with them, how to love them the way they need to be loved, respecting them as children, always knowing that I can’t see them and pass on the love.
The ex has just taken my children out of school. She thinks the world’s against her and that the children are better off at home; friendless, segregated and fearful of the outside world, just as she has become. In her mind, she is a martyr to the children whereas, in reality, she is a sick, deluded primary carer with parental alienation syndrome that needs help fast.
Because she is the children’s primary carer (and I am the absent father), the law system, which sides with the judiciary and ignores the children, is likely to protect her illness and extend her onslaught of emotional abuse upon them for the foreseeable future.
Of the students, apart from me (‘the quarantined male’), there’s a Russian mum who is so set in her old-country ways that she won’t trust any of the other parents, who allow their kids to have sleepovers, walk to school alone and play sports. She thinks her son hates her, which is probably true because all she does is moan about him and stop him from joining in with his friends.
Then there’s the fat young English single mum who’s on incapacity waiting for a two-bedder now she’s got her two year old daughter to bargain with. She can’t be more than twenty, hates the father and moans about having to play with her girl, ‘what with my back and everything else’. She blinks constantly when she tries to look anyone in the eye.
The other three women are British Jamaicans.
One married a Muslim because she didn’t want to turn out like her mum (who was easily led and kept getting hurt in violent relationships). She wears the long black dress and headgear and has four children. She’s a lovely, smiley woman and undoubtedly a good mum to boot.
The other two are also lovely. Being cousins, they sit together and both have three children. They’re strict Christians, but they didn’t sniff at my clothes or look down at me when I told everyone I was an alcoholic in recovery. They’re open-minded and a pleasure to sit next to.
Me and the Jamaicans get along well while blinker and blanker sigh and fidget and moan next to the refreshments table.
The facilitators (one white English and two British Jamaicans, all women) are very good at what they do. They work for a charitable organisation that wins contracts from the education secretary.
The course-method was devised in America, purchased by the government and then remodelled to suit a British audience as part of the Race Equality program.
When the course began, we were told that it may not go ahead because of low attendance, but then the Muslim Jamaican and the Russian ogre appeared and all was well.
During the break, I noticed the poster that some children had made on the wall.
It’s an oblong shape and, in the middle, it says ‘Activities at The Children’s Centre’. There are six arrows that point outwards to charities which help the children in different ways.
When we started the course, all six charities were still there, on A4, with a bit about what they did.
Today, seven weeks later, only three remain. Little blobs of the non-sticky sticky stuff had slightly ripped the poster where the other three had been taken down.
Of the three that remained, one was the charity I’d worked for up until last month, when I was told that it was likely that it would close down because of the cuts.
Only a stay of execution was keeping it on the poster.
The facilitators’ charity was one of the other two still there, so I asked one of them whether they’d be affected.
‘Oh no,’ she said with unconvincing resolve. ‘The government are heavily involved with Jigsaw4U.’
I was less than impressed. ‘They’re heavily involved with Kingston and St Georges hospitals and look what they’re doing there,’ I said. (Kingston, which was highlighted to stay firm as part of Cameron’s push to power, had just announced massive job cuts and St Georges were reported to be cutting 500 jobs in the papers yesterday.)
She could only muster silence with a steely eye in response.
Over a standing tea, I gave her my pep-talk for the coming civil war and she agreed that, in principle, it seemed all too likely. It was strange hearing fearful agreement from a hardworking mother-of-three. Only a month ago, she’d have given me one of her ‘don’t be silly’ looks and laughed at my paranoia.
When the course ended, I got in the car and made my way to the charity shop.
When I got there, Mary was in tears. I asked her what was wrong and she told me that the group of volunteers that had worked there for the past fortnight had been let down by her assistant who hadn’t bothered to show up for work that morning.
‘It was their last day,’ she whimpered. ‘I’d got them some presents to thank them, and now this.’
‘Can’t you get in touch with them? You must have one of them’s phone number,’ I said.
Alas, the volunteers were from a local school and, to avoid problems of insurance and for health and safety reasons, Mary and the kids had thought it best to keep quiet that they were helping out at the shop from the school.
‘They were doing it all hush-hush as a Big Society project that they wanted to present to the school,’ she blubbered. I didn’t believe a word, but Mary’s as gullible as they come.
‘Maybe they’ll come in after lunch,’ I said and made her a cup of coffee.
They did come in. I was downstairs in the shop next door arranging clothes when I heard an almighty racket upstairs. The kids had obviously taken a liquid lunch and were busy jibing and imitating Mary’s other assistant (who suffers from mental health problems).
I went upstairs, stood there and said nothing, so they got the message and went outside into the street.
Mary asked if I could go to the other shop to help price up some clothes, so I went after noticing that the middle-class students had taken over Mary’s office and were busy watching a rather sick website that shows accidental death and hair-raising injury. So that’s the Big Society project; watching people die.
Male clothes go on blue hangers and female clothes go on yellow ones, but I don’t think the young Indian volunteer knew the difference and they had to be done again. The Irish manager shouted at me for laughing at the madness of it all.
Then I bagged some unsaleable clothes in green bags but I bagged them up too full and had to open them and take stuff out. The manager told me they had to be half-full because they’re struggling to stay open and they get a certain amount for each bag from another charity that ships the clothes off to other countries.
A woman came in and reminded the manager that she was supposed to be child-minding her son last night, and all I could hear was sorry sorry sorry.
I went to my doctor’s appointment and was dealt with quickly by the efficient and friendly Asian team, so I raced back to Mary’s shop to do a bit more work and close up with her.
‘You can’t do any more than you’re doing, Mary. You can’t change the way the world’s going. I mean, it’s nuts out there,’ I said to her.
‘Oh Richard, you don’t understand! It’s costing more to keep the shop open than we’re making. It’s never been as bad as this and David won’t keep it open if it doesn’t make money,’ she said, stroking her Yorkshire terrier.
David, the landlord, owns a property development company and uses the charity shop to dodge tax under the suspicious premise that he puts shoddy bird sanctuaries in old people’s homes once in a while. The bottom-line is that Mary lives in one of the flats above. Without the charity shop, he’s sure to kick her out to get market value.
Mona, a Pakistani volunteer who moans and moans about everything that’s going wrong at the shop and in the world came in for a moan.
The teenage volunteers were all bad, she said, and the assistant, a Polish girl on community service for drink-driving, had probably drunk too much the night before to get up in time to open up the shop. Mona’s son wasn’t talking to her any more and it’s no wonder. She seems to hate anything under thirty. Once she’d moaned enough, she left and Mary looked white as a sheet.
We closed up at five because Mary couldn’t face staying open. I think she likes a drink and probably wanted to start early.
With time to kill before a meeting, I parked up in a bay where the meeting was being held to save on meters and left a note just in case.
While I was scribbling the note, I saw a Jewish father and son (I knew they were Jewish because they had the caps and the twizzly hair and the big, doleful eyes) trying to get in to the building where the meeting was being held. I assumed they owned the building and asked if it was OK to park there so early.
They turned and nodded, then continued to try to find the right key for the door.
Wondering why they’d had some much trouble with the key and the door, I strolled off to the library none the wiser and got on the internet to check email.
There was one from Ebay, one from Amazon and one from Vistaprint, all of which I’d unsubscribed from a zillion times, but they just keep on coming.
I looked around the room. There was the nice Polish girl who dealt with enquiries, a few Asian lads having a laugh on Faecesbook, five or six east Europeans all bearing down beady-eyed for jobs and flatshares, four Africans playing games together, a French guy who kept receiving text messages or phone calls and an old British lady who couldn’t work out how to use the internet.
Every couple of minutes, she’d call the Polish girl over, and with the girl’s attention taken and the old lady saying ‘What? I can’t understand a word you’re saying’, the laughter and mayhem around the room rose to a level all too much for the Clitoralpram to cancel out.
‘Shut the fuck up!’ I shouted, and was duly asked to leave.
From there, with another half-hour till the meeting, I went to this affluent, leafy south-west London suburb’s Sainsbury’s to get some shopping with my eleven quid, keeping a quid for the meeting.
When I got there, the usual suspects were smoking outside, supping tea and having a giggle. My mood lightened as I shook their hands and talked small.
I saw my sponsor, who’d just got back from a break in Goa, and sat down next to him with my polystyrene cup of tea.
There were some children of alcoholics playing in the corner of the hall, but when the meeting started they managed to stay pretty quiet as we talked about the tolls of the booze on our lives and how much better it was now that we’d started to live without the poison.
After the meeting, I said goodbye to my sponsor and went home for a quiet night in.