I saw the title "champagne challenge" and thought I may be able to win a bottle! No luck again eh, didn't get any at the awards dinner either! Nor bloody veal or fois gras! Was I given the paupers meal? It was a rubberchicken with cheese in I think, not sure I hardly ate any of it! The coffee was excellent as usual though! If there was champagne at the dinner, how come there wasn't any on all the tables? We had a dodgy red I can get in my local Co-op for £3.99 and a weak as ditch water white from some obscure country! Was I at the right dinner? I'm beginning to wonder!

Amusingly for several animal welfare charities who went, apparently both white veal and foie gras were served at one point.

Shall we get some low-paid Indian children in next year to do shoe shines?

I have to learn to type properly. or proofread more when I post.

Cameron:  'Overwhelmingly, they point to a profession that is on the defensive:' and 'Any profession should be prepared to defend itself'

umm....

A stroy:

 A friend of mine told me about a supplier of his.  He knows one of the guys that works for it whose project came to an end, and he had no project to go to next.  No work to do, and due to the industry, he thought he'd just be asked to finish - he' was a contractor earning three figures a day.  But no, somehow they missed him, so he went in every day for 4 months, and did nothing but talk to people, play games, and drink coffee.  After 4 months someone twigged they'd been paying him but giving him no work, only because they had a new project on, and neeed someone to do it, so he went to work on the new one.  The only comments made were 'oh happens all the time'.  So my friend asks for a reduction on the costs he's paying, obviously plenty of money sloshing around.  Answer?  No can do, margins are tight.

 But people don't scrutinise the accounts of each minutae of big corporations, the market controls them, nothing more.  No-one asks them to defend the high cost to consumers.  Maybe they should, maybe they shouldn't but here's the comparison, in a week, they spent more paying this guy to do nothing, than any single charity did rewarding their staff with a table.  'But,' people say 'that's a company, that's not public money'.  And that's true, but they aren't isolated bubbles. Charities need to pay and reward staff at a level that lets them recruit and keep talented staff.  I doubt any company will have figures to show that spending £100,000 on an office christmas bash will save them that in recruitment costs, or net them that in increased sales/income - why do we demand it of charities?  Companies are profit driven, so it must make financial sense to them to do it, why should it be different for a charity?

It has been fascinating to read the comments posted to the previous blog entry about 'champagne charities'.  Overwhelmingly, they point to a profession that is on the defensive: fundraisers, it seems, get very angry if anyone dares impugn their motives.

This is very disappointing. Any profession should be prepared to defend itself, and should not resort to carping if its morality is questioned. Rational argument is what's needed - not Lindsay Boswell's unique style of conspiratorial suspicion, something which only damages the sector further.