I read that David Beckham is helping King Charles by becoming an ambassador for The King’s Trust, formally known as The Prince’s Trust, described on Wikipedia as “a UK based charity founded in 1976 to help vulnerable young people get their lives on track. It supports 11-to-30-year-olds who are unemployed or struggling at school and at risk of exclusion. Many of the young people helped by the trust face issues such as homelessness, disability, mental health problems, or trouble with the law.
It runs a range of training programmes, providing practical and financial support to build young people's confidence and motivation. Each year they work with about 60,000 young people, with three in four moving on to employment, education, volunteering, or training.” All good stuff!
The Trust suffered a bit of a setback when it’s chief executive (not the king - or prince as he then was) apparently offered a Saudi billionaire the possibility of a knighthood in exchange for a donation! Oops!
Anyway, David Beckham has stepped forward: one rich man helping another. He’s not made a donation but he’s giving his time to promote the Trust. In return he was given a tour of Highgrove, the king’s Gloucestershire home. (I suppose one benefit of the king having a number of homes dotted about the place is that it provides employment for the staff who maintain them.)
When I read that the Beckhams have a fortune of £455m it struck me that they could give half of it to charitable causes, helping out more of those young people with problems “such as homelessness, disability, mental health problems, or trouble with the law”. And they would still be filthy rich!
There are rumours that David Beckham, someone I always thought of as quite a nice young man, was disappointed not to have received higher honours than his 2023 OBE (for services to football). Left off the honours list in 2014, he is alleged to have said in an email, “It’s a disgrace to be honest and if I was American I would of got something like this 10 years ago.” However, his representatives said at the time that the emails had been “doctored” and taken out of context.
Personally I think it’s a disgrace that someone can have gone through the education system and still, despite having advisors and representatives, write “I would of” instead of “I would’ve” or even “I would have”! Just a little linguistic bugbear of mine!
Mind you, their children should be properly educated as they can afford private school fees, even with an average cost of £17,500 per annum.
At the other end of the financial scale, it seems that the rise in shoplifting is still going on. Some shoplifters are organised and steal in bulk to sell food on at reduced prices to people who can’t afford supermarket prices. An odd kind of Robin Hoodery, stealing from the rich to sell to the poor! My brother-in-law recently posted a photo of packs of cheese with security tags in a supermarket. This is what we have come to!
There are people given the label “Swiper”, a Seemingly Well-Intentioned Patron Engaging in Regular shoplifting. Oh, boy!
The Co-op alone recorded 330,000 incidents of shoplifting, abuse, violence and antisocial behaviour in its 2,500+ stores across the UK in 2023, a 44% increase on the year before.
Experts in the psychology of shoplifting link it to the mental health crisis and say engaging in shoplifting can represent a cry for help, especially among women. Around 85% of people arrested are men and only 4% of the prison population is made up of women, but of the 19,900 defendants prosecuted for shop theft in 2021, 28% were women. My thought is that maybe there are more women shoplifters because they are often the ones doing the family food shop!
There it is!
Meanwhile, in Gaza children are dying of malnutrition, actually starving to death. There is even a strange north-south divide with some supplies tricklIng through to the north but the south gradually cut off from all aid. Here’s a link to an article about this.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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