Charity Wars

Working in the charity shop is an eye opener to parts of life which have so far passed me by. It took a couple of days for me to realise why that workplace felt different -I have never worked in a majority-female situation before! The gossip is far more interesting!

And I stumbled into the "donation bag wars". Would you believe that some people will go around and steal the bags of clothing generously left outside homes, selling the goods to textile merchants? And I mean that this is done on an organised scale, not by chance opportunists, with men in vans circling residential streets looking for charity bags. That is pretty low.

But not as low as local councils, who sometimes insist that charities buy a license to collect from houses -and then demand a cut of any profits made. Recession or not, that is grubby behaviour of a type that makes even criminals blush.