You think, when you attend a fund-raising do for a hospice, that your contribution is going to be spent on equipment and essential nursing care. We certainly thought so last Saturday when the do we were at raised £583 for Trinity Hospice in Bispham, Blackpool, where some of our friends have spent their last days.
What we didn't know was that two days earlier the hospice's trustees and management had unveiled seven pictures commissioned for the trifling sum of £50,000 to brighten up the chapel (a chapel they describe as 'non-religious', which itself makes you raise your eyebrows a bit, for there ain't no such thing as a non-religious chapel.)
See today's Blackpool Gazette, and see also the Hospice's website for small pictures of the paintings.
The Gazette report notes that the artist spent a year working on this commission. Even if she wasn't working on anything else, fifty grand isn't a bad return for a year's work, and I bet she's glad she switched professions when she came out of theological college and opted for the evidently far more lucrative job of painting in preference to parsoning, and for Heaven's sake, I hope no NSMs find out what she's getting or they'll be taking up the speculative brush as well.
The hospice has, I fear, landed itself with a PR disaster, because the reaction of the populist press was so obviously predictable, and the meeja has been handed a story on a plate (someone has already spotted the the ad on the Trinity website for a vacancy in the servants' quarters, at only a bit over £6 an hour.)
Only a few hours after the Gazette hit the streets there was a huge chorus of disapproval on the website, where comment is invited from readers, some of whom are even able to spell their own pseudonyms, and only a few defenders. I waded through page after page of comments, and agreed with almost all of them, as one does when one does not wish to cause offence. Then by chance I heard a bloke on a TV quiz show say, just as I was about to turn the wretched thing off, 'Once I've med up me mind, I never go back on it. 'Er were th'weakest link', and that, and the quality so far of the comment on the Gazette website, brought to mind Maurice Evan Hare's apt metaphor, this after all being Blackpool:
There once was a man who said, ‘Damn!
It is born upon me that I am
An engine that moves
In predestinate grooves -
I’m not even a bus, I’m a tram.'
Ah well. I am sure we get the press we deserve.
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