Monday, 25 November 2013

Silver lining

A ‘friendship’ helpline for older people, called The Silver Line, has been launched. It uses specially trained volunteers to:

  • Offer information, friendship and advice
  • Link callers to local groups and services
  • Offer regular befriending calls
  • Protect and support those who are suffering abuse and neglect.

I think the subtle allusion in the title is brilliant. I’m pleased to see they will make calls as well as receive them. The ability to link callers to local groups is going to be heavily dependent on the national charities with local branches, since the structure of local CVSs has been so decimated that even where they still exist, their connections with independent groups is often tenuous or fortuitous.

I’d like to see the service gradually localised, so that helpline staff are more likely to recognise some of the things that callers are talking about. Geography and places can be useful conversation hangers.  

 

25 Nov 2013 06:15:29 | Older people, Social exclusion

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Oh keep the dog far hence The Indy has a nicely restrained headline this morning: Man gets permission to bury dead wife in his garden. If this were your neighbour, would you be wondering to yourself how willing any future purchaser will be to go ahead with the conveyancing, when they find out there are moral constraints on what they can do with the garden? It’s hardly going to make the place easy to sell, is it? Not to mention the prospect foreseen by T.S. Eliot quoting Webster – ‘oh keep the dog far hence, that’s friend to man, or with his nails he’ll dig it up again.’ And I am not going to be as tasteful as the Indy, which has respectfully resisted referring to Billy Connolly’s famous gag about the man who buried his wife with her bum above the surface so he had somewhere to park his bike.

Kevin Harris

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