You click on the blog section of the website and everything’s out of date. The newest blog is about 3 years old and you think, “Well they haven’t got much to say for themselves.”
I’m rather afraid that happened to us. It’s all too easy – you’re busy with clients, and life, and family, and the blog comes last. So. I’ve had a spring clean, a clear out, and this is me starting over again.
It’s been the busiest time ever, the hardest, and the best. That’s why you haven’t heard from me.
Busiest? We’ve won two heritage Fund bids in a matter of weeks, and now we’re implementing the programmes.
Hardest? In these hardest of all times for fundraisers, two Heritage Fund wins in succession is not quite lightning striking twice, but it doesn’t half feel good.
I was on the phone with a one of the Heritage Fund investment managers today. “They way you combined the community and heritage aspects was excellent. It was a really busy round, the busiest I’ve seen, but the panel just kept talking about your project. You made it easy for them.” You can imagine how I felt.
Best? A few weeks ago I found myself sitting in my office, on the inevitable Zoom call, but talking to two blokes in Bolivia, who had found their way free from lives lost to drugs with the help of my newest client.
They spoke of a life I couldn’t imagine. Of knife crime, living on the streets, of nearly being lynched in a lawless village. Then Luis, the young guy in his 20s, said, “This is so different. This is like another language, another world, compared to my life before. I want to make up for lost time.”
Sometimes, doing my job, you are stopped in your tracks. No matter what anybody is doing, anywhere in the world, they aren’t doing what I am doing, hearing what I am hearing. It’s a privilege.
When I was about, I guess, 12 or 13, my Latin teacher wrote a limerick about me.
There was a young fellow called Gilly
Who really was terribly silly.
Every time that he spoke
Out came a great joke,
Couldn’t help it, ‘twas just willy-nilly.
I was charmed. Overjoyed. Mr Woodman had written a limerick about me. ME. Nobody else in the class, just me.
Somehow, then, I turned into the bloke who doesn’t keep his blogs up to date. I guess I still couldn’t help it, ’twas just willy-nilly. But it’s a good kind of randomness.
