Aasmah Mir
DO you have a minute for the starving children of Africa? The world stops. What is the right answer to that question? “No”? “Yes, but …?” Welcome to the world of the chugger – or charity mugger – who will guilt you into signing a direct debit or drive you to behave in an uncharacteristic way – ignoring them, suddenly losing the power of speech or crossing the road with your mobile clamped to your ear.
Charities need money, but chuggers are a nasty modern twist on a basically good idea. Just watch them operating for five minutes. People give them a berth wider than Johnny Vegas’s bottom. It’s not that they don’t want to give. But they don’t want to be guilted or intimidated into giving. So hurrah for the handful of councils that have now started excluding chuggers from certain areas.
People gave before anyone thought up the street charity worker – and we now have access to more ways of donating than ever before – internet, text message, direct debit. I noticed outside a tube station how everyone crossed the road to avoid the row of charity workers with their clipboards and cagoules. Inside the station, most of them put change in the tin of a man sitting on a stool collecting for the Royal National Institute for the Blind. He wasn’t even rattling his tin. He certainly wasn’t blocking anyone’s path or trying to be sarcastic.
All we need now is for the exclusion zones to cover other forms of intrusion. You can walk 100 yards down a street and be asked all sorts of personal questions and handed all kinds of junk. Do you have a minute for starving children? Can I ask you where you got your hair done? We’d like to give you a free makeover … are you up for it? Do you have any piercings? Do you use wax strips? Leave me alone. This is the middle of Oxford Street, not my bathroom.
It’s no wonder that more and more people are opting out of electoral rolls and trying to protect their telephone numbers and addresses. But there’s still little shelter on the street, where the cold-caller is in front of you and can choose to make your life hell.
Oh, you don’t have time for the starving children in Africa? Triumph in their voice, their eyes narrowing. Murderer. You’re in a hurry? Well a child dies in Africa every minute. Surely you can spare a minute?
Hello, yes you, lady in the green top, looking gorgeous – please don’t avoid me. I’m just trying to help children who are dying of starvation.
Or do you do what I saw a man do recently? He’d been stopped by four or five chuggers in a row. “Yes, I do have time for the starving children of Africa,” he said, “but no time or inclination to let you siphon off 10% of what I give you, for your wages, before it reaches anyone remotely near Africa.” The chugger stopped in her tracks. People clapped. I thought these things only happened in films starring Tom Hanks or Robin Williams. It’s not nice when someone shames you in public, is it?
Let’s have a bit more privacy in public. So we don’t have to be stripped bare, morally or cosmetically. Like the very polite Eastern European woman who approached me with a clipboard and some shampoo and said: “Can I ask you about your hairs?” Good God, I thought, how can she see them from there?
