I visited Tony at his lovely flat in Friendly Street Mews. He was very proud to show me around his spacious living room, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom. It was very, very clean and tidy. “Much tidier than my house” I told him. We are both Arsenal crazy so we spent some time standing on his Arsenal rug talking about how Emery’s first season as manager had gone. We agreed it wasn’t too bad, but next season it needs to be better.
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) rightly gets a bad press when it involves tokenistic gestures by big corporates seeking to pacify government and public opinion in the cause of profit. Even well-meaning companies can misfire awkwardly in the cause of CSR. Like the rookie company offering to teach a 200 year old charity and it’s grandmother how to suck ‘business survival’ eggs (awks), or an unskilled team painting a whole community centre, badly, in the cause of saving a local charity time and money (not).
Once upon a time there were three blokes. One was blind, one had autism, all three had learning disabilities. The odds on ‘living happily ever after’ might have been better if the labels stopped there. All three had mental health and challenging behaviour labels. And all three had a reputation, shaped by words like ‘forensic’ and ‘dangerous’, the stickiest labels of all. All three were in-patients in NHS funded assessment and treatment units – like the infamous Castlebeck’s Winterbourne View – and/or equivalent secure residential units.