Greece is the word
Hustling through. Waterloo station on Friday, I noticed numerous identical little ladies in pink t-shirts collecting for what seemed to be ‘Greek Animal Rescue’. I am always happy to give to deserving causes, but in a hurry, I couldn’t figure out what this meant. What could this charity be about?
Was it for example, the rescue of British dogs, but run in the Greek financial style? Maybe the charity was already bankrupt, with local collectors alternating between Waterloo Station and a spot of street violence at Clapham Junction. At least you could see why they were at Waterloo, rather than, say, Frankfurt Zentral. Or might it have been a charity run in the Greek Olympic style, with lightly oiled youths tending the rescued animals, dressed in off-the shoulder togas, with fresh vine leaf fascinators?
Alternatively, I thought, they could be Greek nationals rescuing British animals. But if so, why? The collectors didn’t look very Greek – they looked small, pink, and English. Possibly they were local people rescuing Greek animals in Britain? But then how did these animals arrive? Could they be realistically released into the wild in South London?
The final possibility was that the charity supported the rescue of Greek animals in Greece (which animals: deer, larks?). And this, on Googling them, is what it turned out to be. It’s a typically British concern in a time of Somali starvation, street riots, and global financial melt-down. Their web page explains the background, and casts a not very flattering light on yet another unsavoury Greek practice.
Collecting for Greek animals at Waterloo raises the possibility of the number of charity collectors at the station going through the roof, as more combinations of deserving cause and foreign country are represented. The Albanian Warthog Appeal will jostle aggressively with Pencils for Switzerland, while commuters, deafened by the sound of shaking cash buckets, try to dodge past unmolested. It’s just one more thing to worry about. The country’s going to the (Greek) dogs.
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