Welcome to the Worthing Community Chest Covid Diaries; a snapshot of life under lock down in Worthing!
Brought to you in isolation by our Chair, Karl Allison.
#WorthingCovidDiaries April 10th 2020: Be More Bond
In more normal times, whatever they are supposed to be, we’ve enjoyed the monthly privilege of a Worthing Community Chest column inside Here & Now being delivered through most of Worthing’s letterboxes. Sadly, it probably won’t be dropping into anybody’s isolated hallways this month, but you can still find it online. Here’s just a little bit of what it says……
“April was going to be such a great month for cinema. The new Bond film, Peter Rabbit 2 and a red carpet premiere in Worthing called Rags to Riches starring some of your neighbours.
I’m not making this up. It was listed on the Dome website for April 28, a film about Worthing scheduled to be shown in one of Britain’s oldest, loveliest and busiest cinemas, with surround sound, air conditioning and popcorn.
This film is so local that it begins with some people going into the Dome to watch the film they’re already in. It’s got cameos from well-known Worthing faces and even some local, independent trader product placement. Short of a safety-conscious car chase along Marine Parade and a plot twist in which the entire trustee team of Worthing Community Chest are revealed to be bloodsucking aliens hiding behind the veneer of transformative grant making, it looks like we’ve thought of everything.
But, just like James Bond, we’ve had to surrender for the time being. Let’s remember that the postponement of events is essentially an act of kindness towards the weakest and most vulnerable members of our society. It is a good thing to be doing. We’ll adapt and we’ll be back. The event is postponed, not cancelled. So don’t delete your 2020 diary just yet. It will be full again soon.”
#WorthingCovidDiaries April 2nd 2020: Doing it for Dorothy
It would be all too easy to get lost in the numbers at the moment. Just about every number we hear is big and getting bigger at a speed we can’t compute. We are not accustomed to bad things spreading exponentially. We spend most of our lives confident that we are exercising at least some degree of control over the things that matter most to us. Now, rather too suddenly for reasonable adjustment, we are faced with spiking infection rates, non-flattening curves and how many people are in front of us in the queue to add apparently essential items to their online supermarket order.
Our attempts at a response might feel slight and even our best intended actions inconsequential. But they aren’t.
So when Worthing Community Chest fired up our trustee whats app group, agreed to relax many of our usual terms and conditions, rolled out an emergency fund aimed at all those brand new neighbourhood response groups and achieved something like a 48 hour turnaround, we would have been thrilled to imagine that our prompt and decisive action played a part in the saving of thousands of lives. But they probably didn’t. Maybe not even hundreds of lives, but that’s OK. In fact, if someone called Dorothy who lives in Durrington feels less alone because someone arrived about two metres from her doorstep with three tins of alphabet spaghetti and a long life rice pudding, then that should be something to be proud of. In the current climate, I wouldn’t even want to put a price on it.
So do what you can. It will make a difference.
To apply for our emergency Covid-19 grants, email grants@worthingcommunitychest.org