Bristolians will be familiar with St Peter’s Hospice. To quote their website: “St Peter’s Hospice is a Bristol charity caring for adults with life-limiting illnesses. We aim to improve the quality of their living and dying while extending care and support to their families and loved ones.” I have had some dealings with the Hospice in a professional capacity and I know by talking to third parties whose family have used the Hospice just how valuable the work is that they carry out. It costs £19,000 a day to run the hospice. What do you think about someone who breaks into one of their charity shops to steal hundreds of pounds?
That is what happened to the Portishead shop, which exists purely and solely to raise money to assist the dying. I am very much opposed to all forms of theft but this strikes me as being worse than most. But what inspired someone, if inspiration is part of this sordid story, to steal money in this way?
I expect when the miscreants are caught – and let’s hope they get caught soon – their legal team will provide explanations. They come from broken homes, they are desperate drug addicts, they are brainless dickheads. I doubt whether the final explanation will be the one we hear about, actually. It will of course be society that is to blame. Perhaps they are too dim to know what a hospice actually is, so the first thing I would do once they have been sentenced to a £10 fine by the local Magistrates Court, payable at 5p a week, is take them to a hospice. Let them see what a hospice is and perhaps have a friendly cup of tea with the awesome staff who care for those who are spending their final days there and indeed the dying themselves. I’d ask them one question: “Are you that bloody desperate that you will steal money from people who are dying?”
If the thieves had any conscience at all, they’d hand themselves in to the police immediately. A real man would never have burgled a charity shop in the first place, but one with at least a sense of decency and morality would walk into their local police station, hold their hands up and say “I’ve done wrong, I’ve been an arse, I’ll pay back all the money I nicked, I apologise unreservedly to everyone concerned, but especially the dying, their families and everyone who works for St Peter’s Hospice, not to mention everyone who donated money and then found I had stolen it.”
What follows is unlikely because of the limited reach of this website, but here goes. If, by some chance, you are one of the people who broke in, or you know the people who did, then do the decent thing. You may not realise it, but one day you too will die and you might even need to use a hospice. You can put this right in a heartbeat. Just do it.
