Sponsorship is an idea that should never have been divulged to the Poles. At the moment there is an ad campaign for hospice care. Posters on bus stops invite you to send a text message to the hospice charity. They tell you how much the text costs with VAT but they don’t tell you what the rate of VAT is or what proportion of the cost goes to the hospice charity and what (if any) to the mobile phone operators.

Such trifling information is of far less importance than the list of sponsors of the advertisements: underneath the posters appear the logos of no less than 25 companies and “foundations.” How mean is that? “Oh yeah, we’ll sponsor your sick dogs’ home or whatever it is, but we won’t sponsor all of it. What, you think Glaxo Smith Kline is made of money? Tell you what: we’ll sponsor one twenty fifth of the costs. Can’t say fairer than that, can you?”

If you inspect the poster carefully you see the list of logos is actually divided into three groups: “media patrons,” “operators” (i.e. mobile phone operators) and “sponsors.” The distinction is probably vitally important to their taxation experts and corporate lawyers but to you and me it looks like an undignified scramble to be associated with a good cause at the minimum of expense.