The original tweet was from Sophia Alexandra Hall on Dec 15th.

https://twitter.com/sophiassocials/status/1338885827804401664

On December 16th (today) it was tweeted by Sophie’s friend   David Alfred Grimm.

This card found by my friend in @FromPaperchase today, poking fun at orphans and care experienced people… Do you truly believe this is ok @FromPaperchase ?? Absolutely disgusting thing to sell.

we are more than the butt of a joke… #notok #careexperienced #fixthis pic.twitter.com/Ctcw9xIhPD

— David Alfred Grimm #cep (@DavetheCareBear) December 15, 2020

I called David to ask if I could write about it and then share the blog on all platforms.

A mother is on the phone looking at a child. The child is staring at spilt milk. The mother shouts on the phone “Is that the orphanage? Right I want a f*cking refund…”

This is a card for sale in #Paperchase. @whaleandbird#Paperchasehttps://t.co/lsBK9epPyE

— lemn sissay MBE (@lemnsissay) December 16, 2020

Which is what I did.  Sophie and David were right. Something was deeply wrong with  the card .  Unbeknownst to Sophie, David or myself  Paperchase were busy looking into it after receiving a  tidal wave of complaints from the blog, twitter and Facebook. They also received all your complaints when you wrote directly to customer services.  Paperchase have apologised unreservedly and openly.  They have removed the card from their website  and “have instructed all stores to remove it from display”.

Thank you Paperchase. And thank you to every person who tweeted and retweeted and who shared the facebook updates and commented on the blog. There were some really  powerful messages  which I screenshot and placed at the end of this blog.

Most of all thank you  Sophia Alexandra Hall who brought this to all  our attention in the first place.  This is what it says at the beginning of a  Guardian article on Sophie….

“when Sophia Alexandra Hall received the response to her application for the University of Oxford in 2015, she opened it in front of everyone at her school. “I ran into the canteen and burst into tears,” she says. “I was sobbing, and I remember my headteacher saying: ‘Stop crying – you got into Oxford!’ No one at social services believed me.” As a care leaver, the odds of Hall making it to university, let alone Oxford, were very slim”.

Thankyou Sophia.  It was important to write this blog to thank Sophia and  Paperchase and all the people who wrote to them about The Card because our thanks should be as loud as our protest. I will Cherish this response from Paperchase as the best Christmas Message this year. Merry Christmas everyone.

One more thing: The card is was  sold by Paperchase but it is produced by a little independent company called forest friends https://www.forestfr1ends.store/ . I hope they hear about this and  remove it from their production line. @forest_fr1ends