Speeding fine? Fine by me… October 21, 2009
Posted by someonenicer in acts of kindness.3 comments
only fools and students...yes, I drove one of these once
Talk about rubbing salt in the wound. For 35 years I’ve driven an assortment of old bangers the length and breadth of Britain without once being caught speeding. And in the same week my record attempt is dashed by the arrival of one of those stern official envelopes from the Fixed Penalty Support Unit I read of a 99 year old man named as the UK’s safest driver for not getting a ticket in 84 years on the road.
Oh well. I’m happy to let Mr George Geeson have his five minutes in the spotlight. He deserves it, not just for his ’safety first’ maxim, but for being old enough to be able to boast that his first car was a Model T Ford. How cool is that?
And I deserve my speeding ticket, for as surely as traffic lights turn red the moment we approach them, I confess I have never been a slave to the speed limit.
road sense
It turns out that while I’ve been smugly crowing about my clean sheet, everyone else I know has been racking up points like Tesco shoppers. Indeed, some of the tales I’ve heard make my 37mph on a deserted Watling Street at 7.30am on a Sunday morning sound positively pedestrian.
But getting the ticket did set me thinking what a thankless task it must be, sitting in the FPSU (there’s catchy!) grinding out thousands of letters that you know are going to ruin the recipient’s day.
I wonder if dealing daily with calls from Mr and Ms Angry has worn them as thin as an illegal tyre, or whether they still get some job satisfaction from the thought that every ticket they send just may have a tiny impact on our fast-forward-world. That occasionally it may just make someone pause for thought about the effects of speed, and the fact that every morning when they jump into their car they’re putting themselves in charge of a dangerous weapon?
I don’t want to come across as po-faced about this but the older I get, the more I’m inclined to agree with gorgeous George that, when it comes to the roads, safety comes first. And not just my safety but the safety of all the pedestrians I pass, preoccupied like me with all the things they’re hoping to do that day and therefore not necessarily paying attention to what’s going on around them.
a small thank you
So there’s a subtext to today’s act of kindness, parcelling up a box of Marks and Spencer chocolates to send anonymously (for fear they may think I’m trying to bribe my way out of trouble) to the FPSU as a thank you for doing a thankless task.
And that’s my growing sense of gratitude at having been caught, and reminded that I am not in a hurry to get my life over with.
I’m a bit worried it’ll end up in the bin without being opened. It’s possible their soft centres have been hardened by the treatment they get from the public and fear of being poisoned will prevent them taking a risk with M&S’s finest. The best I can do is enclose a note explaining this is a genuine thank you from a sorry speeder.
In praise of slow
Meanwhile, I can now see where I went wrong. Take a look at the list of cars our careful record holder has owned. Hard to speed in a Ford Anglia and even in the 80s owning an Austin Maxi condemmed you to only venturing out after dark for fear of being caught committing a crime against car-style. My first car was a black Morris Minor with a split windscreen and a top speed 20 miles under the national speed limit. From there I graduated to a three-wheeler Reliant whose power, like its’ street cred, had been by-passed. If I’d stuck with those cars I’d still be tootling along in the slow lane – instead of being captured on police video, singing my heart out along with ‘Good Morning Sunday’ and failing to spot that the higher the notes, the faster my speedo was rising.
The Big Bleed October 12, 2009
Posted by someonenicer in acts of kindness.Tags: acts of kindness, Kindness, blood, national blood service, blood donation, transfusion, cancer, Mars Bars
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This was my third attempt to give blood.
The first time I tried was in the early ’90s when there were more stories about HIV/AIDS than the X-factor in the papers and no enthusiasm for donors whose blood had ever darkened the Dark Continent.
By the end of the 90s the mention of Africa no longer sent the NHS screaming into a corner and my 10-year conviction for having been there was allowed to drop off my donor licence. Sadly, one glimpse into the lecture theatre where prostrate bodies lay hooked up to lines and bags bulging with the red stuff, like a field hospital from the Crimea, and the blood drained right out of me. My second attempt ended with smelling salts, which was pretty much par for the course. I’m someone who passed out so regularly during school biology lessons they banned me from sitting on those wooden lab stools and installed a beanbag so I didn’t have so far to fall.
The spirit was willing but the flesh was oh, so ridiculously squeamish.
blood banking on friends
Then came an email from a friend still reeling from the news that her father, young, fit and 11,000 miles away in Australia, had been admitted to hospital with minor chest pains and rapidly transfered by helicopter to a special unit for a quintuple heart by-pass. Pre-empting all the ‘if-there-is-anything-I-can-do’ responses her message ended with the following appeal:
“Please give blood. It’s largely painless, you get a mars bar at the end and you could literally be saving someone’s life. It’s particularly healthy for your own heart as it’s meant to lower your iron count, and an excess iron count can lead to heart disease. It’s also a complete credit crunch donation – costs you nothing, yet you get the warm buzz of being able to contribute positively to the social fabric.”
It was time to test that third time lucky saying…
personal services
I’m going to pass over the details of the paperwork to be completed in advance. Not that it was long or complicated or anything. Just a tad, shall we say, personal (in the sense shops use the term to mean anything concerned with matters below the waist and above the visible panty line).
And to note in passing that Africa is now SO last decade. It’s South America, indelibly linked with Swine Flu thanks to this year’s media obssession, that now sets alarm bells ringing at the Blood Donor clinic – or ’the bleed’ as I heard the staff rather unnervingly refer to it among themselves.
I was shown first to a row of chairs and asked to have a big drink and read the small print. Unfortunately, my appointment letter hadn’t mentioned it helps speed the bleed – and recovery – if you drink copious amounts of water ahead of donating. Thanks to a Starbucks voucher in that day’s Guardian my blood was almost pure Americano (presumably making it a pefect match for any sick journalists).
Next I was led behind a screen so a nurse could check my paperwork. It wasn’t entirely in order: in my haste to demonstrate what a healthy, clean-living type I now am I’d answered the men’s questions as well as the women’s.
The nurse looked up at me just a little sternly: “You did read these statements before ticking them didn’t you?”
more in the same vein
A small sample of blood taken for testing, then another nurse brought me to one of a half dozen beds set out in a circle in the middle of the room. It all looked quite convivial – more campfire than circled wagons – and once a third nurse and I had established that I am squeamish and might be there to give blood but best not to mention it or let me see anything ressembling blood, I was hooked up to one of the machines, good to go.
It was all pretty painless, took less than 10 minutes, and though I did get my usual touch of the vapours at the end it was nothing three more cups of water couldn’t put right. Which is pretty amazing considering what brilliant stuff blood is.
Among the things I learned are:
- that the NHS gets great value from each donation because the blood breaks down into red cells, platelets and plasma which are all vital for treating certain conditions
- that 53% of all donations go to help people being treated for cancer, leukaemia, sickle cell disease and similar conditions; it never occurred to me before, when I’ve been wanting to support friends and relatives with cancer, that becoming a blood donor is a fantastic way of giving active support
- and that only 5 percent of those who can give blood do so.
local heroes
In the months I’ve been experimenting with acts of kindness this was one of the best experience I’ve had. Of course it helped that the lovely staff got all excited to be bleeding a ‘first-timer’ and made a point of thanking and congratulating me at every stage along the way. (A Mars Bar afterwards would have helped even more but perhaps it’s only the Aussies who know what comfort there is in chocolate; in austere Britain it’s Rich Tea all round.)
But sugar rushes aside, the 40 minutes I spent at a community centre in Newport Pagnell were an embodiment of what this blog is all about: anonymous acts of giving, where what is in my heart, my intention, counts for more than how much I spend or what, if any, thanks or reward I get.
Three months ago a friend was found to have pancreatic cancer – one of the cancers that causes people to speak in an even more hushed tone than usual. The good news was the doctors decided it was worth operating on and after eight long hours under the surgeon’s knife he’s sufficiently recovered to enjoy whipping up his shirt to show off the pyramid-shaped scar cutting his chest in half.
The fact that he’s in a position to turn my stomach at all is down to a dozen people who gave up their time to attend a bleed.
I’ll never know how and where and who my small donation will help. But what I do know is that I won’t have to feel quite the same degree of helplessness next time I hear of a friend’s cancer, pass the shocking evidence of an accident as I whizz up the motorway, or switch on the news to more tales of distress and disaster.
Perhaps it’s time to wear the badge of a bleeding heart liberal with pride?
links
National Blood Service Do It!
And while we’re at: organ donation at The Wall of Life
Runner beans, the vicar, and me October 8, 2009
Posted by someonenicer in acts of kindness.Tags: Milton Keynes, Kindness, random acts of kindness, harvest festival, stopsley, vicar, autumn colour
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It was all the vicar’s doing.
Let me explain. One of the joys of Twitter is linking up with the kind of people you’d never meet in the normal run of things. A few weeks ago I got a message saying my tweets were being followed by @stopsleyvicar.
Intrigued, not just at the thought that a vicar might find my views interesting, but by the coincidence of him being based in the part of Luton where I spent the first 12 years of my life, I decided to follow him back.
Since when I’ve been tickled by his efforts to get his creative juices flowing for sermon writing by playing heavy rock; enjoyed his real-time updates as he listened to the Bishop of St Albans speak about making Christianity relevant today; followed his outing to see Mott the Hoople at Hammersmith, and been reminded that this is the time of year when churchgoers everywhere raid their cupboards and veggie patches to put together a harvest offering.
basket cases
How the memories came flooding back, pressing parents to spare a tin of pink salmon or bake a fruit cake to give the shoebox covered in crepe paper a bit more class. All the time knowing that Karen Greenham’s basket overflowing with goodies from Sainsbury’s – the rest of us Stopsleyites shopped at Bishops beneath a concrete monstrosity called Jansel House - would get centre stage at the harvest festival service like it did every year.
It’s no good telling an eight year old that it’s the thought that counts.
Still. I always loved making up a basket and loved the service even more, entranced by each year’s bumper display of fat marrows, perfect carrots, gleaming tins and, best of all, harvest bread: a perfectly reproduced sheaf of corn complete with field mouse, all glazed to the colour of caramel.
season of mellow fruitfulness
Half a lifetime later I love autumn even more. Not only have I joined the ranks of folk with soil beneath their nails and homegrown vegetables on their dinner tables (but please, no more runner beans). I’m also lucky enough to have moved from Stopsley to a new city which could rival New England for autumn colour: 20 million trees in Milton Keynes and every single one of them a slightly different shade of fire.
Once I started reading my Stopsley vicar’s messages about harvest festival I wanted to be a part of it again. I wanted the pleasure of packaging up a surprise basket for a stranger, selecting a few treats to hide in among the staples, adding some of my own harvestings from the veggie patch and allotment: plum jam, golden pumpkin and apples fat as footballs.
I wanted to imagine the smile on someone’s face when they received it. Above all, I wanted to say thank you in a very small way for being able to enjoy autumn and growing, picking and eating my own produce. Forget what I said about the runner bean glut a moment ago. I can always go back onto the internet to find a recipe for runner bean chutney, roast runner beans or even bean wine (though if it’s anything like the homemade brussel sprout wine an enterprising neighbour brewed up, the suspiciously green colour will put anyone off drinking it).
closed for business
Talking of suspicious, it wasn’t quite as easy to find a home for my beautiful wicker basket as I’d hoped. The first two churches I tried were locked, and, like them sadly, I had no confidence that if I left my gift outside it would still be there in the morning.
But I recalled walking around Willen with some friends and calling in on St Mary Magdalene, which off the back of a tenuous Christopher Wren connection keeps its doors open to tourists, and was able to leave my basket there, with a note of gratitude.
In a few days someone will be enjoying my pumpkin, swiss chocolates, organic red wine…and the inevitable can of baked beans.
Mind you, I’m certain that somewhere Karen Greenham is browsing the shelves of Waitrose, selecting extra virgin olive oil, macademia stuffed dates and Scottish heather honey for this year’s centrepiece basket.
Philanthropist in a league of her own September 14, 2009
Posted by someonenicer in acts of kindness.Tags: acts of kindness, CFN, charities, community foundations, donations, giving, philanthropy
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I’ve always treated league tables with suspicion, especially the kind that involve making the case for being better than someone else – even if it’s only better at having had a worse time. Which of us hasn’t done a Monty Python at some point and got caught up in competitive story-telling? (“There were a hundred and fifty of us living in t’ shoebox in t’ middle o’ road”…”You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank.”)
Too often league tables make us feel hopeless or helpless, whether we’re working in a school with disadvantaged kids whose best efforts will never make a difference to the school’s position at the foot of the table. Or telling our own painful stories in order to justify staying put in our lives.
But there are some areas of life where a league table may be a positive thing, a channel for our aspirations, spurring us on to do better and to make the most of our potential.
It works for sportsmen and women, and this week it worked for me when I met someone who, by any measure, has reached the premiere league of being someonenicer.
keeping it local
Marcelle Speller made her money through setting up the holiday-rentals website. She sold at a good time and could have spent the second half of her life lunching at Loch Fyne and shopping only in boutiques where the staff wear Dior and haven’t cracked a smile in 30 years.
Instead, Marcelle decided that while her money could be put to good use, there was even greater value in her skills. Coming across the Community Foundation Network , which enourages philanthropy (that old-fashioned word) and channels its proceeds into supporting local groups, Marcelle has ploughed more than £1 million of her own money, plus all her business acumen, into conceiving, designing and building a website that will allow tens of thousands of tiny, local charities to fundraise online.
Localgiving.com levels the playing field for those local charities that can’t currently cash in on our love affair with all-things online because you need to be a registered charity to join the phenomenally successful Justgiving.com website. Plus, justgiving requires a monthly fee which is simply out of the scope of many smaller charities who’d never bring in enough to justify the outlay.
The website is currently being trialled in a dozen parts of the country and will be live next year. And while few people have ever heard of Marcelle – or are likely to – her contribution to charitable giving is potentially vast. Just think about your own giving behaviour and how much more generous with your dosh you’ve become since giant charities like Comic Relief made it possible for you to donate by texting a telephone number or ticking a box on a website.
Stars in my eyes
Marcelle’s own £1 million, ploughed into the site, will pay dividends of a hundred or more times her outlay for all those small groups who currently waste effort scratching around for the £20 they need to buy stamps to post a newsletter.
But what I love best about her act of kindness is that it encourages a million more acts of kindness from people like you and me. We may not have Marcelle’s money but her website makes it simple, straightforward and quick for the rest of us to do what we can by donating a few pence or a few quid to a local charity where folk are trying to make a difference in our communities.
That’s why I put her at the top of my personal someonicer league, for inspiring me to want to be more like her, channelling more of my skills, creativity and energy – as well as the occasional few quid – into making a difference.
None of us needs do more than we are able, but doing what we can with Marcelle’s vision and ambition, and with a similar shrug-of-the-shoulders humility, puts us in the same league.
How a stranger provided the cure for post-holiday blues September 7, 2009
Posted by someonenicer in acts of kindness.Tags: Kindness, Luton Airport, queues, random acts of kindness
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photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/special/
Arriving back in the UK after two weeks in Andalucia was never going to be the highlight of my summer.
I guess everyone’s familiar with the post-break slump that follows a return to the desk/office/washing/plunging temperatures, as inescapably as peeling skin accompanies our first tentative exposure to holiday sun.
Still, I usually manage to hang on that lazy post-holiday glow for at least a couple of days beyond the baggage hall.
Not this year, though. First off, no-one at Luton airport could be bothered with crowd control, as a result of which we stood in a passport queue for more than half an hour as each new arrival disgorged another 300 passengers into the middle of the existing line. It was the first time I’ve looked at the non-EEC-passport huddle, getting their hostile grilling about what conceivable reason they might have for wanting to come to the UK, with something akin to envy.
free-for-all
Passport control wasn’t the only bit of Britain that wasn’t working. The airport’s introduced a mean£1 drop-off charge so rather than spend the money the bus to the ‘airpark’ stops just outside Bedford: at least that’s how it felt, trundling heavy cases through crowds, traffic and up and down curbs.
There was a bus at the stop but its’ doors were resolutely shut, even though the crowd of waiting passengers was already quite large. More were arriving all the time, and so was the rain, carried on ferocious gusts of wind that drove us all deeper and deeper into a shelter designed for three or four at most.
It goes without saying that almost everyone pushing and shoving to claim their inch of shelter was wearing tee shirt and shorts with gooseflesh like the serrated rows on a cheese grater (an annual display that proves the British are not quite the pessimists the rest of the world believes, for why else would blind faith in high temperatures overrule decades of experience that says whatever the weather we’ve left behind, the skies over the airport will be wet and cold).
act of kindness
It had been 90 minutes since we landed and in all that time I hadn’t stopped chuntering about everything that was wrong. I was also working myself up into having an even bigger rant about the newcomers still arriving at our bus-stop. So what if the crowd was now so large they were forced to stand in the rain? I could see they were in a far better position to secure a place on the next bus, whenever it chose to show up.
In that way we have of awfulising situations, my mind was already 10 minutes ahead of itself, and all these selfish folk had shoved those of us who’d been waiting longest to one side and nabbed all the space in the bus so we were left behind for a second time.
Aaargh!
I would have carried on stewing for another 90 minues – for the rest of the day, indeed. But for a small scene played out beside me, where one couple – wearing fewer clothes than the average swimsuit model – shivered as gloomily as me.
Behind the bus stop a car skidded to a halt, a man jumped out, opened his boot and fished out a large golfing umbrella. He darted over to the semi-nakeds and, with a large smile, shoved the umbrella at them, vanishing before they thawed out enough to thank him.
my Monica moment
This truly random act of kindness acted like an emergency brake on the roller coaster of my sulky sountrack. It reminded me, ironically, that I’m the author of a blog dedicated to exploring how it feels to be someone nicer, and what I’v been learning about how focusing on others, on kindness and gratitude and the good in me, is proving to be an antidote to the negativity to which I seem to have been prone all my life.
Strangely, it also brought to mind the episode of Friends, where Monica and Chandler are on honeymoon and beaten to all the upgrades by another couple. Increasingly glum and angry, they finally confront the other pair who look at them in amazement. They’re on honeymoon, for God’s sake: why would they such trivia bother them?
I’d just had two wonderful weeks on holiday, getting up and going to bed when I wanted, spending time with my family, enjoying great food, stupendous scenery and those fat paperbacks you only ever tackle during a summer break. What in the world did I have to complain about?
Today I put a spare umbrella in my own boot. Hell, I may even go and buy half a dozen from the market to keep somewhere handy so that I too can save a stranger from the rain. And, even more important perhaps, give an onlooker that moment’s pause for thought that saved me from myself, and becoming a victim of my own, self-induced, post-holiday-blues.
intermission August 23, 2009
Posted by someonenicer in acts of kindness.1 comment so far
It was never my intention that someonenicer should join the millions of abandoned blogs, floating around in cyberspace like so much flotsam and jetsam.
However, after almost four months thinking, living, breathing, dreaming my new book, I hit the send button – and the creative buffers -at the same time. My brain simply didn’t want to look at another blank page. Even switching on the computer to check emails was done through gritted teeth.
Hence my silence on this blog for the last couple of weeks. And it’s likely to continue for a couple more while I treat my running-on-empty brain to 10 days r & r in southern Spain.
THAT is being kind to me, and will hopefully send me into the last four months of the year recharged, renewed, and raring to get back to my writing.
Someone Nicer in Starbucks August 2, 2009
Posted by someonenicer in acts of kindness.Tags: coffee, Kindness, pay it forward, random acts of kindness, Starbucks
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Truly, I need to do this more often. I mean get more practice, until I can be someone nicer without feeling like someone stupid. Without being overcome by that oh-so-British urge to stick my head in a paper bag and pretend it’s nothing to do with me.
Let me explain. I’d been thinking how most of my recent posts had been a little more, well, impersonal. Doing good without appearing to do so, so there’d be no awkwardness on either side.
Which wasn’t my original intention, if you remember. I wanted this project to take me outside my comfort zone. Which meant it was time to up the ante on myself a little: feel the awkwardness and do it anyway.
pay it backwards
Coincidentally I’d been reading about a spate of random acts of kindness in the US. Apparently Starbucks‘ customers have been ‘paying it backwards’ by paying ahead for the next customer’s drink – thereby encouraging that customer to pay it forward (still with me?) by doing the same for the person after them.
One barista claims to have witnessed a chain of five pay it backward/forwards (though the blogger reporting this is, you’ll see, adding his own large pinch of salt to this coffee story – could Starbucks possibly be brewing this one up themselves for the PR?)
So, Starbucks it would be, even though I already knew it would be a stretch. I’ve never been in a Starbucks where there isn’t a big queue breathing down my neck. How would I pay for the next person in line without them overhearing and perhaps feeling awkward about it?
indecision
As it turned out, not being overheard was only one of a string of logistical problems.
As I approached the counter I thought how will I know which drink the next in line wants and therefore how much to pay?
What if it was a whole family? Would I then look mean if I only paid for one drink?
And the other thing about Starbucks, it takes a while for your own drink to come. Was it a problem that I’d still be hanging around when my ‘victim’ joined me for the waiting game…
Aargh!
and more indecision
This all led to a little bit of lurking, suspicious enough, I’ve no doubt, for the store’s security cameras to be trained on me while I stepped forward and ducked back every time another large gaggle of friends approached the counter.
There are limits to my purse, sadly, if not my kindness.
Then, bingo, I overheard a teenage lad and his father, discussing whether there was time to queue for a drink. “I’m in a hurry,” the dad said testily. “We can’t stop to drink it here. What do you want?”
OK. So perhaps paying for his son’s drink would soothe this guy’s agitation a fraction. I continued eavesdropping while I waited to be served, mentally trying to calculate how much to put behind the till as the son announced he wanted a caramel macchiato, then changed his mind to a frappuccino, then back to a different sort of macchiato, then something with cream on the top…
hissing and pounding
It was my turn. I ordered my usual tall black americano – to take away. ”Anything else?”
My heart was going faster than a washing machine on the spin cycle. “Yes”.
The barista looked startled. Somehow, my yes had come out sounding more like ‘get stuffed’.
I leaned towards her, hissing: “Can you take another £2.50 towards the next customer’s drink?”
“Sorry”, she shouted at the top of her voice, “I didn’t catch that”.
make that a meal
To add to my difficulties, testy father and thirsty son now had the nerve to change their minds entirely. I could hear them agreeing that not only were they both going to order drinks, they were going to eat too!
For heaven’s sake: my couple of quid wasn’t even going to be noticed by the time they’d clocked up for two drinks, two packs of sandwiches and two buns.
Just the same, I repeated that I wanted to pay extra on my bill towards theirs.
Then I scuttled off to wait for my Americano, praying it would be served before the two spendthrifts caught up with me, unsure whether I wanted them to know it was me and acknowledge my (by now) tiny contribution, or simply note it in the spirit of a random act of kindness from a nameless stranger. It was, and they didn’t.
conscious kindness
But here’s the thing. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I think I should have turned to the duo and said, with a smile on my face and certainty in my voice, “I would like to buy you both a drink and I’ve given the barista some money to pay for it. I hope that’s OK?”
That would have made it human. That would have turned something nice-but-odd into a gift. That would have reminded us all that a part of what we’re here to do on this planet is to connect, make life a little better for each other, make a messy and confusing world - momentarily – appear a little less random.
I really want to know what you think about this. My sense is that there’s more power in kindness when it’s no longer an anonymous act but offered openly, not in any spirit of expectation, of wanting anything back, but absolutely from the heart. (And as I write that I don’t underestimate how big a challenge that is.)
So once again I feel a sense of a job half done. That I need to return and try again, and this time be honest about what I’m doing – rather than be a lurking, whispering oddball looking for answers at the bottom of a cup of coffee.
It feels positive to have realised this, and there are two more positives to report. I left the shop feeling great: lighter, taller, and a pleased with myself for being brave enough to follow through.
On my way home I popped into the co-op to buy coke for my teenage son and, on a whim, picked up an instant scratchcard which won £6. Enough to pay for my coffee and whichever creamy concoction that teenager opted for in the end.
Pay it forward at work, d’you think?
Lessons from a book-signing July 27, 2009
Posted by someonenicer in acts of kindness.Tags: acts of kindness, Borders, Jordan, Katie Price, Kindness, Lindsey Davis, Milton Keynes
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And this is the other way to sell books in Borders - courtesy of Jordan
Life was a lot cheaper when teenage daughter worked in a card shop. Ever since she got a job at Borders I’ve found myself ‘accidentally’ turning up to collect her 10 minutes early. Which leaves me no option but to have a browse.
I may be single-handedly keeping the Milton Keynes store afloat.
Every so often I see the displays have been shoved a little to the side to make way for an author signing.
embarrassment
Ah, what potential for embarrassment. Unless the author behind the teetering pile of books is a) a celebrity chef or gardener b) the writer of a hugely successful sci-fi series, or c) Jordan (before she became a pariah for ditching Peter Andre) the customers will dodge past pretending not to have seen them.
The author – who assumed all they needed to do to sell their masterpiece was to turn up – will eventually settle for adopting an expression of indifference and pray for a power cut so they can leave early.
Before you ask, no, I’ve never done one. But I know I’ll need to when my next book appears in 2010 because publishers now expect it. In an era where selling one thousand books is considered acceptable, the dozen or more you might shift at a signing represents a useful contribution.
Not that I’ve ever seen anyone who wasn’t already a celeb shift a dozen books at a signing. I’ve never actually seen anyone sell a single book (though I have seen people fall over trying to avoid getting within hailing range of the desperate author behind the books).
I suppose this means I have a vested interest, but I’d like to think it was a desire to be kind (and to compensate for the many, many times I was the one doing the avoiding) that led me to Borders this Sunday, specifically to attend an author signing.
It’s been in my mind to do this for a while so I would have gone whatever the book’s subject. I’m sure I know someone to whom I could pass on the Clubber’s Guide to Bognor Regis or How to make art from nail clippings.
touching
But as it turned out the writer doing the signing had come up with her own personal take on the Milton Keynes story: Touching the Heart of Milton Keynes, so I had a personal and professional interest on top of my mission to be nice.
What was interesting was that Borders themselves seem to have got a little wiser and had moved the signing table to a spot near the door where it was virtually impossible to miss the book and author Susan Popoola, who’d printed off hundreds of bookmarks to hand out as a means of starting conversations with her potential customers.
She’d also, she told me, mugged up on how to have a successful signing and learned you should never sit down (unless like Lindsey Davis, who I saw talk in St Albans, you know it’s going to take you two hours to get to the end of the queue of loyal fans).
Apparently it helps if you can enlist friends to turn up at intervals and be interested customers. Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd.
And you need to use every conceivable network to tell people about the signing so that when they stumble across it they’re less inclined to slip into that anxious frame of mind that we all adopt when we’re not sure what we’re being approached about. Sort of like when my son asks ’will you do something for me?’ and I’m expected to answer without knowing what something is – though it’s a fair bet it will involve money changing hands.
bestseller
I wasn’t the only one who stopped to talk to Susan about her self-published book. In the five minutes I spent chatting to her I saw three other customers pick one up, and several people hovering, presumably waiting to get their’s signed.
Today I discovered through her Twitter stream that her book was the bestseller at Borders MK over the weekend.
It turns out she didn’t really need my act of kindness, or certainly not as much as all those other authors I’ve avoided in the past.
This is one of those occasions where it’s me that’s benefitted most from being someone nicer. Not only have I learned some valuable lessons that will one day help me shift books at my signings.
I’m feeling eversos slightly less scared at the prospect of putting myself on the line by taking my book out to sell.
Thanks, Susan, for a powerful lesson in facing your fear and doing it anyway.
How to save money at the sales July 23, 2009
Posted by someonenicer in acts of kindness.Tags: acts of kindness, cardigan, Kindness, Marks and Spencer, summer sales
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pic by sewpixie
First day of the Marks and Spencer summer sale and a coral-pink cardigan is calling to me.
It’s a beauty: coral, pearl and mint green stripes, with some quirky buttons, a sharp neckline and a few rhinestones thrown in for good measure.
I try it on and suddenly it’s November and I am cosy indoors, sipping hot chocolate, snuggled into my new jumper whose fake diamonds catch the firelight and send splinters of it spinning around the room.
perfect storm
Except it’s not. It’s late July and I’m in the middle of a scrum of anxious women, tearing through the rails to try and reach the bargains before someone else can. It’s a perfect storm of shoppers’ stress and bad manners and, let’s be honest, gaudy clothes that M&S couldn’t shift at full price because who wants to wear a lime green blouse that looks like it’s been used to clean windows? Or a canary yellow jacket with sleeves that end just shy of your elbow?
bad taste
I’m not sure how the cardigan I’m now clutching managed to slip through the net of bad taste and bad buying decisions. But it did. And it looks great on. And I’m going to buy it right now at half price .
Except now there’s a woman with a pushchair in front of me asking politely where I found it.
I throw an army wildly in the direction of one of the racks the rude shoppers are rampaging through. But even as I do so I know my cardie was one of a kind. All she’ll find over there are more jackets for people whose arms end at their elbows.
There’s something very slightly similar in blue behind us so I point that out.
But the woman with the young child shakes her head sadly. “Not the same.” “No”, I agree, “Not the same at all.”
doing the right thing
I throw her a look that, I hope, conveys sympathy, and step over lime green blouses and the odd shopper to get to the tills.
But, damm it, I’m in the middle of this beingnicer experiment. And in my hand is something that someone else wants a little more than I want it.
I don’t know that that’s true. But I do know I came into M&S to buy milk and a newspaper before meeting friends for lunch. I didn’t come to town with the thought ‘I must get a jazzy new cardigan before the sun goes in for six months’ in my head.
I doubt the pushchair woman did either, but how in need of cheering up must she be if she’s desperate enough to bring a child in a pushchair into the first day, nay, the first hours, of Marks and Spencer’s annual sale?
There is a massive queue at the till, which is to be expected, but which I take as a sign. Thinking time.
And what I think is I’ll go and find the woman as she searches the racks and the mounting pile of clothes on the floor and I will let her buy the cardigan because that’s the sort of thing someonicer would do.
So I do. And she doesn’t even look surprised.
But I have not only done something nice. I’ve saved myself twenty quid. And possibly the risk of being accused of dressing up like a Christmas tree when the cardigan gets its first outing: taste is a very personal thing!
In sickness and in health July 17, 2009
Posted by someonenicer in acts of kindness.Tags: sick day, sickie, swine flu
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pic by http://www.flickr.com/photos/beeldenzeggenmeer/
If you’re wondering why I’m writing about someone nicer rather than being someone nicer it’s down to a tickly throat and (probably) an overactive imagination that has almost convinced me I’ve got swine flu because my son’s best friend has.
As a result I’ve put myself in quarantine – a genuine act of kindness, since I’m one of those people who prides themselves on packing tissues and paracetomol and showing up for my life, regardless of how far I might be spreading my germs.
Put it down to some dubious parental conditioning I’ve not yet managed to shake off. Dating from the time eight-year-old me faked sickness and was discovered by her mother (who had no business being quite so silent as she crept upstairs to my sickbed) scoffing sweets and shouting to her friends in the street.
I can still remember her exact words. “I don’t care if you’re dying next time, you’re going into school if I have to drag you there myself.”
Just a little harsh, wouldn’t you say mum? What eight year old hasn’t tried it on? But then mum hasn’t forgiven my mother in law either, for missing my wedding. “Flu? I could have been dying and wild horses wouldn’t have kept me from seeing my child wed.”
Can you see the theme?
If my kindness quest has shifted the balance in favour of not spreading swine flu – or a piffling summer cold – then that’s definitely a small victory we can chalk up on the side of kindness changing my life.
Angel in a Mercedes July 17, 2009
Posted by someonenicer in acts of kindness.Tags: acts of kindness, Africa, angel, expedition, Kindness, Mercedes
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No-one left and no-one came: deserted road in Africa
I met someone a lot nicer than me on an empty red track in the middle of Africa.
Picture, if you can, a group of 50 novice-travellers riding through Africa in the back of two trucks.
And picture our Long Haul expedition lost, stuck in deep sand and even deeper despair in the Chad desert. Stoned by the locals, stalked by bandits who, we were warned, would kill us for our vehicles, and, when our water ran out, forced to drink from an abandoned well with a bloated goat’s corpse in it.
It was bad. But somehow, after three weeks, we limped out of the sand into Chad’s shot-up capital - where I promptly succumbed to dyssentery. The next days are a blank, but ended in me checking myself into a hospital somewhere in Cameroon, accompanied by the man who’d one day become my husband.
robbed
Antibiotics and a drip soon sorted my body out but mentally I was still pretty much out of it. The first lift we hitched ended nastily when the driver refused to let us out until we’d parted with an implausibly large sum of money for our ’fare’. We paid up, but he punished us for quibbling by dumping us at a lodging house where we were robbed again – this time while we were sleeping.
Which is how I came to be standing beside a red dirt track, penniless, days behind the expedition, certain my travels had reached the end of their road. We saw two vehicles go by in two hours but you couldn’t have fitted a fingernail into either of them.
And then, unbelievably, a silver Mercedes appeared, cruising along the track as though on a conveyor belt. Gliding to a halt, before I’d even stuck out my thumb.
Out jumped the driver, a young man, not much older than us, wearing a plain white robe and trousers. In stuttering French we explained we were chasing after our companions who were heading for the Central African Republic. And in textbook French, the young man, whose name was Youssef, invited us to jump into his car and travel with him as far as the border with CAR, where he had business.
to give and not to count the cost
The reason I’ve described the events leading up to Youssef’s arrival is to give you some sense of how it felt, after weeks of hardship and fear, to be scooped up and allowed to rest while someone else took charge.
And it wasn’t only us he looked after. Every time the Mercedes arrived in a village we were approached by beggars. And each time Youssef wound down his window and handed out a few coins.
He stopped regularly to buy us food and drink. Stopped to pray, facing Mecca, every few hours. And, at the end of the day, Youssef went out of his way to drive us to lodgings he knew were ’safe’ and bought us more food, with the promise he’d be back in the morning to take us further.
checkpoint
He was as good as his word. Better. For when, finally, dozens of police checks later, we reached the border with CAR, Youssef dropped us with the promise he would call back at the end of the day just in case we hadn’t found our next lift forward, in which case he would again find us a safe house for the night.
In the end there was no need. As we argued with the guards at the border about not having the correct visas we heard the unmistakeable throb of the trucks’ engines. It turned out we’d been travelling three or four times as fast as our companions and every police checkpoint had narrowed the gap still more: it takes hours to get 50 people waved through unless you’ve got loadsamoney for bribes.
fragile
So I made it to East Africa, relatively unscathed, and it was months later that, back in the UK, I wrote to Youssef to thank him again for rescuing us.
I never heard back. Youssef was from CAR himself and once we’d spent several weeks there we understood how fragile a country it was; and how impermanent the lives of its people.
I have written before about being on the receiving end of others’ kindness; of someone going out of their way to help.
But Yousseff’s kindness had a different quality. It wasn’t a conscious decision he made, to pick us up and look after us while we were in his continent, so much as an imperative. I genuinely feel he had no choice. Service, goodness, generosity, were who he was: his whole DNA.
Some people project an energy and authenticity that we sense at a soul level. They really know who they are and why they are here. Yet they remain human, their goodness overlaid with humour, interest and a grace that makes it easy for us to receive from them.
Quite possibly angels are just people who don’t have to try to be someonenicer.
I’d be interested to hear whether you’ve ever met one…
Care to walk a mile in my shoes? July 10, 2009
Posted by someonenicer in acts of kindness.Tags: achilles, Gandhi
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A little bit of eccentric kindness from me today, inspired by a wonderful story I recently read about Gandhi. (Allow me to sidetrack for a mo to tell you I actually read it in the book, 365 Steps To Practical Spirituality, which I spotted when I was leaving a favourite book for someone to find, a dozen or so posts back – how I love the circularity of this exercise!)
The story goes that one day Gandhi was boarding a train when one of his shoes fell off and down the gap onto the tracks. Unable to reach it, he took off the other shoe and threw that down the gap too.
“Why did you do that?” a companion asked.
To which Gandhi replied that anyone finding one shoe is no better off. But finding a pair they have stumbled on a gift.
A life lived backwards
It’s a great story; it may even be true (though I always thought Gandhi wore sandals). What it says to me is that:
- opportunities to be kind are around us all the time
- sometimes our misfortune can be turned into someone else’s good luck
- even when we are being spontaneously kind it helps to engage our brain.
I’m not sure the achilles tendonitis I’ve been suffering from since last November counts as misfortune. More like stupidity. I doubt my tendons would have seized up in protest if I hadn’t gone through a four-year high heel period in my early 20s ( at the time my calf muscles became so foreshortened I couldn’t get up a hill in flatties without walking on tiptoes or walking backwards).
This leg abuse was compounded in my 30s by spending 360 days of the year physically idle, and 5 days marching my body up mountains. And in my 40s by running several Great North Runs without doing the proper training.
Brought to heel
Hence the knotty bits on my legs, which now severely restrict the sorts of shoes I can wear if I want to be able to shuffle downstairs to the kettle in the morning in less than five minutes.
I clearly hadn’t engaged my brain a few weeks back when, heady with excitement about having found the perfect party dress, I splashed out on a matching pair of strappy, four inch heeled sandals.
I realised the error of my ways before I even left the house and the shoes have been at the bottom of my wardrobe ever since.
In Gandhi’s honour, I have stuck a heart-shaped ‘help yourself’ post-it note on the box and intend to leave the sandals for some lucky soul (sorry, couldn’t resist that one) . While, trying not to dwell on whether, by encouraging someone’s addiction to high heels, I’m condemming them also to a life walking uphill backwards.
As I’m discovering, it is possible to overthink kindness…
And while we’re on the subject of vanity (well why else would anyone have invented high heel shoes?), check out this quirky website Operation Beautiful, involving guerillas with post-it notes, on a mission to convince us we’re perfect as we are, knotty heels, shuffling gait and all…)
