Allow me to share a tweet from the brilliant writer Ian Ridley:
“It was just before Christmas, 2007 and I was doing some shopping in Peter Jones, Sloane Square. The lady in front of me at the till was struggling as her debit card would not register. Suddenly she burst into tears. “Are you OK?” I asked. “Maybe I could pay, and you can pay me back,” I said. “Oh, thank you, young man. That’s very kind,” she said. Next attempt, though, her card worked. I paid too and she waited for me. She clearly wanted someone to talk to. “I’m sorry to be so emotional,” she said. “But I’ve just been diagnosed with breast cancer this morning.” I asked where she was being treated and she said, The Royal Marsden. I said that my partner (Vikki and I were not married then) was being treated there too, having been diagnosed earlier that year. I told her that the people at the @royalmarsdenNHS were the best. She thanked me for the reassurance, and we both smiled and went on our way, she a little calmer, me buoyed being being called ‘young man’.
That was my encounter with #DameMaggieSmith. RIP lovely woman and wonderful actor.”
I confess that I have seen little of the late Dame Maggie Smith’s work – my bad, I suspect – but I have always been aware of her reputation as being a fine human being. Her passing, at the grand old age of 89, leaves the world a far lesser place. Those who are aware of her career on both stage and screen confirm her brilliance as an actor and isn’t it good to read a story about nice people doing nice things?
I include under the heading “nice people doing nice things” Ian Ridley himself, with whom I corresponded briefly after I read his wonderful book ‘The Breath of Sadness: On love, grief and cricket’. (You can even find my review if you scroll down the Amazon page.) The book is about Ian losing the love of his life, Vikki Orvice, to cancer when she was only 56. Tragic though the story is, somehow the author makes it uplifting and life-affirming, in ways that a humble blogger like me cannot do justice. His kindness in offering to pay for Ms Smith’s shopping illustrates, I think, the man I came to know through his brilliant writing and via social media.
It is a theme to which I return on a nearly daily basis, so please ignore me or move on to do something else if you feel I have overdone it again. But there are, in my small world, lots of nice people doing nice things. You only have to look around and see kindness. And you don’t have to look that hard. Even a ‘Good morning’ as you pass a stranger who is out dog-walking. You don’t know what is going on in that person’s life, but what if they were going through hard times? Maybe that ‘Good morning’ with an accompanying smile could make a difference to that person’s day? Even if it makes no difference, what’s been lost.
It used to be an effort to do nice things and then it became instinctive. I don’t always, maybe don’t often, get it right and when I get it wrong I can be a proper nause but there is something satisfying about being kind. Not in a smug, self-centred way and I certainly don’t need praise for what I feel I should be doing anyway, but I feel better about myself than I would if I did something horrible. I would hate to be someone who did horrible things instinctively and then not give a fuck about it.
I hope you enjoyed Ian Ridley’s story about Maggie Smith as much as I did and I hope it makes you feel better about life.
