What Kirsty doesn’t understand is that I am absolutely up for a miracle. Catholics are brought up on miracles. You tend not to pray without purpose. You pray for an intention, for an intervention – you pray for a miracle. I wonder if a year of good deeds qualifies you for a miracle? Or whether they are like the lottery? All sorts of unsuitable people benefit and really deep down you think they should be disqualified. If I am entitled to a miracle, I want one for Kirsty.
Good deed no. 300: cooked a dinner party for the expats to celebrate their first anniversary in the country.
Friday, 28 October
Good deed no. 301: cooked the exact same menu as last night (halibut in Italian cacciatore-style sauce) for visiting next-door neighbours with three-year-old boy and eight-month-old baby girl, carrying it round to their house and washing up after all of us. (On the upside, they look even more exhausted than me.)
Saturday, 29 October
Good deed no. 302: sent award-winning piece of literary fiction to Merry.
Sunday, 30 October
I have spent two days shopping for my children. Yesterday was all about making sure my eldest son had all the gear he needed for an outward-bound course he is going on at school, which involves climbing up tall poles and jumping off things – why would I want to encourage such behaviour? Today, after two of them played rugby and one of them played football, the five of us went shopping in Newcastle for my little girl’s birthday. Worse yet, I am in one of my periodic bouts of insomnia. Sometimes I am so tired, I could weep.
Good deed no. 303: emailed artwork and pulled together hard copy of poster and labels for Hull Sainsbury’s.
Monday, 31 October
Talked to the Gazette editor about Sophie’s offer, and he actually sounded disappointed. He wants us to keep going and get it in the way we said we would. He wants us to slog away, week after week, with a Christmas target in mind, rather than take the easy way out with Sophie’s nice fat cheque with lots of noughts. But because he didn’t want the hospice to lose out on her donation, he said she might perhaps consider making a donation after we hit the target.
I was going to take it. I was going to morally compromise for the sake of an easy life. I hate people with integrity. They make the rest of us look bad.
Good deed no. 304: took the Young Journalists’ Group at school. (One kid had done a great job with a piece on the local swim club, including asking an eleven-year-old swimmer why she doesn’t give up when things get hard. She had told him: ‘Because I’ve learnt that when things get tough, it’s not the time to quit or give up, it’s an opportunity to get stuck in and try even harder to achieve what you want to.’ Ten months into my year of doing good, I am trying to bear that in mind.)
Tuesday, 1 November
THE PHILOSOPHER
I have done more than 300 good deeds and I am still not a better person. I am bringing in the experts. Professor Robert Merrihew Adams knows a thing or two about goodness. Research professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina, he taught at Yale, UCLA and Oxford. For nearly forty years he has been thinking about ethics, specializing most recently in character and virtue. I called him to talk through what I’m doing, and he accepted my definition of a good deed as something bringing benefit to someone else, although philosophers are more interested in the ‘good deed’ as the intrinsically excellent action, something which is well motivated and good in itself – even if (as sometimes happens) the deed does not actually produce benefits for another person. I prick up my ears at this – is this my cop-out on my failures? I wonder.
I told the professor that I’d noticed how good deeds factor across religions, and he agreed that all great religions have a place in their belief systems for a code of conduct which includes good deeds. ‘That is because we connect spiritual happiness or peace with states of mind or characters in which there is no self-centredness or selfishness,’ he said. Like Professor Dunbar, the Oxford evolutionary psychologist, he reminded me that good deeds also feature in the Darwinian system. ‘Societies that don’t flourish, don’t survive – they have to have a moral code, a code that keeps the peace and ensures people treat each other decently.’
According to his online photo, Adams has a white beard, which seems perfect for an eminent philosopher. I imagined him tugging at it as he talked to me. He believes virtue – that is to say, good moral character – is fragmentary and frail, liable to inconsistencies and vulnerable to events. He managed not to laugh at me when I held up to view my paltry attempts at goodness. The traditional view traced back to Aristotle, he said, holds that repeating a behavioural pattern got one habituated to it, developed into a habit that would become a virtue. In Aristotle’s own words: ‘People acquire a particular quality by constantly acting a particular way … you become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.’
Adams, however, was sceptical that mere repetition could change someone in any fundamental way. ‘There is probably no such thing as a pattern of behaviour making one a better person.’ This man has spent nearly forty years thinking about ethics – I was expecting a bush to appear and catch light in my house any second. ‘But a pattern of behaviour may well change how one feels about doing good, or how one feels about other people.’ A year’s good deeds, then, might make me receptive to doing more good deeds for my fellow man, for whom I would feel an increased sympathy. Or it might not.
If anyone would know whether I have a chance of becoming a better person after a year of good deeds, Adams would. After I put down the phone to him, I went back to his book A Theory of Virtue, published in 2006, in which he argued that ‘one will probably not become wedded to virtue without discovering that in some way it “works” in one’s own life.’ Repetition matters less than seeing you have accomplished something good and that it is appreciated. I read on. The book argues that you can admire someone who ‘strives unsuccessfully for moral improvement … inasmuch as the excellence of the efforts is independent, to some extent, of the success of the improvement project’. In other words, full marks for trying – but I do not want full marks for trying – in the race against myself, I want to stand on that podium with the national anthem playing and the shiny gold medal around my neck engraved with the words ‘A Better Person’.
Good deed no. 305: emailed outdoors shop to highlight the brilliant service from one of their staff (knowing this risked email deluge of discount offers on crampons).
Wednesday, 2 November
Stephanie rang at 7.45 p.m. to ask me to put on her heating so the house would be warm for her mother. There were high winds, rain pelting against the windows, it was pitch dark, and I was trying to ram the kids into bed knowing I still had the kitchen to clear from tea and my daughter’s birthday presents to wrap for tomorrow. Perched on the kitchen stool at the phone, I looked out into the hurly-burly night and thought, ‘I am so not doing it.’ Past midnight, my poor husband trailed in exhausted from a day in London to find a note lying on the kitchen table alongside the keys to Stephanie’s cottage, another on the fridge (in case he pretended he hadn’t seen the one on the table) and another on the front door (in case he pretended he hadn’t seen the one on the fridge either), asking him to put on her heating. I pretended to be asleep when he came to bed.
Good deed no. 306: bought a poppy for Remembrance Day.
Thursday, 3 November
Cryssie came up with her most ambitious story to date. A boy went down to the sea and was swept away by a tsunami, his body washing up on the beach days later, leaving his mother grief-stricken. At a critical moment, a kangaroo appeared which looked as though it might rescue him; instead, it hopped off into the distance. Very grim. We softened the ending by the ghostly boy comforting the grieving mother by taking her hand in his, but the story was ambitious enough for me to ask her whether she wants to try something longer, which would take a lot more planning, and she is keen. She wrote the story while her brother (who has the same
condition she does) was ill in hospital, and it crossed my mind she was testing out the whole idea of losing someone – the tsunami being death or our mortality. What the kangaroo represented I can’t even guess at.
Good deed no. 307.
Friday, 4 November
I took my eight-year-old out to a brass band concert in Doxford Hall, a country house hotel, nearby. The concert was part of the Northumberland Music Festival – with a percentage of ticket sales being donated to Macmillan Cancer Support, the Great North Air Ambulance Service and Hospice Care North Northumberland. We created mayhem, of course, because I’d thought we could buy tickets on the door and it turned out that you couldn’t.
A dapper little chap in a blazer looked genuinely shocked when I asked whether we could get a couple of tickets. ‘There’s a table plan,’ he said, in exactly the same tone he would have used if I’d arrived at the pearly gates and he’d been saying, ‘God says, “I don’t think so.” ’ Through the open oak and glass doors of the banqueting hall, the red-jacketed bandsmen were already playing ‘The Standard of St George’. Fortunately, the dapper little gatekeeper was standing next to a wildly efficient, can-do colleague, who let us sit at the band’s table while they were playing. Bliss – the blaze of chandeliers, a glass of cold white wine, the warm body of my son slumped against me, and golden brass filling me up. It turned out that the band was actually the Durham Miners’ Association Brass Band. I doubt there are any miners in it these days, but there was a table of elderly miners towards the back of the hall. When the band struck up ‘Gresford’, which is known as the Miners’ Hymn, these elderly men stood as one, their grey heads bent, hands clasped in solemn prayer. I asked them afterwards why they’d stood and they told me that in 1934 more than 260 miners died at Gresford, a pit in Wrexham, North-East Wales, after an explosion and fire underground – only eleven bodies were ever recovered – and I felt privileged to have seen those miners long retired pay their respects to men long since dead.
Good deed no. 308: gave the builders three pieces of chocolate birthday cake.
Saturday, 5 November
A sea of broken china is washing against the harbour walls of my skull – that is to say, I am trapped in a ferocious migraine, which I am blaming on today’s birthday party horror. It was my daughter’s sixth birthday party and I had bought a cake with a Tinkerbell theme, iced in pale green and mauve with edible glitter and a bas-relief Tinkerbell flying around with her friends. My mood was not improved when my eldest son, having begged to arrange the candles in the cake, stabbed Tinkerbell and managed to decapitate her, slice off her cheek and take out the entire eye. Thank God my daughter didn’t see it happen. I balanced the head back on the neck and used the warmth of my index finger and spit to massage the cheek back on, but there was nothing to be done about the empty eye socket or the fact she appeared to have suffered a stroke. Less Tinkerbell, more Phantom of the Opera. Moreover, Tinkerbell then cursed the damn cake because when the time came to light the offending candles, each one of them a letter spelling out Happy Birthday, all but R, T and H collapsed, spluttered and went out. My little girl got to blow out three out of thirteen candles and I didn’t even put the cake on the table for fear she noticed Tinkerbell’s head. Instead, I held it in front of her and whisked it away again. I am not going to the next children’s party.
Good deed no. 309: donated £3 to the Jam Jar Army, as per promise, after winning £6 on the EuroMillions lottery. (This is my second lottery win since making the promise; I figure the next one is the biggie.)
Sunday, 6 November
Time off for good behaviour this morning: I opted out of all childcare and spent the morning with Sophie (who had come up for my daughter’s birthday) in a new café that has opened which specializes in loose tea, pan haggerty (sliced potato, onions and cheese) and girly conversation. We talked through the whole donation business. She has written a cheque for £2,500 and is happy for it to go towards the target or to supplement the £10k if we hit the target ourselves. She is very clever. Despite the recession, her company is set for its third highest sales. People are buying less, so you go get new customers. Seems like the obvious thing to do when you put it like that. I am very proud of her. She really liked my tweedy autumn jacket that I picked up from the charity shop, so I gave it to her. It fitted her slightly better than it fitted me across the shoulders, and it made it more of a fair exchange – you give me a cheque for £2,500 and I’ll give you this lovely second-hand jacket which cost me twelve quid.
The gift of the jacket was going to be my good deed until we stepped outside and a small boy ran by as we were walking along the street. He must have been about two and a half or so. A car with a family in it was driving very slowly alongside him. I turned round and the driver was leaning across watching the boy, and I said, ‘Is he yours?’ I had this vision that the child might have refused to get in the car and was having a paddy, but the driver shook his head and said he had no idea who the kid belonged to, he had just spotted him running along the pavement. The pavement where we were standing is very narrow and on a tight bend. I scooted up the street after the boy and brought him back.
He was dressed in jeans and a jumper and a neat little blue puffa jacket, but his face was dirty and his nose running with snot. I knelt down on the pavement in front of him and said hello and asked him his name and where his mummy was, but there was no reaction whatsoever. He made as if to go and I shook my head and took his hand again, and said, ‘Let’s wait for Mummy, shall we?’ At which point another car on the other side of the road stopped. This car had obviously seen him minutes earlier and turned around to come back and make sure he was all right. The young driver called out that he had seen the child tear out of an alleyway further down on the right, so the boy and I walked a little way and Sophie scooted off to find the alley.
An elderly couple arrived on the scene as I unzipped his jacket to see if the boy had a laminated label with his name and address on it or perhaps the words ‘I’m simple’. He didn’t – instead, he dug around in his pocket and came out with a toy motorbike, as if he thought it was this I was looking for.
The old man crossed the road and walked up to another corner to see if he could see anyone frantically searching for a child. I went back to kneeling and unpeeled a little bracelet my daughter had given me that morning with tiny plastic charms strung on elastic – a little piece of cake, a gingerbread man, a pink rabbit and a custard cream – and put it on the boy’s wrist for him to examine. When Sophie came back, the boy having tried to make another break for it, we decided we were going to have to ring the police. At this point a black 4x4 crawled by us very slowly – presumably checking whether we were very inefficient kidnappers. At the same time, down the street, a man started pelting towards us, arriving at the bottom of the hill, breathless and white-faced. ‘Mattie, Mattie,’ he gasped with relief. The child took his father’s hand as if nothing had happened, as if to say, ‘Ah, there you are, Daddy,’ as if the father hadn’t just aged ten years in the ten minutes his child had been missing. It turned out the guy was Polish – as was the child – hence the complete lack of comprehension when I tried to talk to him. The father did not have the English to explain what had happened. Then again, I didn’t ask. I imagine he took his eye off him for one second and he was gone. When they get home, will they wonder where he got the bracelet?
Good deed no. 310: found a lost child – my second of the year. I am keeping the third.
Monday, 7 November
Diane came over for a bacon sandwich and a cup of tea. She was smart because these days she teaches maths on a morning, which means I have hardly seen her for months. I miss her, but you do not give a friend a pattern and expect them to knit to it.
Her daughter did well at the birthday party. Despite the noise and strangeness of it all, she joined in the games, and ate the sweeties when she was tipped out of musical bumps, and even gave me a sudden hug when she was going home, which melted me. A great deal of Diane’s
time this year seems to have been spent on one adult or another coming to watch, assess and judge. You want anyone who watches a child to say, ‘Your child is fine, your child is perfect, how proud you must be of this child.’ It must be hard to watch them watching her, only for them to say, ‘Your child is different, your child does not know her letters, colours, numbers, your child needs more than you can ever give.’
I told Diane how well her daughter had coped at the party and she smiled. The child is calmer, she said, because slowly they are finding the right strategies – bouncing her up and down, holding her at the point she might otherwise come apart, coming to an understanding of her sensory overload and how she might be helped to cope.
‘I don’t need anybody’s sympathy,’ she said as she gathered her things to go, ‘she’s glorious and we love her to bits. Some people still try to say “She’s only a little girl” when she does something bizarre, and I know they mean well, but frankly, honesty helps a lot more.’
Good deed no. 311: gave Diane a bag of small Bounty and Snickers sweeties (sorted and judged wanting at the birthday party by my nut-allergic son. Turns out Diane loves them).
Tuesday, 8 November
The assistant head at Berwick Academy (formerly Berwick High School) emailed me saying they had ‘some’ jars to collect. Whoop whoop noises. I don’t care how much is in them. I don’t care how many there are. I do care that a few of those kids might not have eaten my jam sandwich, but went home and put money in their jars any which way. Feel like cheering. (Heard later that they sent a cheque to the hospice for £200. Cheered again.)
A Year of Doing Good Page 26
