I ring the bell, and a small nun in the familiar white habit with its blue banded veil greets me and takes me through to the kitchen where enormous pans of food steam as we wait for the signal to start serving. We bow our heads and read a prayer written on the wall, and in my head the smell of cabbage mingles with thoughts of heaven, and part of me begins to wonder if heaven itself smells of cabbage. We stand poised in the kitchen. I have lost track of time but it can be no later than elevenish when the thin sound of hymn singing stops and the volunteers form themselves into an urgent line to pass down steaming plates of stew and mashed potato, cabbage and cauliflower to the dining room. I’m at the threshold of the dining room between an Asian man without much English and a fresh-faced nun who led the kitchen prayer. I keep my head down and only when everyone is served do I go into the dining room to check who wants seconds. The plates are cleared of the stew. The mash is almost – though not quite – as popular. Like my own children would be, some of the men are less keen on the cabbage and cauliflower. There are only two women among the seventy people being fed – one black woman who asks me for rum at one point, and a large florid-faced woman who sits at the end of the table, her legs splayed. Some of the men have the faces you would expect from life on the streets, from alcohol. Occasionally, as you lean over to pass a plate, there is the smell of the street too. Many of the men are Eastern Europeans, and some of them are too young to be there. They eat fast. One clears his plate within minutes and is out the door as if he can’t bear to be there, as if the food were an inconvenience to him. A few of the older or more infirm prop their crutches against the wall to eat. All of them sit and eat with jackets and coats on, and I realize that is the oddest thing, not the fact that strangers sit close by each other, nor the plastic cutlery, nor the lunch so early in the day, but the fact no one is at home, no one is staying. They eat a mix of yoghurt and caramel for dessert and drink tea, and we clear and wash up all the while, an exercise in efficiency and speed.
When the last one goes, and the last plate is dried, I sit and eat the stew. It’s tasty – lightly spiced, what I guess might be turkey. Somehow it seems rude to ask.
Good deed no. 327.
Thursday, 24 November
I went from the soup kitchen for lunch to the House of Lords for dinner last night. I had rung a friend who is a working peer saying I was down, and he kindly invited me along to the Lords for dinner. The Lords does not smell of cabbage. It is fabulous – all oak and gilt and red leather and huge paintings of kings and queens and battles. It was quiet, apparently the House had risen, and every now and then as you turned a corner you bumped into the silver-haired ghost of a cabinet minister from the 1980s. We sat at a table and the waiters came up with menus and water and bread, and every time they gave my mate something they slid in the title ‘my Lord’: ‘Bread, my Lord?’, ‘The menu, my Lord,’ ‘Your wine, my Lord.’ It was very strange and ever so slightly creepy. So I waited for the latest my-Lording waiter to slip away and I said to my mate, who is a Labour politician after all, ‘Tell me, that doesn’t make you wince?’ He buttered his bread roll and shrugged. ‘That’s how they do it,’ he said. ‘You can’t do anything about it.’ The conversation moved on and the first course arrived, and as the waiter slid my Parma ham and melon onto the table in front of me, he said, ‘Your starter, my Lady’ and then they served my friend. I waited for them to go. ‘That thing I said earlier about the “my Lord” stuff making you wince, I take it back – I rather like it.’
One day you are feeding the homeless and the next day you are trying to avoid meeting their eye. I checked out of my quirky London hotel with my wheelie bag, and the homeless were everywhere – with rolled-up nylon sleeping bags, with crutches and limps, with faithful mongrels on bits of string. What is it about the homeless that inspires fear? The thought they might start shouting obscenities at you? Infect you, if you stand too close, with their addictions and misery? There were at least three Big Issue sellers within a couple of hundred yards of each other at Victoria and, good-deed doing or not, since I wasn’t armed with a plate of cabbage, I walked on by. I had to make myself stop and dig out £2 and buy a copy. I had to make myself see another human being standing in front of me.
Good deed no. 328.
Friday, 25 November
What I had forgotten when I went along to the soup kitchen was that I might have boosted my own health – my very own ‘Mother Teresa effect’. In the journal Psychology and Health in 1988, Dr David McClelland, a psychologist and a leading expert on motivation, described an experiment in which 132 Harvard University students were asked to watch two films – one of them a documentary about Mother Teresa working with the poor of Calcutta. Before the film, immediately after, and again an hour later (having been asked to retain the idea of loving relationships in their heads), the students’ saliva was tested for immunoglobulin A (the body’s first defence against cold viruses). Levels were up. The students’ bodies (even if they themselves didn’t like her and even though they weren’t themselves benefiting) responded to the compassionate, tender care they saw on the film.
A later experiment in 1995 published in the Journal of Advancement in Medicine also found that encouraging subjects to feel care and compassion (without an external stimulus such as a video) had an even greater immune-efficient effect. I have got to believe then that feeling care and compassion, while engaged in caring, compassionate work with Mother Teresa’s own nuns, is better than a flu jab this winter.
Good deed no. 329: filled jars with sweeties for sale at the school Xmas fair (and wanted to cry, I was so tired).
Saturday, 26 November
Good deed no. 330: sold second-hand uniform at school Xmas fair and cleared up afterwards.
Sunday, 27 November
Good deed no. 331: reassured a friend who was upset at the proposed closure of her children’s school.
Monday, 28 November
Brian Burnie is a 66-year-old former businessman and hotelier who sold his £9m hotel in North Northumberland and has ploughed profits ‘running into millions’ into the Daft as a Brush charity, transporting north-east cancer patients to hospital in special people carriers. Consequently, Brian and his wife Shirley (who herself recovered from breast cancer) moved from their Georgian home complete with maze and spa and swimming pool into a three-bedroomed rented terraced house. As Brian said: ‘You come into this world with nothing and go out with nothing – what’s important is what you do in between.’
Official patient transport in an ambulance or an ambulance taxi often means an early start or long delays in getting home as other patients are picked up en route or waited for or dropped off. Daft as a Brush patients are driven by a volunteer chauffeur, picked up at a time convenient to them and brought home directly after their appointments. They are also escorted by a volunteer companion so that they aren’t alone if their spouse can’t come because of their own health or age, work or childcare commitments.
I travelled as a companion with a patient called Robert and his wife Jane to the Freeman hospital in Newcastle. Robert is sixty-six, tall and rangy, with a pale face and bunched-up hands thrust into the pockets of his olive-green coat as if to keep the cold away. He looks as if he would rather be walking the rolling Northumberland hills with a thumbstick and a Thermos than stuck in a car headed for the horrors of the city, and I don’t blame him. Travelling down to Newcastle for the results of a bone marrow test, the former gardener is no stranger to the journey. Four years ago, he had an operation for bowel cancer; more recently, he was diagnosed with MDS – myelodysplastic syndrome – a malfunction of the bone marrow in producing the correct quantity and quality of blood cells. The disease can leave a patient chronically tired and weak due to extremely low levels of haemoglobin. It requires the transfusion of blood and platelets, there can be spontaneous bleeding and bruising, and the patient is at risk of infection. Robert is unassuming, dignified and uncomplaining about all of it. He was due to start his seventh round of chemo
therapy today. The treatment has been cancelled so that he can get the latest results from a bone marrow biopsy. I can’t believe he and Jane aren’t worried in case it’s bad news.
I am embarrassed to be there. I am an intruder. As I sit in the passenger seat next to Sharon the driver, who works in a café, I wonder exactly what a companion does in this situation. I could play him a favourite tune on the harpsichord – if only I had one and I could play the harpsichord. I decide that at the very least I need a lapdog to whom I could feed titbits. When we get to hospital, I immediately offer to fetch a cup of tea but disconcertingly Robert and Jane don’t want one and within seconds they are called in to the unit so I can’t force the point. Sharon, Emma (the Daft as a Brush organizer who accompanies new companions and drivers on their first outings) and I go for our own cup of tea.
We are there for three hours. Waiting. Hospitals are not so much for the sick as for those who wait – wait to see a doctor, wait for treatment, wait for the busy nurse to get around to them, wait for the drugs, wait to recover or wait to die. Perched at the end of a string of seats by a glass cabinet stacked with scarves for the bald, I sit and I wait. As I wait, I think and hope. I hope I never have to wear a scarf like that, that I never get sick, never get cancer and never die. I hope too that Robert and Jane are OK, that they aren’t sitting in front of a doctor holding hands and knowing the worst. I liked Robert – he takes photographs of wildlife – the best one he has is of three badgers playing together. I liked Jane too – in her spare time she is brave. Actually, I think she is brave all of the time. Hours pass. Sharon and Emma chat to other Daft as a Brush volunteers, and they are noisy and healthy – not like the sick, and not like the families of the sick. They laugh and tell jokes. Sharon and Emma go to swap our people carrier for another one. I read The Times. I text. I look at the scarves and watch porters push hospital beds down the corridor. I go to the loo and look at myself in the mirror – my hair could do with a wash. I stroke my hair. I like my hair. I think about how I’d look in a scarf. This is what happens in hospitals: you sit down next to your own mortality and strike up conversation.
Finally, Robert and Jane are through. He is more relaxed. There was no conversation about results – only a blood test. He has to come back on Thursday for the bone marrow results, and we head back to the car.
Good deed no. 332.
Tuesday, 29 November
Good deed no. 333: liaised with Michael Hintze’s CQS hedge fund, which has offered to have a pre-Xmas Jam Jar Army collection in the office for the homeless.
Wednesday, 30 November
Good deed no. 334: researched opportunities/advised a would-be journalist who has asked for help.
Thursday, 1 December
Good deed no. 335: taught Cryssie writing.
Friday, 2 December
THE HOLY MAN
Goodness is admirable. Perhaps the fact I felt so resolutely ordinary, so banal in my everyday interactions with people and so limited in the effect I have on the world – including on my own children maybe – influenced me in starting this project more than I thought. I wanted to change the world and I wanted to change me. To be a saint for a year. There is an irony, then, that as I have slogged my way through a year of good deeds, as chance would have it, I feel that I have less faith in God than when I went in.
Then again, faith in my fellow man has grown because not only is there a need, there are people answering that need at some cost to themselves – be it money or time or energy, and be they with or without faith. And I come back to the idea that for all the good deeds this year, my year is worth nothing set against someone like Lily, caring for a child damaged by our society, or Cryssie’s parents caring for children at the mercy of their own genes, or my dad caring for my mum every day in every way. Because for some people, pain acts as a crucible for goodness and perhaps, for me, therein lies the real divine: the piece of toast spread with marmalade and placed carefully into the hands of a blind woman; the chaotic, loving family home opened to a discarded child; or the pennies dropped into a jam jar.
I met my cousin, who is a priest, in the almshouses close to Durham Cathedral. Father Ed is lionized in my extended and very Catholic family. He is the religious equivalent of a walking, talking golden egg: a treasure and a thing of lustrous wonder. Tall and spare with trendy glasses and a beard that has started to silver, once upon a time – in a play we made our parents watch – he played Prince Charming opposite my Cinderella. Some time after, he went into the priesthood – I try not to hold myself too responsible.
On the one hand there are good deeds, on the other there are bad. In nearly thirty years as a priest, Father Ed has heard the worst of people in their confessions. ‘The fact confession exists, however, is evidence of people’s desire for goodness,’ he said amiably, and I am intrigued by the talk of confession, secrets he has heard, sinners he has forgiven. I cocked my head and pressed my ear against the metal grille, the dusty velvet curtain of his memory. He had heard of murder, child abuse, army killing, fraud – everything but genocide. And did he forgive all? I asked. Did he wipe the chalky sins from the slate with a damp sponge of three Hail Marys and a Glory Be? Not quite. He laid on the sinner a ‘proportionate penance’ – not to punish, he explained, but to help the sinner towards goodness. ‘When I heard confession, it confirmed for me what animals people are sexually, that if something can be done, it will be done and is being done. But …’ He paused as he poured fresh tea into first my cup and then his own. ‘… my experience in confession affirms both the depths to which we can stoop and the heights to which we can aspire and the best that is present in each and every person – the goodness and the heroism.’
Goodness in the father of the disabled child with little time to live, confessing: ‘Sometimes I give way to despair, which is a sin.’ Well, who wouldn’t? Father Ed said. ‘But in that man’s confession, what he is saying is how much he loves. You realize for that father, his good deed is holding on to the love for that child in the face of overwhelming odds, and not giving up and walking away on his family.’
For Father Ed, the good deeds are enhanced by a belief in something higher; hence the ‘golden rule’ shared by religions and cultures the world over: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ – which comes out in Christianity as ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’. As Father Ed talked, I began to wonder whether it was possible to regard God as a metaphor rather than as an all-knowing, all-seeing, beardy guy or a white, pulsing, sci-fi source of energy. If the idea of God (across religions) brings people to goodness, and if I choose to value goodness, then surely it is possible to hold fast to a ‘God’ of some sort. Plus it will make my mother happy. She’s never very keen when I lose my faith.
Faith is not a requirement of good deeds, though, Father Ed assured me. The doing of good deeds, however, can only be done by those who hope, or those for whom optimism is an inclination, those who believe that beyond the worst of things lies something better; and I wondered, as he told me this, whether he was doing so because he thought I needed to hear it.
Good deed no. 336: met with start-up social media company to offer advice and feedback on proposed product.
Saturday, 3 December
Good deed no. 337: sent a P. D. James thriller to Merry.
Sunday, 4 December
I may have done something stupid. I have been given the cake equivalent of a chain letter – that is to say, a bowl of yeasty gloop – and I actually asked for this so-called ‘friendship cake’ because I thought I could pass it on and it would be a lovely generous gift for my nearest and dearest. It is a nightmare. It turns out that it comes with all these ominous shouty instructions: ‘Hello. My name is Herman. I am a sourdough cake and I am supposed to be kept on a worktop for ten days without a lid. You cannot put me in a fridge or I will die! You can cover me with a tea towel to keep me safe. If I stop bubbling, I am dead.’ Talk about needy.
Every day you are supposed to stir him between two
and four times. I don’t get that much attention in a day. Twice, the instructions yell ‘I am hungry’ at you, at which point you drop whatever you are doing and feed it milk, sugar and flour. On day 9, you divide it five ways and give away four portions to friends, along with a copy of the hellish instructions. The following day, you pour in oil, eggs, baking powder, sugar, flour, salt, cinnamon and whatever else you want into the fifth Herman, bake him and eat him – providing you aren’t too emotionally attached by then. The kids make eeeeurgh noises whenever I bring him out for a stir. This good deed might have been a mistake.
Good deed no. 338: fed Herman the German.
Monday, 5 December
Yesterday I spent six hours slumped over the laptop in the kitchen figuring out how to film, edit and cut DVDs of this week’s forthcoming school nativity play at the behest of Lily, who had the great idea of selling parents a copy of the DVD in aid of the PTA. She asked me to find someone and I advised sending out a note round school. Foolishly, though, I told her that I would do it if they couldn’t find anyone else. Since I hadn’t seen any note asking for a budding Martin Scorsese, I figured I needed to step up to the mark. The only problem being that I hadn’t used my video camera in two years and I hadn’t edited anything since I worked at the BBC as a producer, when I used to sit next to a nice man known as an editor, bring him cups of tea and say fretful things like, ‘We’re running out of time.’
A Year of Doing Good Page 28
