Perhaps you are searching for reasons to be cheerful at the end of what has been a particularly dispiriting year? In that case, read on. In November, I was on a train travelling into London. When I got off the train and headed for the ticket barrier, I realised I didn’t have my wallet. I knew that I had had it when I boarded. I made an undignified scrabble and search through my coat, jacket and trouser pockets that deserved the comic skills of a Charlie Chaplin or Jacques Tati. There was, though, no mistake. I had somehow managed to leave my wallet on the train.
A nice station attendant took the details and said he would pass the message down the line. I left him my mobile number. But it was rush hour, the man pointed out, and the chances of getting the wallet back had probably vanished with the departing train. Meanwhile I rang my bank and eventually succeeded in cancelling my cards. I felt horribly stupid, old and embarrassed. I went for a drink with friends and felt sorry for myself.
A couple of hours later, I looked at my phone. Among my emails was one from a woman called Natalya. She had found my wallet on the train, she explained, and had already dropped it off with the security people at the Guardian’s office. Everything was intact, including the cards and some cash. She had seen the Guardian connection because of my National Union of Journalists card, and had taken the not inconsiderable trouble to go to the office and hand the wallet in.
One of my friends is prone to ask people if, in these dark political times, they can nominate three things that should give us all cause for optimism. You might want to try it, because it’s a harder exercise than it sounds, but for me, the story of Natalya’s kindness offers a reassuring start. I imagine Shakespeare must have had a story of this sort in mind when he wrote that lovely line in the Merchant of Venice about the candle whose beam shines like a good deed in a naughty world.
Cheeringly, I am not alone. Only a couple of weeks after I got my wallet back, I read an article by the Belfast Telegraph’s excellent journalist Sam McBride, which began: “Last week I was about to get on a bus in Belfast city centre when I realised that the wallet I thought was in my hip pocket wasn’t there, wasn’t in my bag, wasn’t in my coat – wasn’t anywhere on my person.” And, yes, you guessed the rest. A little while later, Sam’s phone had rung with the news that the bus driver had handed the wallet in, cash untouched.
Perhaps McBride’s experience and mine were just a coincidence – two journalists separated by the Irish Sea experiencing the same good fortune at the same time. Perhaps, if so, they illustrate a version of Rupert Sheldrake’s deeply controversial theory of formative causation, or so-called morphic resonance, in which humans in different places somehow learn to behave differently without anyone urging them to do so or without anyone orchestrating it.
The safer explanation, however, is simply that there are more Natalyas than you may think. Maybe a lot more. I’m not saying that if you lose your wallet, I can guarantee you an observant good citizen who will ensure you get it back. Like Shakespeare, we live in a naughty world. But I am prepared to say that the chances of you encountering the kindness of strangers, as I did, are quite a bit higher than the unremitting bleakness of an all too common view of Britain in 2025 might lead you to believe.
There is no way around the fact that the media – traditional and social alike – are sleepless drivers of our reflexive collective pessimism. We live in a country where failure, risk and danger are deemed ever present and on the increase. Our media endlessly reports terrible cases of cruelty, exploitation, greed and anger. As a result, no one in my profession would ever think my wallet story was worth sharing, except perhaps at Christmas.
Of course, in the wider scheme of things, my wallet story was trivial. But reflexive pessimism is a big issue for modern societies, not a little one. Here’s a wider illustration of how it can work. When Andy Burnham was health secretary in the Gordon Brown government, he invited a group of us into Whitehall to share some private polling that was worrying the government. The polling showed public expectations of the NHS were getting lower, driven largely by repeated news of healthcare crises. At the same time, however, the public’s own personal experiences of the NHS, and the experience of their closest relatives, remained almost uniformly excellent.
I remember feeling sceptical about these findings. I knew too many bad NHS stories, even back then, as well as some better ones. But the questions Burnham posed in the light of the department’s own focus groups remained valid. How do we get past the public’s conviction that the macro-NHS was in decline, and that they had simply been lucky? How do we get people to see that their own good experiences were not freak good fortune, and to have confidence that the NHS – or a myriad other embodiments of the common good – could deliver for all?
In essence, this is the same possibility that is posed by Natalya’s single act of kindness. You can put it in various ways. Maybeall of us, and our media and our politicians in particular, are too quick to believe the worst. Maybe our social and moral norms are more decent and resilient than we assume. Maybe we live in a better country than we all seem to think. Maybe we should be less angry.
If even some of this is true, the questions that follow from Natalya’s decency are ones such as these. What can we get beyond the belief, fired by so much political and media exaggeration, that we all inhabit a howling wilderness of incivility, misbehaviour and ineffectiveness from which our only refuge is either fear or repression? What can we do to help ourselves see that individual experiences of kindness, politeness and decency are not random oases of good fortune in a desert of general nastiness?
The answers are obviously not easy. But they are out there, and they are worth nurturing. Natalya’s kindness reminded me that, in spite of so much evidence to the contrary, the better angels of our nature are not necessarily dead or doomed. There are still plenty of things in our society which work well, exactly as you want them to do.