Three years ago today we left the EU. Of course, it’s rather longer than that since we voted in 2016 but the actual official leaving was three years ago today. Over the last couple of days there seem to have been a number of programmes on TV and radio analysing the effects of Brexit on the country but the government response appears to be that we should celebrate the benefits of Brexit. This is despite reports that increasingly, by a margin of around 60%, Britons are saying that Brexit was a mistake.
Even sedate and eminently sensible programmes like Radio 4’s Food Programme have had reports from cheese makers, shellfish merchants and the like whose businesses have been decimated by the effects of Brexit.
I don’t suppose having a pandemic in the middle of everything has helped. Almost everything was slowed down by that, except perhaps selfishness. Maybe it was spending so much time not interacting with others that has made it perfectly all right to be constantly looking out for number one. Someone posted on social media recently:
“Nobody is trying to fix the problems we have in this country. Everyone is trying to make enough money so the problems don’t apply to them anymore.”
This may well be true. However, I keep coming across posts on social media about “random acts of kindness”. You know the sort of thing:
- Someone helps an elderly person sort their shopping from the counter into their shopping bags and when the elderly person gets their purse out to pay they discover that the helper has already paid for their shopping and disappeared.
- A small boy is told he can choose something to buy in the supermarket and instead of choosing a toy he chooses a pair of gloves and a scarf for the homeless man sitting outside the supermarket entrance.
There are a number of variations of the last one, usually carefully videoed by a proud parent, which makes me wonder how spontaneous the small boy’s actions were. But it’s heartwarming to know that some folk are quietly helping others.
And yet … and yet … it’s not always what it seems. I read this morning about a woman in Australia, out shopping for shoes. She was asked by a young man in the street to hold a bunch of flowers for him while he put his jacket on. She willingly agreed to do so. The flowers in the woman’s hands, young man then smiled at her, turned on his heel, wished her a good day and ran off. She was a little bewildered and then spotted a film crew, or at any rate someone with a camera on a tripod, filming the whole episode. Later that day her grandchildren told her she was causing a sensation on TikTok. The young man who handed her the flowers was maintaining / hoping he had cheered up an elderly lady’s day, even had made her shed tears of gratitude. In the first place she didn’t consider herself elderly and in the second she had handed the flowers to the camera-on-a-tripod man, declaring “You can have these, I don’t want them!” She was furious to have video footage of herself out there on the Internet without her permission.
The young man turned out to be a well-known - no, not just well known, famous - TikToker with millions of followers, no doubt making money from sponsors, regularly filmed being kind. Such artificially set-up acts of kindness are not in the least “random”. Or perhaps they should be called “random acts of self-aggrandisement”!
Note to self: be careful not to appear lost or helpless when out and about. I don’t want to be the victim of a random act.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well! Everyone!
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