Conversations on Kindness E-Book

Bernadette Russell

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 334

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'A beautiful beacon lighting the way... A gorgeous guide to embodying kindness.' Suzy Reading, author of Self-care for Tough Times 'Extraordinary … I loved it. It was the ray of sunshine I didn't know I needed'The Sun Overwhelmed by the constant flow of bad news, Bernadette Russell felt trapped, desperate for something to change. Then, a chance encounter sparked a question that would transform her life. What if one small act of kindness, every single day for a year, could ignite a light in the darkness? In Conversations on Kindness, Bernadette embarks on an extraordinary 366-day journey. From moments of unexpected joy and surprise to the times when her well-intentioned kind acts demand much more than she'd bargained for, this is a story of discovery and profound connection. Along the way, Bernadette explores the deeper possibilities of kindness. In conversations with scientists, artists, activists and academics, it becomes clear that kindness is a powerful driver for healing, understanding and significant positive change – especially when life feels at its hardest. Conversations on Kindness is a warm, often funny, heartfelt immersion in the power of kindness to bring us back to ourselves, to each other and to change the world.

Leseprobe

Dedicated to my mum, to my sisters Natalie Russell and Kimberley Trim, to my partner Gareth Brierley, Lola the Woof and to my wider family – thank you for all your support.

To all survivors, artists and dreamers everywhere.

And to all of those in the past, present and future who are in service to kindness, many of whom do not receive awards, accolades or recognition, yet who make the world a better place by quietly doing their thing. To them, my love and gratitude, always. I see you and I will do my best to amplify your names and work as often as I can.

Contents

BEFORE

London’s Burning

1. AUGUST

Try a Little Kindness

2. SEPTEMBER

Flower Power

3. OCTOBER

Be Kind to All Kinds

4. NOVEMBER

Another Day in Paradise

5. DECEMBER

I Gotta Have Faith

6. JANUARY

The Bad News Blues

7. FEBRUARY

What’s Love Got to Do with It?

8. MARCH

People Ain’t No Good

9. APRIL

Born to Run 125

10. MAY

Compliment Slips

11. JUNE

Amazing Grace

12. JULY

Journey’s End

AFTER

Starfish

Chapter Notes

Further Reading

Who’s Who

Thanks

Before

London’s Burning

Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.

Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

Hello, and thank you in advance for reading this book. Just so you know what you are getting yourself into, it’s about the experiment I began back on 18 August 2011, when I tried to do a kind thing for a stranger every single day for a year and a day, to see if kindness could change the world. And it’s about the decade since, as I have continued my daily practice of kindness, deepening my understanding of its power and potential for positive change in the wider world, in my community and in my life. Since that transformative day, I’ve written and performed a theatre show about my experiences, which has toured the UK for over ten years. I have made dozens of community art projects with kindness at their heart, with many organisations, including the Royal Albert Hall and the Royal Festival Hall. I’ve written five books about kindness, hope and community for adults and children, as well as dozens of articles on the subject for newspapers, websites and magazines. I have been one of the subjects of a BBC1 television documentary about kindness, as well as featuring in a PRX radio documentary about kindness in the USA. I have spoken about kindness on many podcasts and radio shows. But most significantly, I have changed the way I work, live and think, by intentionally aiming to place kindness at the centre of everything I do and every decision I make.

The story I’m about to tell you, about that first year and what happened afterwards, is a pretty messy one. Some of it is sad. Some of it is joyful. Bits are funny, silly, surprisingly unlikely and infuriating. Some parts might irritate you. Sometimes the protagonist (me) is annoying and makes bad choices. The story zips about in time a bit, and in it I have conversations with many wonderful people for whom kindness is at the centre of their work and lives: scientists, artists, activists and academics who have helped me dive deeper into what kindness is and what it is capable of; who have helped me answer the question, ‘Can kindness change the world?’

Before you read on, let me tell you: this journey changed my life and I think it has the potential to change yours. I know this is a bold statement, and I make it quite deliberately: I think certain stories do have the power to transform lives.

This is a story about kindness, but it is also a story about resilience and hope. I’m sharing it as a reminder to myself, and to you, that the world is fuelled by love. That we already have everything we need to make the world a better place. It’s an audacious thing to say in the present circumstances, I know. I ask you to stay with me.

If you are despairing . . .

If you feel lost . . .

If you feel powerless . . .

If you are overwhelmed . . .

If you want to do something but don’t know what to do . . .

If you are tired of hurting . . .

If you are tired of worrying . . .

If you are tired of being sad . . .

If you are longing for something better . . .

If you’re sick of the bad news . . .

If you sometimes secretly fear you just don’t like human beings much any more . . .

. . . then this book is for you. And if you are none of those things, but you are curious, or you just like a good story, well then, this book is for you too.

Some of it is full of light and beauty, and some of it is dark, and most of it sits in the messy middle, just like life.

It starts in the dark, back in the 1970s when I was a little kid. Way back to when it all began for me. A trigger warning: without gratuitous detail I am going to talk now about my very difficult childhood. If you’d rather skip this part, I get it, you can go to the * on page 7 and just know I was motivated by my childhood experiences to prove to myself that there was good in the world. If you’re okay with reading on, here goes . . .

When I was a very small child, I found out suddenly that some grown-ups could be cruel and were not to be trusted.

I was three when my mum and dad split up. My dad was in the army and he stayed on his base in Germany; my mum took me and my sister Natalie back to live with her parents in Leicester. My dad didn’t want to see us any more, although we didn’t know why. I didn’t see him again for over forty years.

My mum was very young and very pretty and felt trapped and frustrated staying with our grandparents, even though she loved them a lot. They were old-fashioned and protective, and treated her a bit like a child. Natalie and I, on the other hand, loved living with them and loved their house. We loved Leicester and the sari shops filled with jewel-coloured dresses and rows of sparkling bangles. How everyone said ‘me duck’.

Mum got a job in a pub and tried to rent a flat, but the prospective landlady wouldn’t rent it to her as she was worried about two little girls and their mum living on their own. It was really hard for my mum. She craved independence and a new start. When I was four and my sister two, Mum married a man who had a good job and who could give us all a home and provide for us.

Unbeknown to Mum, though, our stepdad was an abuser: sadistic, cruel and an expert manipulator. He made sure she never had the faintest idea of what he was up to. The man who had replaced our absent father treated me and my sister as if we were worthless. It’s well documented that predators are expert at concealing their actions and intentions, and I want to be clear that I do not hold my mum in any way responsible for what happened to us as children. In a very real way, it happened to her too – she is also a survivor of his abuses.

So, my lovely mum had married a man we were terrified of and whom we both feared and pitied. While he lived with us, my sister and I never told each other what was happening because we didn’t have the words to explain it. We each thought and hoped it was only happening to us.

Our stepdad kept changing jobs, after being asked to leave for reasons that remain unclear. We moved so often we never put down roots or felt we really belonged anywhere. We were always the new ones at school. We were both extremely shy and didn’t know what to say to other kids (but we had each other). We had things to hide. We were ashamed. We escaped reality through stories and books. We played long, complicated games in which we cast ourselves as heroines who escaped evil and poverty to become rich and happy.

In real life we weren’t well off. We had that humiliation common to so many people without much money, of having unfashionable and scruffy clothes, and being conscious that money was tight and that we should not always expect to get the things we wanted. I was always scared, often sad and sometimes outright terrified. I covered my walls in pictures of animals, which I loved fiercely and felt a profound connection with. My sister got into stargazing and escaped that way. We each tried in our own ways to draw attention to our unhappiness, but it was not picked up on and help didn’t arrive.

Eventually we settled in rural Hampshire, the place I still think of as home.

My grandparents provided light in this darkness when we stayed with them in the summer holidays. We four sat at their dining-room table in Leicester and made up poems. Grandad would walk us up the garden and show us his flowers and vegetables. Nana wrote us poems and took us swimming. They made us fat chips fried in lard with eggs for tea and bacon sandwiches for breakfast; they played Jim Reeves records and sang along to Grandmaster Flash on Radio One. I think my nana was the first elderly white lady to know all the lyrics to The Sugarhill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’. Grandad told the same jokes over and over again – ‘Last night I dreamed I was eating shredded wheat and when I woke up half the mattress was gone’ – and we laughed every time he told them. They had a sideboard filled with sweets and broken biscuits from Leicester market and we’d sit and watch Top of the Pops on the TV and eat all the sweets and Grandad would say it was ‘like a dog had been at them’. He sang ‘You Are My Sunshine’ and ‘My Way’ to my nana every night.

They gave us unconditional love. My grandparents taught me and my sister what kindness is and how to relax and enjoy yourself when you aren’t under threat all the time. We were so happy there. Our lovely mum taught us by example how to be kind to people, so despite our stepdad’s shadowy presence, we did have adults we could depend on for love and guidance.

Eventually, when I was thirteen, my stepdad left. Once he was gone my sister and I shared our experiences with each other and plucked up the courage to tell our mum. We had a little sister now, his daughter, and we didn’t want the same to happen to her – at eleven and thirteen we felt big enough to protect her. Mum listened, devastated, believed us without hesitation and called the police right away. The police came and interviewed us. We didn’t understand their questions. They phoned Mum soon afterwards to tell her that there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute him. Our extended family did not want to talk about it – I think they may have been ashamed. Some family members told us that they had felt something was wrong with our stepdad, which was why they kept their kids away from him all these years. Other adults who might have helped – teachers, friends and professionals – failed our little family in their various ways. My mum was left to cope with the terrible aftermath of our revelation with very little support.

At some point we were visited by a social worker. I believe she was trying to comfort us when she said, ‘Don’t worry, unfortunately there are lots of people like him in the world, in lots of other houses.’ My sister and I were both horrified. We would much rather have heard that he was the only one she had ever heard of, because that would have meant we were safe now we were away from him. But apparently not so. It seemed the world was populated by monsters. How the hell could we survive in a world full of houses occupied by people like him? Why were there so many? Why were they allowed to be like that, when we had to quietly get on with our lives with no help?

I was so bloody angry.

Also, I just would not believe it, I would not accept it. It didn’t make sense. Everyone, even him, had to have some light in them, didn’t they? And there were loads more good people than bad, weren’t there? After all, there was only one of him in my life, and I also had my mum, my sisters, my grandparents, my friends.

I think that moment was when it began really – my mission to prove to myself and to everyone around me that the world was a good place and the people in it were good too. This need to prove a point was seeded by fear.

I started with myself. I tried to be as nice as I possibly could be. Obviously I can sometimes be as grumpy, mean and selfish as the next person, but for the most part I worked very hard at being kind. People at college would say, ‘You’re too nice’, and my English teacher said I was ‘generous to a fault’. I gave away clothes, money, ideas, food – it was as though I was throwing things into the abyss because of my fear that under the surface was a deep well of darkness.

*

I constructed a way of being in the world that made me feel safe, but it wasn’t very robust because I didn’t really have a guiding principle. I was busy putting on lipstick and drinking snakebite and black, and listening to goth bands in nightclubs in Portsmouth, so it took me a while to find my compass. For a long time I was a mixture of genuinely heartfelt trying-tobe-a-good-person intentions and a little ball of rage and fear. To be honest, probably a typical teenager. To be fair, a pretty average human being.

As I travelled through life, I realised how much suffering there was, all around me, and how much I had to be grateful for. There is always someone worse off than you, and the realisation of how fortunate I am has grown as I get older. But still, I carried this wound.

Eventually I went to university, then to drama school. I abandoned my original ambition of being a vet in favour of being an actor. I wanted to be famous. Deep down I hoped that if I was famous my dad might see me on TV and reach out. Maybe even my stepdad would be full of remorse and ask my forgiveness. I didn’t have that kind of self-awareness then. I always told people, and myself, that I had chosen acting because it would give me an exciting life – simple as that.

I managed to just about scrape a living doing small-scale tours of theatre shows around the UK. Like many people who choose the theatre as a profession, I often suffered existential angst – a pretty expression for sweaty, insomnia-inducing horror. No, no, no, I’ve made an awful mistake, I think I’ve ruined my whole stupid pointless life! Why didn’t I stick it out at Barratts Shoes while I had the chance? They offered me management training! These thoughts have been induced on tour; by near bankruptcy; by occasional experiences of mild carbon-monoxide poisoning suffered while sitting in a lay-by on the M4, observing someone else trying to fix a broken-down white van whose back was filled with spine-destroying sets, which we often had to carry up three flights of narrow stairs as the venue’s lifts were broken or never existed; and idle afternoons spent wandering around identikit shopping centres that smelled of pine disinfectant and mild disappointment.

‘This is where my dreams have led me,’ I could be heard muttering to myself, staring wanly out of a rain-splattered window at another anonymous stretch of motorway.

There wasn’t an awful lot in the way of validation. The wound I was carrying wasn’t healed by choosing this life, but I was pleasantly distracted. In the background always was this nagging feeling that there was something I meant to do that I hadn’t done yet. That I wasn’t going to find what I was looking for here.

But there were loads of compensations: I have often laughed so hard during work that I have fallen over, made lifelong friends with some wonderful, interesting, hilarious, eccentric people. I have seen parts of the UK I would undoubtedly never have got round to visiting; been all around the world; I’ve done shows in theatres of all sizes, as well as in phone boxes and on boats and in old factories; I’ve had standing ovations and received awards and looked out on banks of seats filled with people laughing and crying or just watching, rapt. I’ve extended the time that you are usually allowed to wear fancy dress/pretend you’re an animal/put on silly accents merely by virtue of calling myself an actor. I have used a lot of glitter.

In those early post-drama-school years, I was still trying to be a good person. I recycled, I voted, I signed petitions. I was a vegetarian. I tried to be nice, polite, punctual, put my loose change in the charity buckets at the tube station.

I had watched the news less and less; when I did, it was through meshed fingers. I felt overwhelmed, even back then. It was so depressing. This feeling of helplessness I could track back to the march against the war in Iraq on 15 February 2003 that everyone was on: Home Counties mums, inner-city college kids, crusties, passionate lefties, religious folk of all kinds, everyone. It felt incredibly powerful and important and life-changing. Until nothing changed. The war carried on. Tony Blair disgraced himself, the news of weapons of mass destruction was a load of bollocks, and everybody said how many of us would it take to march until something changed? It didn’t feel like democracy, the reaction to that march. It felt like someone saying, ‘Shut up, fools. Be quiet.’

After that it was harder for me to work up enthusiasm for being politically active even in a small way. This wasn’t a conscious decision, I just let it fade away. I wandered around Topshop in Oxford Street and forgot to buy Fairtrade coffee. I had a purse full of maxed-out credit cards and I found it hard to be optimistic.

Still, when I went to the Edinburgh Festival in 2011, I was happy.

Sort of.

‘Happy on top,’ as my ex-flatmate Amanda Cuellar used to say, seeing straight through my brittle grin. ‘But sad under.’

Underneath the fizzy adrenalin of enjoying what at best felt like a paid holiday, maybe I was a little bit down. I was sad because of all the horror of the news. I was sad because of neglected dogs left to pine in empty flats, and the old lady dead for three days before anyone noticed, and the boy who committed suicide because he got bullied on Facebook, and because of benefit cuts to people who needed them most, and Tesco’s selling padded bras for eight-year-old girls, and children’s science toys only stocked in the boys’ section, and the woman who got arrested and threatened with stoning for falling in love, and bombs ending the lives of children playing on beaches, and girls hurt in the name of tradition, and endless bloody wars that no one seemed to have the power or the courage to stop, and refugee camps as big as countries, and people burning down forests and mosques and synagogues and churches, and rising sea levels and species extinctions and cruelty to animals and oil shortages and crop failures and global warming and bloody twerking. And I was sad because I was still carrying an old wound that had never healed.

I didn’t notice it consciously, this undercurrent of sadness. It was like the magma that Mr McFadden taught us about in geography lessons, underneath Earth’s crust. I carried on oblivious on the surface of it, knowing it was there but not paying it any attention.

I was at the aforementioned Edinburgh Festival with Penny Dreadful Theatre Company. It was the morning after the first night of our show, and I was sitting with my friends reviving myself with a fry-up at my favourite café, The City Café, when on the TV I saw some terrible sights. A twenty-nine-year-old black man called Mark Duggan had been shot and killed by police in Tottenham, North London. A gathering of about forty people, including the mother of Mark Duggan’s children, Semone Wilson, gathered at the police station to ask questions, only to be turned away. There had been no official confirmation of his death at that point, so his family and friends found out via what they saw and heard in the media. The negative impact and frustration that built in the days that followed led to the unrest that is usually described as a riot. However, many community leaders and frontline workers saw it as a protest born out of a widespread sense of social injustice.

Soon the unrest spread from London to Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and beyond. Back in Edinburgh, on the TV screen in front of me, I saw double-decker buses on fire, shops burned to the ground, businesses looted. It looked as if civil war had broken out. As though there’d been this boiling rage just underneath the surface that suddenly exploded. On the news they said there’d not been that many fires in London since the Blitz. People were scared, or angry, or both. There were calls to bring in the army, or water cannons, to deal with the rioters.

This was the last straw for me. There was something about this expression of rage and grief that brought all the bad news to the surface. It wasn’t simply the unrest and fires and looting, although that was bad enough, but also the reaction from the press – no one seemed to care about finding out why they had happened, they just dished out blame. Tabloids called the riots the ‘Chav Spring’, Richard Littlejohn wrote in the Daily Mail that the rioters ‘should be clubbed like baby seals’ and David Starkey said the riots happened because ‘the whites have become black’. It was all so racist, classist and depressing.

Even in Edinburgh, in that magical month when the festival is on and the ‘real world’ seems so far away, the riots stayed in our minds and conversations.

Blame was piled on what some in the media decided were the ‘usual suspects’ (black people, brown people, poor people, young people), but we soon found out that in fact all kinds of people had grabbed a free pair of trainers from the kicked-in windows of Foot Locker. I wasn’t the only one who remembered the words of Martin Luther King Junior who cautioned, ‘A riot is the language of the unheard.’ It didn’t seem as though anyone in power was even attempting to listen to those unheard voices.

A week after the riots had started, I came back home from Edinburgh to Deptford, South East London. Back to reality. The whole of the capital seemed unusually quiet and subdued. I felt useless, thinking about it all, powerless to make any kind of meaningful, positive contribution to anything. What was I doing with my one ‘wild and precious life’ when there was so much urgent trouble?

But I did notice little shoots of hope.

On the front pages of newspapers, images of buses on fire were replaced by pictures of groups of people with brooms held aloft, people who’d joined in #riotcleanup, a campaign started by poet and artist Dan Thompson on Twitter, as a practical response to the riots. He started tweeting around midnight on the Monday after the unrest had started, encouraging people to ‘start with the smallest thing possible . . . get a broom, get a bin bag and start clearing up your local shop’ – and by midday on Tuesday he had 76,000 followers.

In one of the places badly hit by the riots, Rye Lane, around the corner from where I live, someone stuck up a Post-it note which said, ‘We all love Peckham! Peace.’ It was soon joined by hundreds more tiny squares of messages of love and respect for the local community and came to be known as the Peckham Peace Wall. Walking past it, you could see it put a smile back on the faces of passers-by, and it was easy for people to contribute to.

These stories of people looking out for each other and their communities gave me courage, and just a little bit of hope. I felt sure there was something I could do to contribute meaningfully. I just didn’t know what yet.

Then on 18 August 2011, a perfectly ordinary day, I was in a queue at the Post Office in Deptford. There was a young man in front of me. I vaguely noticed his hoodie, his downcast eyes, his scuffed trainers. I remember thinking, I bet you are having a hard time right now. You look like all those images of rioters we have been presented with on TV. I felt for him. I thought about assumptions that might be made about him. How he had been affected by recent events, too. I overheard him talking to the man behind the counter; he said sorry that he didn’t have enough money for his stamp, that it was more than he had expected it to be. As he walked away, I said, ‘I’ll pay for it.’

He seemed completely taken aback by that tiny act of kindness. It was nothing much, a little bit of money and time, but he said thanks several times and we smiled at each other. It felt good to do. I thought to myself: Well, that was easy. Making him smile was easy. Maybe, that 50p and a few moments of my time did make a small difference to him in that moment . . .

I got on the bus, thinking about what had just happened, the effect it might have had on the young man, and on me, and on the people in the Post Office who saw it. It was such a small act but it seemed pretty powerful, like the Post-its on the Peckham Peace Wall.

By the time I got home, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. Even thinking it gave me a big rush of adrenalin. I was going to try to do a kind thing for a stranger every single day for a year. For 366 days, I realised, because it would cover a leap year. I was going to see if kindness could change the world . . .

Before I continue, I’d like to confess to the not-so-kind things I did before I started. I don’t want you to feel you are about to get a saccharine, virtue-signalling festival of vainglory. I was definitely not perfect. I’m still not. Here are some highlights, in date order, of just some of the things that make me feel guilty, or ashamed, or both, and definitely not kind:

•    When I was six, I tied my little sister Natalie to a swing at the bottom of our garden with a length of washing line and I left her there for ages while I went in and ate a Findus crispy pancake.

•    When I was seven, I threw a brick at my best friend Christopher Walker’s head because I wanted to see what brains looked like.

•    When I was ten, I forced our cat into a blue baby doll’s outfit, which said, ‘I am a boy’ on the front. Then I put the cat into a pram and pushed it round the neighbourhood all day. And the cat was a girl. Not that cats care about gender conformity, but still . . .

•    When I was eleven, I told my teacher our house had burned to the ground in a terrible accident, just to get out of doing double PE, and I was called into the head teacher’s office for counselling.

•    When I was twelve, I wrote ‘Mary is a silly cow’ on the wall of Purbrook Park School and I drew her head onto the body of a cow. It was an excellent drawing of both her and the cow, although I realise this is beside the point.

•    When I was thirteen, I dumped the entire contents of my Saturday morning paper round into an ornamental pond, and I told the newsagents a rival paper girl had attacked me.

•    When I was fourteen, I kicked a boy just because he looked like the 1980s pop star Simon Le Bon.

•    When I was nineteen, I glued matchsticks to the hairs on my friend Alex’s legs with superglue while she was asleep.

•    When I was twenty-two, I was sick inside my friend Geraldine Daley’s hat, and I never owned up.

•    When I was twenty-six, my friend told me about the time she went on holiday to Greece. She was really excited to be on holiday abroad without her parents for the first time. She ate a lot of unfamiliar, very rich food, as you do, and the next morning, on the way back to her caravan after having breakfast, found herself caught short with a gurgling tummy. She had to squat behind a bush and just poo and poo and poo until it all came out. I retold that story to everyone I knew (and I am now writing it down for publication).

•    When I was thirty, I pushed a woman into a bin full of garlic on Deptford High Street just because she shouted at me.

•    When I was thirty-four, I escaped out of my friend’s play by pretending to faint, but the real reason was I was really, really bored.

•    When I was thirty-six, I poured very hot Tabasco sauce into my partner Gareth’s mouth while he was asleep.

•    When I was thirty-eight, I put raw sardines in my friend Ian’s shoes at a barbecue and let him put his feet back in the shoes without telling him.

•    When I was forty, I was asked to do a short phone survey for Transport for London, but I said it wasn’t possible because ‘Bernadette Russell is sadly dead’.

•    When I was forty-three, I said, ‘Don’t bitch me, bitch’ to a customs officer on the Vienna to Bratislava ferry and to this day I would hesitate to put my foot back in Slovakia.

And there have been a lot more since then. Grumpy mornings, thinking the worst of people, taking more than my fair share of pizza, you know the kind of thing. I hope the list gives you an idea of who you are dealing with.

I do admit that I was (and am still) prone to what my partner Gareth refers to as ‘madcap schemes’. I’d previously told him I was going to take my HGV licence because I loved the idea of driving a massive truck, but I hadn’t even got my normal licence yet. I once decided I was going to do a diploma course in Ghost Hunting at the Paranormal Academy. That’s a real course. And just the week before I had decided I was going to leave showbiz entirely and retrain as a dog whisperer. None of these madcap schemes came to fruition. I get easily excited, you see. Then I run out of steam, just as easily.

But not this time. This time was different. I thought to myself, Come on, you can do this! You know you have never really been the best at anything, so maybe, just maybe, you could be the best at being kind. So, I posted my intentions on Facebook and Twitter; they got two likes and twelve comments, which seemed epic at the time and was all the encouragement I needed.

For fun, here’s a list of some things that definitely came in handy for me in that first year and a day:

Good walking boots

Water

A sense of humour

Tissues

Germolene

Plasters

Good listening skills

Good observational skills

Crafting skills (optional)

Glue (optional)

A change of clothes in case you suddenly go to a party

Pen and paper

GPS

The ability to spot people who might be receptive to a conversation with a stranger

Friendly demeanour

Thick skin and sensitivity

Readiness to learn some uncomfortable truths about yourself (like you get angry if people don’t say thank you)

Readiness to forgive yourself once you’ve learned uncomfortable truths; to withstand loneliness, despair, sorrow and exhaustion. But also to enjoy spontaneity, mischief, creativity, conversation, parties, cakes, surprise turns of events, startling revelations, shocking confessions and sudden changes of weather and opinion.

Ready? Let’s go . . .

1. AUGUST

Try a Little Kindness

Five acts of kindness this month:

Day 5: I hid £5 inside a book in Waterstones, Greenwich, with a note saying, ‘Enjoy.’

Day 7: I gave a stranger at the bus stop a packet of love hearts.

Day 9: I left a packet of Liquorice Allsorts in a phone box in Shoreditch with a note saying ‘Eat me.’

Day 10: I chalked the Wendell Berry poem ‘The Peace of Wild Things’ on to the pathway of our local park, in the hope it might make people smile.

Day 14: I gave a stranger an ‘unbirthday present’ – beautifully wrapped and containing chocolate, hand cream, sweets and a mini sparkler.

Well, I’d had the call to adventure, even though you could say I’d called myself. And I was very eager to set out.

I was freelancing as a picture researcher three days a week. It was a very busy and stressful job. The rest of the week I worked on my monthly storytelling show at an arts centre in East London. I had very little disposable income. So, time and cash poor. But also, fairly secure with work, which was unusual for me, and with a public platform via my storytelling show. Plus I worked with very supportive and interested people who got involved with my mission from the start. So I had a lot on my side.

My incredibly supportive partner, Gareth, was in the midst of training for the London Marathon, so he had some good ideas about how you can support yourself when setting out on a big challenge. He suggested that I might like to write some rules. It might be fun and put some boundaries around the whole idea.

Here they are.

The Rules of Kindness

1.    Thou1 must be kind to a stranger every single day for a year. Basic requirement.

2.    Thou must never say no if someone asks thou for money (yes, I know, foolish, and yes, it got expensive).

3.    Every single day thou must smile at a stranger and not sulk if they don’t smile back.

4.    Thou can sponsor people, but this is very easy, so thou can only do it if thou are ill or somehow incapacitated.

5.    It must be a wide variety of people, not just people thou like the look of. In fact, it should especially be people thou don’t like the look of.

6.    It doesn’t count if it’s just normal everyday politeness, like saying thank you. It should be an uncommon act of kindness.

7.    Thou must record it every day on Facebook and Twitter.

8.    Other people can join in, but thou can’t make them.

9.    No days off. No exceptions – however ill, hungover or maimed,2 thou must do it . . . whatever happens.

10.  It must be a different thing every day.3

So I had my rules sorted. I’d posted the idea on social media. I was ready. But first I had to work out how to approach people. What should I say to start the conversation? I didn’t want to scare anyone. I didn’t want them to think that I was trying to sell them something or that I was asking for donations – so I realised that I needed to be friendly, but not over friendly, and I needed to be able to explain quickly and clearly what my intentions were.

I also realised I had to consider who to approach. Should I go for the easy route, and choose someone who looked familiar and friendly? Approaching that kind of person would be the path of least resistance. But I had promised to approach ‘a wide variety of people’, so should I take the opportunity to really stretch myself and go for someone who looked angry, or unfriendly, or intimidating? And what would make me decide that someone might be unfriendly or intimidating? I decided to pay attention to my conscious and unconscious biases as I went on, and to challenge myself on them when they presented themselves.

On Day Two, I went out into the world to try it. Specifically, I went into the Tesco near where I live. (It occurs to me that this might be the only time in history that a great adventure has been recorded as beginning in a British supermarket.) I’d already decided that I was going to buy some flowers and give them to somebody. Everyone likes flowers, I thought. I chose some and went to the checkout to pay. As I approached, I saw Ryan on the checkout. I knew his name was Ryan because he was wearing one of those little name badges. Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’ was playing quietly in the background, and I thought Ryan looked a bit sad. Maybe he isn’t having a very good day, I thought. So I decided to give the flowers to Ryan. I was very nervous.

This is how our conversation went:

Me: Hello . . . um . . . Ryan. My name’s Bernadette. Bernadette Russell. Sorry if this is a bit weird. You know the riots that just happened?

Ryan: Mmm.

Me: Well, it was horrible, wasn’t it?

Ryan: Mmm.

Me: Well, I decided after that . . . I was going to do a kind act for a stranger every day and I brought these flowers and then I saw you . . . and you look nice.

Ryan: Mmm.

Me: So, I wondered if you would accept this and be my today’s act of kindness?

PAUSE (which seemed to last for eternity, but was probably ten seconds max)

Ryan (with amazing enthusiasm and incredible volume): ‘OH MY GOD THAT IS BRILLIANT! IT’S SO COOL. THANK YOU SO MUCH!’

I was absolutely delighted. I loved Ryan in that moment. I went out of Tesco walking on air. ‘Bye, Ryan! Thank you, Ryan!’ I called as I left.

So that was Day Two. A success.

The next day, Day Three, I was feeling very optimistic after the previous day’s triumph. I was on the number 47 bus coming home from Greenwich, and I had prepared a book to give to someone. It was a fantastic book called When God Was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman. I had already read it and loved it – plus regifting is environmentally friendly, of course. I wrote inside it, ‘Dear Stranger, hope you enjoy this book, love Bernadette xxx.’

I quickly decided to give it to the grumpy-looking man sitting opposite me, even though I was a little nervous of doing so. But I paid attention to the fact that here I was assuming he was grumpy rather than knowing for sure, based on my interpretation of his expression. He could just be thinking about annoying things. He could be having a terrible day. Then I started thinking about how maybe