"the grouches pull you down"

had one of those inspiring powerpoint thingummies on the email - you know the ones - pretty pictures and bits of text that sounds like sage advice, and some of it is but some of it isn't, and if you're not careful you just absorb it all amongst the pretty scenery.

amongst the advice about how to keep young, some of which was lovely, there was this bit:

Keep only cheerful friends - the grouches pull you down.

and I'm wondering - if everyone were to follow this advice, who would be left to show love to the grouches? who would be there to help lift their spirits? if everyone followed this advice, I would have remained a grouch forever.

so no, don't keep only cheerful friends - don't be so selfish. take some of the joy you have and go share it with the nearest grouch. they need it.

My pet crazy person

This loving people thing sometimes creeps up on you in the most unexpected ways.

I was staying at a Christian retreat centre, aiming to have a nice restful and relaxing break, when this guy turned up who reminded me of those bunnies in the old advert for batteries. I think the technical term I'm looking for is hyperactive. This guy walks around a lounge where people are sitting quietly and points to an armchair and says loudly: look at that, this is top quality furniture, excellent upholstery! He turns to people he has never met before and says: hello, what's your name? He interrupts people's conversations to say: you two over there, are you a couple or are you two separate people?

And like those bunnies in the advert, he doesn't seem to stop to draw breath. (or, more to the point, to let other people draw breath...)

My immediate reaction was to think: oh, help, how am I going to cope? I'm here till Saturday and it's only Wednesday evening. Am I going to have to go hide in my room all the time?

Ok, "help" is a good prayer... and God can do pretty amazing stuff when I let him, and he did. By Saturday morning I was sorry to have to leave this guy behind. No - he hadn't been miraculously healed from whatever it is that causes him to behave that way, but I had come to feel affection for him. He hadn't stopped being a nutter, but he had become my pet nutter, he had become someone who is pretty unbalanced and behaves in infuriating ways but I know him and like him.

It did help that I'm aware of being unbalanced and infuriating too, in my own ways... So when he asked me if I thought he was crackers, I said: do you think I am? We had some fun banter around the possibility that we had each of us booked into the wrong place by mistake, thinking it was the local loony bin but then finding to our disappointment that there were no straitjackets and no pills.

The process of this guy becoming my pet crazy person started with a game of Scrabble. I had this idea of asking one of the others staying there - someone I got on well with - if she fancied a game of Scrabble that evening. Then he heard us talking about playing and asked if he could join in. She and I exchanged looks of panic, but there was no way we could really say no without being extremely rude.

So we sat down to play, but very quickly she and I were forced to lay down some ground rules to preserve our sanity. We had to find ways of explaining reasonably that we simply can't cope with the level of chatter that he tends to produce, that there's no way we could concentrate on the game if he kept yakking and that we simply found it exhausting. We explained all this whilst realising that he doesn't have a huge amount of control over this, so we just had to keep telling him to shush every now and again - but he took it well, he's an intelligent guy and I think he did understand where we were coming from, and he valued our company enough to accept the way we kept telling him to be quiet. The thing is, everyone needs to feel loved and accepted, and I guess we found a way of giving him love and acceptance whilst not letting it kill us.

He did seem a bit calmer the next day, he wasn't hanging around in the lounge all the time and pestering people like that first evening - he'd booked all sorts of activities which he obviously needs for letting out all that energy and internal chaos, and seemed perfectly capable of occupying himself, not needing people's attention all the time, though clearly pleased when asked to join us for Trivial Pursuit on the Thursday evening. On Friday night, my last night there, I sat in the conservatory doing a jigsaw puzzle and he sat on a bench outside, popping in once to tell me he was driving to the shops and ask if I needed anything, another time to offer me a sweet (yummy!) and the third time he just said good night on his way up to bed. And I found myself thinking: I'm going to miss this guy.

Which is not how I had expected to feel when he first turned up in the lounge on the Wednesday.

People grow on you. I've seen this happen again and again. Even people that bug you - there's a subtle change over time (sometimes, not always) where instead of that inward groan when you see them coming, you find yourself starting to smile at their quirks and foibles, you find that instead of getting cross you just smile indulgently, as you would at your child when they're being naughty again.

Knowing that I have my own quirks certainly helps, it helps to keep me in check when I groan about other people's infuriating habits.

There was a lovely moment during that game of Scrabble, when this guy moved the coasters on the table and arranged them in straight lines, looking at me looking at him and saying to me: I bet you think I'm crackers, don't you? (Was this before or after he went over to the bookshelves and straightened up all the books? anyway, he obviously has a thing about stuff being straight and tidy.) My response was to rearrange the coasters whilst explaining to him that whilst his crackeredness meant he needed things to be in straight lines, my crackeredness means I actually need them not to be in straight lines and it would really bug me if I had to sit there for a long time seeing those coasters in those neat straight lines...

"Everybody's normal till you get to know them"* is one of my favourite book titles of all time.

*(It's a book by John Ortberg, and it's really good, not just the title.)

"He made the mistake of picking on my friend"

So I'm hanging out in a group discussion somewhere on the net, nice friendly chat, until this guy turns up who has turned into a bulldozer and starts shooting everyone down in an unbelievably aggressive manner. (Yes, I know I'm mixing my metaphors, bulldozers don't shoot, but I'm sure you get the picture.)

So I'm watching this guy with horror - I really want to answer him but I can't think of anything that would be constructive, and I really don't fancy getting this sort of guy on my case - and then into the discussion comes a very nice lady who says to him: you're not very nice are you, I don't like the way you're snapping at everyone. And the bulldozer apologises and calms down. Phew.

I sent her a message to say well done, and she said: I'm generally non-confrontational, but he made the mistake of picking on my friend.

It reminded me of someone I worked with in London - about 30 people in an office, plenty of gossip and back-stabbing - who simply refused to listen to anything negative that anyone had to say about anyone else in the firm. If you tried telling him something bad about someone, he would say: don't talk like that about my friend.

So what am I getting at? Well, it's a vague thought but it's something to do with how if we regard everyone as friends, as people we care about, then we are much more likely to come to their defence when they need it. It all goes back to that "love your neighbour" stuff - caring enough about the other person to go out of your way, to even take risks sometimes, to help them in need.

I read a horrifying news item the other day about a man who was driving and stopped on his way to help a woman who had been run over by a car and was dying. When he saw her handbag he recognised this woman was his wife - he'd been on his way to meet her. I can't begin to imagine how he must have felt. But how would he have felt if he hadn't stopped, if he had just thought something like, I haven't got time to stop and help a stranger, I'm in a hurry to meet my wife... How would he have felt if nobody had stopped to help her? There is that old chestnut about how everybody thought somebody should do it, but in the end nobody did it. It's very easy to tut tut about the state of our society today, to tsk tsk about people not stopping to help a stranger like they used to, but the real challenge for each of us is: would we stop to help, or would we be in a tearing hurry, or just plain scared, and hope someone else would do it?