Tag Archives: Personality

An Aggressive Defence of Nice People

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Someday my father and I are going to co-write a novel. We’ve been talking about it for years now. We are considering the epistolary form. The content will be largely autobiographical and we shall take a wry look at society and its conventions. Our own treatment as largely unsuccessful literary layabouts will be suitably ironic.

I have been collecting characters for our novel and I thought it was high time to write an aggressive defence of one of my most cherished prototypes: the nice person.

Since I’ve been in Berlin I’ve had the advantage of meeting lots of new people, many of whom vary substantially on a spectrum of pleasantness.

I have a “breaking news” example. I’m writing from my local library, where I am perched comfortably at a round table with my back to a radiator and a view to a study area.

Just now, my train of thought was interrupted by a booming voice. I looked up to see a large man approach a desk where two young girls, one in a floral headscarf and the other with a stripy jumper were studying.

“How DARE you talk in a library” he yelled. “This is supposed to be a QUIET area. The ImPERTINENCE. How DARE you?”

The girls’ faces were frozen with terror while his was red with vitriol.

Jumping in the air in defence of nice people in Philadelphia, almost a year ago.

“HAVE I MADE MYSELF UNDERSTOOD?”

They nodded.

I had not even been aware of so much as a whisper from the girls. But I was certainly interrupted by this foul-mouthed miscreant, who had taken library discipline into his own hands.

(By the way, I take respectful behaviour in libraries very seriously and absolutely believe in regulation. But in this case the offence was minor and the intervention disproportionate and without mandate.)

Nice people, thankfully, are not in short supply. They are the ones that instinctively apologise when you step on their toe and spend hours nodding sympathetically even when confronted by a dull narrative.

They are the cashiers that give you an extra nod when you’ve completed your purchase and the reporters that say “Oh don’t worry, I was useless at the start” when you display incompetence.

They are the people that do not recoil when a foul-smelling and batty woman sits next to them on the bus and the ones that engage in mini sprints to catch up with you when you’ve dropped a mitten.

Nice people, contrary to the individualist-inspired meme, do not (necessarily) end up on welfare.

Nice people are mostly self-consciously so. They have weighed up the cost of an unpleasant smell and dull conversation against the happy after-glow of having been pleasant. It’s moral mathematics.

Nice people are not walk-overs either. Sometimes they will startle you with their outrage or righteous indignation.

Nice people are sometimes quiet but that does not mean they are taciturn or shy. They are watchful. If you adopt a scornful and derisive tone, they will greet you with a steely silence. The effect is something in between disregard and non-compliance.

In our novel, the nice people won’t end up on welfare. And if they do, it will be very generous.

The Ladybird

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I once started crying in a falafel joint  in Philadelphia because I saw a father upbraid his son for not doing well at school.  He spat when he spoke, his wife pursed her lips and his sister said “I’d help you if I were in big kid school.” It was too much for me to watch. A couple of tears landed in my hummus.

And on Tuesday night, just outside the opera house in Vienna, I gave money to a woman on a crutch who told me she had lost her wallet, had already reported it to the police and just needed a fare to get the train home. I suspended disbelief.

If that wasn’t enough, when I went to see the King’s Speech with LSB, I was in such a state afterwards that I refused to leave the cinema in case I met somebody I knew.

You see, I have a delicate sensibility.

I also like ladybirds, a lot.

So you can imagine my reaction when one landed on my toe last Sunday afternoon. I was sitting on a  bench in a beautiful Viennese park. The sun was scalding me, my eyes were closed and I felt something brush against my toe.  I was preparing to flick the offending creature away when LSB said “Look, Katzi!”

The ladybird that landed on my foot

I looked down and squealed with delight. There it was – a beautiful, well-rounded specimen with chunky spots and a confident crawl. I watched it and asked LSB to take a picture to preserve for posterity.

After some time, it ambled away contentedly to a stretch of pathway. I watched it go a little sadly. Then all of a sudden a wave of people passed by directly in front of me, completely obscuring my view of the ladybird.

“Oh no, no, no, no!” I cried.

LSB winced. “Don’t look, Katzi.”

I had to.

It had been trodden on but it was still alive, flailing.

I rushed to it. Some of its legs were crushed. I tried to encourage it onto a newspaper in my hand. It would not move.

I stayed there a while. I felt I was being watched but I didn’t feel like looking up.

Then a woman’s voice said to me, “The newspaper won’t work. Try your finger!”

I looked up to find a middle-aged lady with brown curls and a loose blouse peering down at me.

I took her advice but it didn’t work. I told her that the ladybird had been stepped on.

“Oh well that’s the end of him then,” she said, smiling apologetically before walking away.

I returned to the bench and watched the bug. It had stopped moving.

“I don’t think there’s anything we can do, Katzi,” said LSB sadly. “But it wasn’t your fault.”

I got down on my knees and looked at it again carefully.

The lady came back. She licked her finger, scooped the ladybird up and plopped it in my hand.

“That’s how you do it,” she said.

I was startled but grateful. LSB laughed a little.

The ladybird moved.

“It’s alive!” I cried.

It began to push forward with its two undamaged legs.

I set it down on a leaf at the edge of a lawn. It moved forward a little and then toppled over onto its back. I turned it back over.

This happened a few times. Then LSB said, “Katzi, this time let it try on its own.”

That was wisdom and my first insight into my shortcomings as a future parent.

It managed to turn itself over. There was no guarantee that it would master the concrete ledge onto the lawn. But it was time to go.

“It wasn’t your fault,” said LSB again.

Spinning in my ladybird costume, Halloween 2008 with a charming Tinkerbell

Since then I have seen several crushed ladybirds on the pavement.

But yesterday, while I was swimming in the Danube, I spotted a ladybird in the water.

Without thinking, I scooped it up into both my hands and brought it to safety.

Even more impressively, today I ate a falafel sandwich and nothing about it or my surroundings offended my sensibilities.