The Little Things

It's June 2003. I'm walking through the crowded outskirts of Paris. It is not glamourous.

We'd spent so long on a dingy coach to reach France, that I'd actually hallucinated. My schoolmates had bought lighters at a service station and every time I nodded off on during our journey, I kept hearing the click of a lighter, as though someone was trying to set my hair on fire.

Maybe they were, we were all only thirteen and extremely stupid.

Once we'd reached Paris, we checked into our Two-Star hostel (no lift, communal bathrooms) and had immediately been summoned for an excursion. I've got a strong suspicion that my deep-seated hatred of excursions stems from school trips and the constant, forced activity they entailed.

Walking through the busy streets, I kept thinking to myself "I'm sure Paris is supposed to be... posh", but, as a group from a state comprehensive school, which was based in a grim ex-mining town in the UK, I guess we were getting what we paid for.

As we made our way back to the Hostel one of the boys on the trip was in tears, as he couldn't afford a souvenir he'd attempted to buy to take home to his Mother.

It was very awkward and we, being emotionally underdeveloped teenagers, looked the other way and tried to ignore his woe until he stopped crying and we could all feel comfortable once more.

Just as we were about to board the coach back to the Hostel, another boy, (one who always seemed much older than the rest of us, was often in trouble with the teachers for smoking, and who, it was rumoured, came from a traumatic background) tapped the first boy on the shoulder and placed the souvenir in his hand.

He'd spent his own spending money on it.

Everyone was touched, I'm pretty sure one of the teachers (usually indifferent to us grotty, precocious teenagers) wiped away a tear.

I think that's one of the first times I remember a good deed being done for someone with no benefit to the person doing the deed.

Obviously, in childhood caregivers and friends had been nice to me, and done lovely things for me.

But.

These two boys weren't friends. They never had been. They ran in different social circles, and if anything, you might've expected the do-gooder to mock the first boy for his tears, rather than trying to make things better for him.

There must be a reason that something so silly sticks out in my mind when I think of 'good deeds' or 'acts of kindness', and I'm sure it's because it was so unexpected and organic.

In adult relationships, we never want to have to ask our partner to buy us flowers, or take us on a surprise trip.

The act of asking detracts from the thought, and when someone does something kind for us, it's often not the material object or the action itself which is heartwarming, it's the fact that this person has thought about us and gone out of their way to do something which we weren't expecting.

The fact that the boy in the story who purchased the souvenir cared enough about a random classmate's emotional state and the thought of him not being able to take a gift home to his Mother always stuck with me.

And, when I found out a couple of weeks later that this boy's Mother had passed away long before our trip to France, it was like a punch to the gut.

Here was someone who literally couldn't take anything home to his Mother, spending his own money on ensuring a classmate could.