SANDY LLOYD believes kindness is feeding our souls
I have made my first batch of soup for the year.
It’s about two months earlier than I usually wake the slow-cooker from its summer hibernation and simmer-up a vat of lamb shank, barley and vegetable soup that is solid enough to eat with a fork and, frozen in lunch-size portions, sustains me through winter.
This was a much lighter — more autumnal — pumpkin and lentil soup, made possible by a simple act of kindness.
Someone gave me a couple of sweet, new-season butternut pumpkins.
They also gave me a bag of end-of-season mini-Roma tomatoes, bursting with the flavour and aroma you only get from a backyard vegie garden.
As I am the world’s worst (and most disinterested) gardener, it was very special to receive the fruits of someone else’s labour.
And it reminded me that acts of kindness — big or small, random or deliberate — are what will get us through this difficult time of disease and isolation and lost jobs.
I’ve always believed that what the world needs to be a much nicer and fairer place for everyone is a healthy dose of tolerance. Tolerance for different races, colours, genders, religions, politics and beliefs. Imagine how much less war and hate there would be if there was much more tolerance.
Now I’m adding kindness to my formula for a better world.
As the boundaries of our lives shrink, small acts of kindness take on proportionately larger importance.
Just as I was despairing the pandemic was creating an epidemic of intolerance — fighting over toilet paper in supermarkets, healthcare workers being abused and spat on — kindness is making a comeback as epic as being two sets and a match point down in the Wimbledon final and fighting back to win the title.
Online and in the media, the happy stories are starting to crowd out the bad stuff. And some of those stories are making me quite teary.
The biggie this week was Uruguay helping Aussies stuck on a coronavirus-stricken cruise ship. People lined the streets of the capital Montevideo to cheer the police-escorted buses heading to the airport or watched it live on television.
It proves kindness is never forgotten. Many Uruguayans remember Australia opened its arms to refugees fleeing a military coup in their country in the 1970s, and they felt this was repaying the debt.
That’s a mighty long memory and a big act of kindness.
There are other big gestures, both at home and around the world — strangers giving healthcare workers somewhere to stay so they don’t risk taking COVID-19 home to their families. Whole cities stopping once a day to applaud and thank the people working on the frontline of this battle.
Or the simpler things — children sending drawings to aged-care residents in lockdown. Saying an extra ‘thank you’ to the person at the supermarket checkout.
And then there’s food. Have you noticed how much of the kindness we see around us right now is edible?
People are grocery shopping for their neighbours, friends, family or complete strangers who can’t get out to do it themselves.
Paying it forward for health workers — from coffee to sausage rolls — is happening everywhere.
People are cooking meals for strangers — from the empty restaurant kitchens turning out hundreds of meals for the needy, to someone dropping dinner to an elderly shut-in.
While the grand gestures are admirable, little moments of kindness are just as uplifting.
Like my pumpkins and tomatoes.
Or the neighbour who designated herself Easter bunny and left bags of Easter eggs at every door in my court on Sunday.
Or the other neighbour who organised a coffee van to come into our court as a treat for us all — no ‘gathering’ and appropriately socially-distanced, of course.
Or the conscious choice so many of us are making to buy takeaways from our local cafes and restaurants, to try and help them stay afloat.
I think the reason food is on the frontline of kindness is because food — especially eating with others — is such an intrinsic part of our society and culture.
From family dinners to backyard barbecues, from the work morning coffee run to brunch with the girls, we share our lives with others through sharing food.
And now we can’t physically get together to eat and drink, we are finding all these other ways to share food from a distance.
For some, that might be a virtual ‘pub night’ with friends via Zoom.
For others, it turns into all these wonderful acts of kindness.
Humans – we are infinitely creative!
And, I am delighted to discover, infinitely kind.
I AM WATCHING...
Chocolate. Lots and lots of chocolate. I watched more chocolate this Easter than I ate, which is a good thing.
I started a week early with the British doco, Secrets of the Cadbury Chocolate Factory — a fascinating social history, as well as the story of one of the world’s most iconic brands.
Then on Easter Saturday I indulged my sweet tooth with the latest SBS ‘slow tv’ offering: The Chocolate Factory: Inside Cadbury Australia.
From Queensland’s sugar cane fields and Tasmania’s dairy farms, to a Melbourne factory, I spent three hours watching Easter eggs and bunnies being made. Yum.
I AM DEVASTATED...
Tim Brooke-Taylor has died from COVID-19. As a child in the 1970s, I watched Countdown, Doctor Who and The Goodies. How I loved The Goodies!
The crazy antics of Tim Brooke-Taylor (the posh one) with his mates Graeme Garden (the brainy one) and Bill Oddie (the hippy one). It was silly beyond belief, but that’s what made it so wonderful. It had a resurgence on DVDs and ABC TV more than 10 years ago, when I got my children hooked as well.
The show hadn’t aged well — but I did get lots of jokes I missed when I was 10! Tim and his Union Jack waistcoat will live forever in my heart.
I AM STREAMING...
The Shows Must Go On YouTube channel, thanks to legendary composer Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Every Friday at 7pm British time (that’s 4am on Saturdays here), Andrew is releasing a full-length musical to watch for free for 48 hours.
First up was Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat (which I missed) and over Easter was Jesus Christ Superstar.
It was the amazing re-booted arena production from 2012, which I saw when it toured here and stars our own Tim Minchin as Judas.
It had more than 1.7 million views — five of which were mine. Can’t wait to see what’s next.
I AM GAZING...
At the full moon. Again. And last week’s was one of those special ‘supermoons’.
Sadly, the best time to see it was about 11pm last Wednesday, when Shepparton was shrouded in cloud.
But I had gazed my fill earlier in the evening when the skies were clear. This was supposed to be our largest supermoon for the year, with our celestial neighbour just 356 907km away.
We’ve had ‘super blue blood moons’ and ‘super blood wolf moons’, but this one was a ‘pink supermoon’, so called because it often arrives at the same time as early spring pink phlox flowers in the Northern Hemisphere.