So I am currently sat on a terrace waiting for one of my childhood friends to get married (which is obviously blogworthy in and of itself, but not really something I feel I can do justice to on a tiny phone keyboard). I got here with a few hours to spare, entirely thanks to a total stranger who saw me walking by the side of the road, blissfully unaware that I would soon be walking down a busy a road with no pavement. This utterly unprovoked act of general niceness got me thinking about the usual thoughts these sorts of ocurrances provoke, such as if-only-we-were-all-a-bit-more-trusting and also there-are-still-some-nice-people-after-all. Then I found myself thinking about other similar occasions when galvanised either by youth or stupidity (providing you don't consider the two terms to be synonymous anyhow) I dared to throw off the bounds of social convention and trust a total stranger.

The two events which spring to mind illustrate the breadth of the spectrum; the first being an occasion when a friend and I flew to Germany with the intention of spending the night in Frankfurt Hahn airport (note to reader: don't ever intend to do this, it is a bad idea) and got chatting to the guy who had sat behind us on the plane. We ended up crashing at his lovely flat (sorry mum) and avoiding a scrotty three hour coach journey in favour of a ride down dark fast German roads in his lovely, air conditioned car. Nice bloke, and we're still in touch with him now, sort of (as much as facebook friendship counts as being in touch these days). So that was one situation in which a fairly stupid risk actually turned out to be a good idea.

The other occasion that I thought of was less of a laudatory anecdote on the inheret goodwill in all man; when I was 14, I was in New York visiting family and some guy thought I was a teenage runaway and tried to recruit me into his prostitute ring, or whatever the technical terms. I scuppered his nefarious plans by completely failing to understand what he was asking, and then spotting my mum and running back to her after a cheerful "It was nice to meet you!" and a wave.

So either way, basically the score is 2 - random acts of kindness make for a beautiful world, 1 - white slave trade recruiters in dodgy NY parks. Those odds will do for now I suppose

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