A NICE THOUGHT (NOT MINE)

As a rule, nice things don’t happen to me all that often.

Don’t get me wrong, on very rare occasions, the very few people who still remember that I’m still actually alive have been known to try, although I usually manage to ruin the moment somehow through my own incompetence or a mis-timed and ill-judged “witty” outburst, or just because of the crushing embarrassment I always feel if I’m ever forced to become that horrific notion – “the centre of attention” – however fleetingly.

“Drawing attention to oneself” - it’s just one of those things that one simply shouldn’t do. It’s why I’ve always had a difficult and bipolar relationship with the whole notion of blogging and placing an internet footprint into the sandy beach of eternity, and occasionally scuttle away from life for a few weeks, months, years or decades, depending upon how much I think I might have embarrassed myself last time.

It’s also why I struggle with the notion of beaming our signals out into space. What if the monsters who were previously unaware of our existence hear them and they do decide to come…?

What then…?

But I digress.

Sometimes a nice thought is just a nice thought and ought to be accepted as being just that, and, even if I do have a tendency to “over-think” things, sometimes you should just accept and appreciate the gesture and say “thank you” instead, before “never speaking of this again…!” obviously…

But then, if one person does a good deed, there’s a good chance that someone else will do one, too, and that’s how the world becomes a nicer place to live in, one good deed at a time.

So it came as something of a pleasant novelty when, quite out of the blue, I had a nice surprise last week when an unexpected envelope popped through our letter-box.

Eyebrows were swiftly raised that I’d bought another something off the internet and then completely forgotten that I’d ordered it, but it turned out that that was not the case…

A friend of mine had taken out a subscription to an Illustration magazine and had ended up having two copies of one issue and thought that I might like it.

I do, and it’s all rather brilliant.

I especially like the article on Victorian Illustration (Sorry, that suddenly sounds a bit like “come on over and I’ll show you my etchings…”) and another one on the history of RoSPA posters, but it was all rather fabulous and reminded me of how brilliant the art of illustration can actually be when it’s done well, and also, perhaps more sadly, far I’ve let my “real” illustration skills slide over the last couple of decades, and so it might just inspire me to take up my pens and pencils again.

So thank you (you know who you are) for the very kind gesture… It really was very much appreciated and, even though I wouldn’t want to embarrass anyone by making a huge song and dance about such a simple thing (although it seems as though I just have…), although because there’s an old adage about never knowing the good that you do, I thought that I ought to at least let them know the good that they did that went way beyond the simple sending out of a spare copy of their magazine.

I was just amazed that anyone still thought enough of little old me to think such a nice thought, which caused me to rethink and rather improved my general opinion of the world in general and my particular relationship with it.

So thank you for that too.