Part 1

The smell of damp cut grass met me as I left the house, a signpost to spring. A middle aged man cycled past wearing a red woolly hat and carrying a bunch of flowers, and my heart was warmed. He was almost certainly doing something Good, and although these kinds of things happen all the time they’re often done in private, and it’s easy to miss them. There’s such a divide between the private and the public and what is exposed is usually exposed for a reason. We insulate our private lives and hold out only choice parts for the world to see, and in that act of choosing some of the honesty and beauty is lost. And this is one way in which man and nature differ: nature does not care what you think of it, it does not agonise over what to hide and what to show, it just exists, and some is hidden and some can be seen, and the beauty that we see is not tainted by motives.

So perhaps that explains why I was moved by this cyclist with his flowers: it didn’t feel like he wanted particularly to show or to hide his actions, he was there, with his red hat and his bike and his flowers, doing what he was doing, and I was lucky enough to be walking to the 43 bus stop at the right time so see it.