Egotists or angels?

Egotists or angels?

Musings
Sonia Kelly

I’m really sick of reading about how financial development has changed the Irish psyche and produced a race of uncaring, discourteous egotists. Either this is patently untrue, or Westport is an island in a sea of avarice.
In fact, I have had so many experiences of help and goodwill from people that I decided to catalogue some of them in an effort to refute the allegations that are creating a false impression of our society. Perhaps, by doing so, the people in question will understand how deeply their acts have been appreciated.
Some of the instances, you might think, are rather trivial and they cost the donor nothing. But that’s not the point, which is that they are giving of themselves with an open heart, which is something of more value than diamonds. For instance, there was the person who took a letter from me to post when I was parked some distance away from the post office in the rain. There was the Council worker who helped me to jump across a trench in the street during excavations. There are staff in a shop who pack one’s bag and decide on suitable cards to choose for one’s relatives. There was the stranger who came from the crowd to support me after a car crash near the bridge.
Then there are presents that come completely out of the blue, like a sun-visor for the car, after I had written about being blinded by the winter light; a bouquet of flowers to welcome me back to work after an operation; a rose on Valentine’s Day – not to mention the little green rubber square for unscrewing tops, that changed my life.
Complaints about rip-off Ireland also fall on deaf ears as far as I’m concerned, garages often bearing the brunt of the criticism and being accused of charging an arm and a leg for the simplest repair job. What can I say – the garage which is now Fuji’s, but which has administered to his various predecessors – has never cost me anything more than what could be described as fingers and toes. If I sometimes splash out on some beauty treatment, as likely as not there’ll be a bunch of samples wrapped up with the purchase. Even those in shops where I am unknown can bestow gracious favours. I had a brooch, which had shed its clasp and suffered a failed repair job by me, involving several layers of apparently permanent super glue. It seemed unredeemable, but I brought it to the expert, anyway. The result? I collected a pristine brooch some days later – all payment refused.
Butchers are something else again and, because I am host to 17 uninvited cats, I have developed a special affinity with a number of them. It may be that they are all cat-lovers, but for whatever reason, they are kindness personified, one on occasion even delivering what amounts to scrap out to my house. Others going to endless trouble to save discarded items to hand me on my scavenging trips. All this unexplained co-operation means that the 17 gate-crasher cats are the best-fed felines in Europe.
Not only are they the best-fed, but they are the most punctiliously seen to. Every morning at nine they get breakfast and at 4pm it’s tea time. The meals consist of the material from the butchers being chopped up and divided between four dishes. Some of it is already cooked in the form of a mixture of sliced delicacies (ham, chicken, etc), the rest is raw offal – operating on which turns the kitchen into an abattoir. I mention this because it has provoked yet more cat-related kindness, this time on the part of neighbours, who are on stand-by to perform this task if I should happen to be absent at the crucial hours.
Here I rest my case regarding the destruction of the Irish psyche.