The kindness of strangers: out of the blue, an older woman handed me a well-thumbed book
Later that year I was on a long train trip from Sydney to Melbourne with a friend and told him about my reading goal. I was pretty stoked with how well I was going and was excited to talk about it. I didn't think this was particularly interesting chat to anyone else on the train, so I certainly wasn't worried about anyone eavesdropping.
But at some point on this journey, an older couple stood up to get off the train. As they walked past, the woman handed me a well-thumbed copy of The Man Who Was Thursday by GK Chesterton. She smiled at me but didn't say anything.
Before I had time to process what had happened, she was gone. I didn't even get a chance to say thank you. That was our only interaction on the train and her gift was completely out of the blue, with no pretext and no expectation. It was a simple, quiet gesture of humanity – kindness just for the sake of it.
I didn't quite hit my goal of reading a book a week that year, instead maxing out at about 30 books for the year, which was still a lot more than I'd ever read before. But what makes the memory even fonder is that The Man Who Was Thursday went on to become one of my favourite books – it now has pride of place on my bookshelf. That woman on the train had great taste.
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Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Saturday morning after newsletter promotion It was Eadie who had successfully kept Splash in captivity until its death in 1937. Cushing and Markwell, referring to Eadie's own writings, wrote that the preserved remains of Splash were 'carefully packed and secretly despatched to London'. 'When delivered to 10 Downing Street on 19 June 1943, accompanied by a leather-bound scientific description of the platypus and Eadie's 1935 book The Life and Habits of the Platypus, with Sidelights on 'Splash' the Tame Platypus, Churchill was said to have been delighted and later to have displayed the platypus on his desk.' The University of Cambridge's Natalie Lawrence wrote in the BBC Wildlife Magazine that Splash, who had been a 'minor celebrity' in Australia, was sent as an 'interim gift' while plans were made to keep Winston alive on the long sea journey. 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