Good news...

...is no news.  Or so the old saw has it.  But just occasionally the media allow some good news to seep through the dross of C list celebs love lives, war, famine and disasters both natural and man-made.  There have been two such instances in the last few days, the first of which brought back some long buried memories.

A man on a long distance train journey must have felt his heart sink when a young lady with a stud in her nose, accompanied by a toddler, took a seat near him.  He must have had thoughts of screams and tantrums disturbing his journey.  But his experience was the opposite.  The young mother played quiet games with her son and gently corrected him when his manners let him down.  The man left the train with the young mother still aboard and, as he left, he passed her a brief note congratulating her.  With the note was a £5 note with which he suggested she should have a drink on him. The mother took to social network sites to try to find her benefactor to thank him, in which she proved successful.  And rather than have a drink with the £5, she used the money to open a savings account for her son.

It reminded me of the time we took a ferry across the North Sea with our two young sons, the younger still only two years old.  The ferry crossing took several hours during which time the Old Bat valiantly attempted to keep a lively toddler quiet.  As we disembarked another passenger - an elderly ex-Army officer type - congratulated her.  It made her day.

And the second piece of good news, which made the television last night as well as yesterday's newspapers, concerns a partially-sighted disabled man, only 4' 6" tall, who had been attacked outside his home and left on the ground with a broken collar bone.  He was too frightened to return to his home after treatment, although we were not told what he did about that.  A young lady heard about this and set up a web site to collect funds to help him, thinking she might raise £500.  She ended up raising £250,000.

But, being the cynic - or sceptic - that I am, I have to wonder if the law of unintended consequences won't come into play.  Now that he has a quarter of a million pounds, will it mean that he can't claim disability living allowance?