19. Buy The Big Issue or contribute to a housing charity. Aha! There’s a lady near Missenden Station who sells TBI and I did this one the week before I had to anyway, so I left it at that, assuming timing isn’t critical. At Church we've been supporting the Old Tea Warehouse in High Wycombe — they're now producing a rag, which I gather can be got, among, other places, from a table at the back of All Saints High Wycombe. Next time I'm in, I'll give that a go...20. Say hello (’ello, ’ello? — sorry) to a Police Officer. I have to confess to not having bumped into one on Friday, and thinking I could end up inside for wasting Police Time if I dialled 999 just to thank them for being themselves. I have, however, always made a point of trying to get to know and work with my local police service. It seems to me police officers end up doing pretty much all the jobs the rest of us would rather not think about, from clearing up after road crashes to managing drunks in our new 24 hour alcohol-sodden town centres. Of course there's good and bad in everyone, but I'm not sure the media and copshow stereotypes help, either. In Thames Valley they've done some really headline work with restorative justice. I don’t think most police officers I know want putting on a pedestal — just some basic respect for what they’re trying to do, and a bit of awareness that there’s a human being inside the uniform. I wouldn't have thought that’s too much to ask, but often, apparently it is. I sometimes look in on the notorious but revealing Coppersblog. It gives down-to-earth view from the other side of the counter, and I find it injects a bit of (alternative) reality into all the media hype and cynicism.
21. Chat to someone in a Queue. Trouble was, the only queues I got in on Saturday were queues of cars. I had a very nice chat with the lady in the fish (as in aquarium) shop, but there wasn’t a queue. Tried to find a queue in Staples, but got served first time (for the first time ever). Even the local Somerfield was a no-queue zone. Grrr! Whatever is happening to the British! No queues! Not when you want one anyway. I’ll see how I do in the next queue I hit...22. Think about how to make space for stillness in the week ahead. A rather busy week, but I have a cunning plan. As well as injecting fractionally more silence into morning prayer with Lucy, I'm going to try and get out walking or running, away from the phone and everything else. See how that goes.
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