Asking too much

Jack Nicholson’s moving portrayal of a lonely old man in About Schmidt convinced me that I should sponsor a child. You may remember the scene at the end: he gets a letter from a nun in the Tanzanian village where a little boy has been receiving his largesse and realises that his life has not been meaningless. He has made a difference to somebody.

I wept buckets as the credits rolled and not long afterwards signed up to a sponsorship programme with a leading charity in the hope that I too could make life better for one person. And maybe I did. I was allocated a child in Armenia. I pledged an embarrassingly low sum of money, really, when you consider how needy half the world is, and how much we in the West lavish on luxuries and incidentals. But it was what I could budget for on a monthly basis at the time.

When the young boy sent me his first letter he told me he was a Chelsea fan, so I wrote back telling him that I was too and sent a few small items in a package from the Chelsea FC gift shop on the Fulham Road. He never mentioned the gift in subsequent letters, all written on the same formal notelets bearing the charity’s emblem. But I like to think he might have got it. I gave the matter less thought over time and when the same standard updates came each year I only glanced through them.

Earlier this year, I received the annual letter saying ‘It’s your sponsored child’s birthday soon, please sign this card’ — a card bearing puzzle games. It occurred to me that he had to be getting a bit old for this. I looked up his date of birth and he was about to turn 18.