How ‘kindness’ became big business

In those moments when I most fear that the West is on the skids, I find it helps to make a list of end-time signs, phenomena that indicate decay, like sparks along a piece of faulty wiring. So far my list goes like this: NFTs; babyccinos; liver-flavoured ice-cream for dogs; the fashion for encouraging children to cut off their genitals; the fact that Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, thinks it deeply wrong to talk them out of it; freak shakes; Heinz ‘pink’ sauce; gannets dead all down the North Sea coast; swearing six-year-olds still in nappies (says my teacher friend in the North-East); risking nuclear war over Ukraine; the TV show Is It Cake?

My latest and favourite end times sign is buried in the minutes of a recent meeting of the London Ambulance Service NHS Trust board, in a section about the plight of call handlers. Both 999 and 111 are, as you might expect, in a desperate state.