Hope ….

At the time of writing this, Monika and I are about to head off to Germany to celebrate her mum’s 85th birthday. The whole tribe will be gathering on Saturday to mark this fabulous milestone. Paula (mother-in-law’s name) has lived in the same village, with the wonderfully Brothers Grimm name of BobbenheimRoxheim, all her life. Brits often think of Germany as being coolish and wettish, much like here, but Bobbenheim-Roxheim is in Germany’s wine-growing region, enjoys fiercely warm Summers and, thanks to the Rhine, easy access to swimming and sunbathing.

The weather is not the only myth that can be busted about Germany. First, Hening Wehn is not the only German with a great sense of humour, Germany is not that different from us on this front. Second, German trains are LESS punctual than British ones and, just like us, Germans complain about how everything is worse in Germany. One German cousin was recently heard complaining about the appalling potholes and endless roadworks everywhere … on German roads.

In fact, the more I travel, the more I find that every country appears to believe that it’s worse there than it is anywhere else. If only we did things as well as the British …

One interesting place to go to find the truth of this is YouTube. There is a phenomenon there called ‘reaction videos’, where people from different countries experience, among other things, films about other countries, and then react to them. Here I have learned that French, Canadian, Venezuelan, Lebanese, U.S., and the citizens of numerous other nations, have a tendency to rubbish their birth countries while admiring others.

This seems to be a human constant: we notice negatives far more quickly and deeply than we notice positives. If you are finding yourself locked into worrying about the world at the moment, may I recommend as therapy any videos featuring the Swedish statistician, Hans Rosling. His TED talks are legendary. Using global statistics from the UN and the World Bank he has conclusively demonstrated that the lives of human beings around the world, on virtually every metric, are improving steadily.

Hans Rosling, who died in 2017, wasn’t saying that the world doesn’t face challenges, because it does. He wasn’t saying that there aren’t places in the world where terrible things are happening, because there are. He was saying, though, that if you think that the lives of people around the world are generally getting worse, you are arguing against the evidence.

What was his motive in doing this? First, it was a passion for truth, but it was also about promoting the hope of continuing progress, because people with hope are more able to continue to improve the world than those without it. Wishing you a happy and hopeful September.

David Knight Vicar of Fletching, Piltdown and Sheffield Park