This year, I want to say thank you more. Here’s why you should try it too | Adrian Chiles

5 hours ago 1

There was a group of blokes cleaning the streets with big hoses and whatnot. These streets were in Zagreb, late one evening in the 1980s, well into Yugoslavia’s last decade. I was a teenager, being driven home from dinner somewhere by a friend of my mum’s, a chap in his 30s, which felt like an old and wise age to me at the time. His name was Radovan. As we crawled past the wielders of the hoses, he said something that struck me as unusual and rather sweet, the significance of which I’ve been mulling over ever since. Nodding approvingly at the street cleaners beavering away, he said words that roughly translate to: “Our boys are doing a good job here.”

Where I lived in the UK, neither then nor now could I imagine anyone saying something like that, unless perhaps they were in charge of street cleaning at the council, or the boss of a street cleaning firm. Radovan was neither of those things, yet still apparently felt that the men – and I can’t imagine they weren’t all men – were his boys. Not in the sense that he had any authority over them, obviously. Rather, that they were all part of the same team, as fellow workers or merely fellow citizens. All working for, or at least with an interest in, the common good.

I try to channel a bit of this when I see refuse collectors, street cleaners and park gardeners at work, even if they are working for contractors owned by some private equity operation registered in Luxembourg. Sometimes I even mutter Radovan’s words, in Croatian, under my breath to see how it feels. A sense of all of us being part of the same enterprise is surely something worth yearning for. We had a warming taste of it during Covid, be it Thursday evening applause for the NHS, blowing kisses to supermarket lorry drivers or, weak at the knees with gratitude, falling at the feet of Amazon delivery people as we dabbed away tears of joy and relief.

But as quickly as we acquired these community feelings, they seem to have faded away. Which wouldn’t be so bad if we weren’t all well capable of harbouring these passions in the negative. When “our boys”, as it were, aren’t picking up the rubbish or sweeping the streets, we become very community-minded indeed, only too happy to express our displeasure in the most sincere and direct language. If we curse councils for the state of our potholed roads, why aren’t we just as vocal in our praise and gratitude when they are fixing them? No one gives pothole-fillers a friendly toot as they pass them working away. More likely a grumpy glower at the grievous inconvenience of the temporary lights.

When my internet went down after a storm, I joined the community in saying and thinking disobliging things about Openreach, anticipating it would take for ever to fix the boxes, or whatever it was it should be doing but wasn’t. But it was soon fixed. Then there was another storm on New Year’s Eve and down went the internet again. Up bright and early and looking forward to kicking off 2025 with a long day vigorously slating Openreach, I took the dog out for a walk, only to find the Openreach bloke with his head already in the box. At 8.20am on New Year’s Day. Good effort. But did I thank him? No! I thought it might be patronising. Also, I was concerned the dog was about to deposit something unspeakable in the vicinity.

OK, you might argue he was just doing his job (the man, not the dog), but what of it? Praise him! So I do so here. In this spirit, I emailed customer services at the Go Outdoors chain only yesterday, to remark on particularly good service I have enjoyed recently at its branches in Kidderminster and Swansea. All I got back was a terse automated email admonishing me for not stating the relevant order number, etc. You see? Praise simply doesn’t compute. So again, I offer it here.