THERE is little joy or hope in the world these days – or so it would appear. The mendicants and the corrupt rule political life; the rich detach further and further from the reality of the rest and few feel any responsibility for society’s weak and unfortunate.

Hatred and cruelty, on unimaginable scales, torment all the world’s creatures, and have become just another part of our disintegrating lives.

As one drawn to news and the internet in the small, dark, dark, hours of the morning, I find myself at times drowning under the utter hopeless horror of it all.

Yet I seem unable to pull away; to pick up a book instead, or to stand under a powerful shower and let it wash all negative thoughts away.

Sadly, for me, I have never been a shrugger: One who uses shoulders to express their helplessness and then moves on "for what can we do?"

Far too defeatist. We always have to try and swim upwards even as the weight pushes us under.

In La France Profonde there are no taxis to be hailed to take me to city bars, friends and life. No distractions from the daily monotony of existence in its country cycle and the insidious creeping darkness from beyond.

Actually, few friends, and not much bloody life anyway to be found beyond these four walls.

Such thoughts have been pressing on me for weeks now – encouraged by ill health, Brexit, knife killings in England, violence in French cities and now the appalling slayings in New Zealand, the shootings in Utrecht.

I do not, thank God, have a monopoly on these feelings. As is apparent from, yes, social media, there are many who are no longer waving, but drowning.

Many who fear all around them and who are bewildered at how we’ve come to this in what seems such a short time.

Let me tell you: "This" has always been here. "This" has just needed licence, and all of us; all of us with any access to the public mind, have enabled "this."

Politicians, publishers, editors, columnists, TV pundits, wannabe fascists; wrenched open Pandora’s box for the sheer click of it all.

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And a public, obsessed by their iPhones, their games and their Instagram accounts, soaked it all in on the times they actually looked up.

Such are my thoughts this week.

Perhaps the plain truth is I have far, far too much time on my hands and not enough breath to fill it with the little joys that keep us from thinking too much.

And then, in the midst of my end-days mutterings to myself and any poor soul who crossed my way, one after another I heard of random acts of kindness and compassion that made my heart sing again.

Perhaps you have to get older to look back and understand that life is a jigsaw that is made up of such random acts that seem to have no meaning until viewed from afar.

A couple I know on the Cote D’Azur have always lived a very private, contained life; happy mainly with each other. In the space of a few weeks this vibrant 50-year-old man has been given the worst news possible and now lies in horrendous pain in hospital.

Quietly, without fanfare, the French neighbours in their wealthy village, have looked after the wife’s dogs, seen to her shopping and allowed her to spend hours by his bedside.

A rather grand English couple she didn’t know turned up to offer any service possible from chauffeuring to calling specialists from Paris. But most of all they offered companionship and understanding.

Another lone soul in a village 10kms from me has always been a difficult woman and few have got through her door. But locals quickly noticed when the door remained shut longer than normal and found her in time.

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I hear they have a rota to visit her in her new retreat home and suffer her abuse. She isn’t French which makes it even more commendable. But then the French around here expect to look after their own and hearts stretch to take in others.

I know an English couple a few miles from me who keep their phone by their bedside all night in case an old boy in the village gets frightened and needs to call them.

Often, he does, with minor, silly night fears and heart attacks that turn out to be indigestion, but they pull themselves from their beds, no matter the hour, and go to settle him and give him fellow human comfort.

There have been other tales I cannot tell but they have all come one after the other in the midst of all this global misery.

God knows my own life has been filled with kindness these last few years. The people I thought might be there weren’t, but oh, the people I discovered who were.

All have given me hope that for every nasty, evil, vicious creature there is in this world – there is a counterbalance.

We need to hold on to that thought. We need to hold on to those people.

They’re there. All is not yet lost.