This week one of my daughters was driving up Amersham Hill when her car ground to a halt. Scores of cars passed her as she stood beside the car with its hazard lights flashing. I was out of the country but she phoned home for help and while she and her sister and her sister’s boyfriend were struggling to solve the problem, one driver stopped and spent some considerable time helping her sort the problem out. He was Swiss and was in England for two weeks only, but despite being a stranger in a strange land, as a motor engineer, he felt unable to pass by a damsel in distress. A true ‘Good Samaritan’ tale.

It would be wrong to draw conclusions from this one incident about the British disinclination these days to get involved and the reticence that we all now have about exposing ourselves to the risk of accusations of improper behaviour. But in another incident that week, a different daughter was walking to her car from the station in Chalfont in the middle of a heavy rainstorm. A man was walking behind her and he had an umbrella.

He offered to share it with her as she walked along the road, adding hastily that she shouldn’t be alarmed as he had just been granted British citizenship which had made him very happy and he was anxious to adopt the customs, as he saw it, of the country which had so generously accepted him into its heart, by behaving like ‘an English gentleman’. He spoke with what my daughter identified as an American accent.

It appears that, despite all evidence to the contrary, we are still seen to be exemplars of courtesy and chivalry, arguably long after those virtues have been driven out of the national psyche by the fear of being considered creepy at best or a potential molester at worst. How sad that the old virtues that were once considered to be embedded in the British population are now more likely to be found in strangers who wish to embrace those old courtesies.

Of course, there are still those of us who refuse to be deflected from succouring strangers as a result of the fear of our motives being misinterpreted or of future litigation, but the fact that these two incidents are worthy of comment says something about the way our ‘Big Society’ seems to be moving.