London - On that bright October afternoon three years ago, the last thing I expected was to make was a new friend. Winding my way around the streets to my home, I spotted one of my neighbours, a chap in his late 60s called Gary, slowly walking towards me.
He was older than me, and we had barely spoken before. Indeed, our conversations were largely restricted to a quick hello. But there was something slightly odd about his gait and when I reached Gary he looked dazed.
Without so much as a “hello”, he blurted out three words: “I’ve got cancer.”
In those three words, a friendship was born. I may not have known him well, but I could see he was distressed and still in shock at the news.
I instantly invited him in for a cup of tea (which turned into several glasses of wine - much more restorative I find) and he told me that he’d just come from the hospital, where he had received that terrible diagnosis. Gary lived alone and had recently lost his wife. He had no children and his siblings lived abroad.
Alone and understandably frightened, he looked like a man who needed a kind ear.
So I did what any good neighbour would do and decided to take him under my wing.
What I didn’t anticipate then was that, far from my helping him, he would become one of my dearest friends, a man who gives me more than I have ever given him. He has repaid any kind turn I’ve done him in love and kindness and laughter.
You might think it’s an unlikely bond. This dignified man, who before his illness was a telecommunications expert running big projects around the world, now happily joins me on the sofa shouting barbs at the tuneless second raters on The X Factor, or plays “guess the score” while we watch Strictly Come Dancing.
I immediately thought of Gary when I heard that Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt had launched a campaign to sign up 100 000 ‘Good Samaritans’.
Gary is hardly elderly. He was a sprightly 67 when I first met him, and we celebrated his 70th birthday this year in style.
Despite Gary’s wonderful nature, he is one of the five million older men and women who live alone. People like him are in desperate need of a little loving kindness, yet are so often ignored by family and neighbours. It’s shameful.
The Health Secretary’s admirable idea was to find volunteers who would sign up to the Winter Friends pledge.
It is a sad indictment of our selfish society that there were more than 31 100 unnecessary deaths last year due to the cold winter, a 29 percent increase on the year before. With this winter already shaping up as bone-chillingly cold, the need to help the vulnerable could not be greater.
The Winter Friends pledge means those who sign up would check in on their vulnerable neighbours once a week, more often when it’s very cold, to do the odd spot of shopping and practical things such as collecting prescriptions.
And equally importantly, neighbours would take the time to stop and chat. That’s how it was with Gary and me in the beginning.
He had a major operation, then many complications that meant he was in and out of hospital. Like several of my lovely neighbours in North London, I visited him a lot in that bleak hospital ward, then in intensive care where he almost died.
We’d take him in fresh coffee, or tempting food and newspapers, but mostly we just went to keep him company and provide a friendly face.
What started out as an act of charity became, for me, the blessing of friendship. The more time I spent with Gary the more I realised what a cool guy he was.
Like so many of his generation he was stoical, but also clever, inquisitive and so alive to the world. He may have been laid up in bed, but his brain was as bright as ever.
Many of us don’t take the time to discover what our older neighbours are really like. Yet so often they have led fascinating lives.
I found that Gary, a well-educated man, was a mine of gripping stories and facts. He had a very tough childhood but went on to get a degree in telecommunications. He worked as a design engineer at the BBC; designed projects for military organisations; worked for Shell, Rank, CBS and many more successful companies and travelled all over the world.
We share a love of Middle East history, and he’s always got some doorstep-sized book beside his bed.
Not satisfied with having read one of my favourite history books, Albert Hourani’s A History Of The Arab Peoples, he re-read the old classic History Of The Arabs by Philip K. Hitti, first edition 1937, so our chats about that part of the world would be more interesting for me.
Indians say that when an old man dies, a library burns down. How true. But how many of us take the time to find that out?
Gary and I also discovered another shared interest - he had long been an avid reader of the Mail and has become a keen yet uncompromisingly honest critic of my column and all my scribblings.
Our friendship is like any other. We relish each other’s company, whether it be dinner at the local pub or a night in watching trashy television and eating pizzas. A week seldom goes by when we don’t meet. And no celebration or dinner party would be complete without him.
We check in on each other by phone or text, especially when either of us is going through a rough patch. It’s not just me watching over him, but him watching over me.
I’ll grab him a Marks & Spencer roasted chicken when I shop, and he brings around his long ladder whenever I need it. (All women need a man with a ladder from time to time!)
He also feeds Jim and Ted, my octogenarian cat and bouncy young kitten, if I’m away and they both adore him. Cats, I’ve found, are good judges of character.
He sorts out my burglar alarm if it goes off when I’m out and is always on call like any friend would be.
That’s why I balk slightly at the description of Jeremy Hunt’s 100 volunteers as Good Samaritans. Since Biblical times, Good Samaritans have been people who help another in need out of compassion, expecting nothing in return.
It implies their acts of kindness are selfless, that it’s a one-way street.
What you realise when you’re friends with someone like Gary is that it’s as selfish as you can get. You receive so much love in return. A friend for all seasons - not just winter.
Let’s hope that this army of Winter Friends discover, as I did, that it can be a friendship for all seasons under the sun. - Daily Mail