MY WEEK BY FRANCIS GAY

If you lend a shoulder, to a friend in need, if you share your time, you’re a friend indeed. It’s the words of kindness, the little shared hopes, encouraging us to go on, and helping us to cope.

His black hoodie had the logo of a heavy metal band emblazoned across the back of it.

His head was shaved, his beard hung down his chest, his ears pierced with spikes, and the cargo shorts he wore despite it being freezing outside showed a large Anarchy tattoo across his calf. He might have been thought a scary dude.

But then there was the 18-month-old bundle of delight in her pink, padded

“I think you’ll find those are past their best,” I said.

snow-suit leading him a laughing dance around the café then insisting he pick her up and dance with her.

Like almost everyone else there, I tried not to smile too widely.

Fashions and rock bands will come and go, piercings and tattoos will project the desired image for a while. We present ourselves differently at different stages of our lives.

But love? Love waits and outlasts the other stuff. Love will get you in the end.

Jack and his granddaughter Carly were picking the fruit of a solitary apple tree. It only stood about six feet tall and there was not another like it as far as I could see.

“This is our favourite walk,” Jack explained. “But, look, the lorries and diggers have moved in.

“This’ll be houses and streets soon. The tree won’t be here next year.”

Five-year-old Carly took up the story.

“Grampa says there might be six seeds inside each apple.

“And each one can grow into a tree that will grow more apples and more seeds. So, we’re going to look after them through the winter and plant them next spring.”

She looked at the three apples in her woolly hat.

“There might be a whole orchard in there!”

The North Ayrshire foodbank is celebrating its seven-year anniversary, which its co-ordinator Craig described as heart-warming and heart-breaking.

One of the people there at the beginning told me he was initially reluctant to endorse the project. He wasn’t being hardhearted, he just couldn’t face the possibility of having to turn hungry people away when the shelves fell empty. Thanks to wonderful donors, that has never happened.

Craig tells me that they have taken in and given out over 400 tons of donations, feeding the equivalent of 30,000 adults and 12,000 children.

The man who had been afraid it would never work smiled and told me: “Sometimes the miracle is right there, waiting for you to take a chance on it. And sometimes people are just waiting for a way to show they really do care for one another.”

Two friends of ours, James and June, are foster parents.

Mostly, they do long-term fostering but this time they were asked to take two girls, aged five and eight, for just two weeks. As they did a tour of the house, the girls were impressed by all the fridge-magnets.

June explained they were pictures of people and places special to them. A few days later she took a photo of the girls and James had it made into a magnet for the fridge.

“Is that because we are special to you,” the five-year-old asked. James had forgotten they’d used that phrase. He tried to speak over the lump in his throat. Before he could, the older girl said, “We’ve never had that before.”

“All the children we foster are special to us,” he told me. “But some make a bigger impact in a shorter time.”