IN these days when the evenings are dark and we seem to be getting more than our fair share of rain, spring seems a very long way off. My thoughts turn to that elusive little word ‘hope’. So I am going to offer you three pictures of hope, to warm the soul in these gloomy days.

As I was cycling along St Giles I saw in front of me a woman in the road who had just fallen off her bicycle. People rushed to her assistance. A woman immediately phoned 999 and patiently went through a list of questions with the operator. A man gave her his neat white handkerchief because she had injured her nose in the fall and was bleeding. As she went in and out of consciousness a woman kept talking calmly to her, arm around her shoulders.

Now, in the world of social psychology there is a well-known phenomenon called the ‘bystander effect’. The theory suggests that if many people are present when a person is in difficulty they often do nothing because they assume somebody else will help. As we waited for the ambulance to come, the bystander effect theory was dead in the water.

Another woman. She is dying with us now in the hospice. The cancer symptoms have been hard to control, but now she is much more settled and peaceful.

Her brother comes to see her every day and she often says how grateful she is for his presence and for the care of the hospice staff.

I sat down with her the other day. She looked out of her room at the autumn trees. “Aren’t they beautiful?” she said to me in her weak, trembling voice. “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful as those trees.”

The Maggie’s Centre at the Churchill Hospital, in conjunction with the hospice, has been running a bereavement course.

After tea and coffee and some rather nice biscuits we sit in a circle together, talking of experiences of loss. There has been laughter and tears, anguish and hope for the future.

Sitting in that circle I have experienced community very powerfully. We are not alone in our hard experiences of life.

The light does shine in the darkness.