Somehow, the terrible floods in Britain have brought out the best in people

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/16/terrible-floods-britain-best-in-people

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As a borderline hermit who lives on top of a hill, I've managed to avoid the worst of this spectacularly cack weather. I haven't been forced to travel to and from my home in council-assigned boats like the people of Somerset. I haven't watched in impotent horror as water has crept up through my floorboards like the people of the Thames Valley. I still have electricity, unlike much of Wales.

The worst thing to have happened to me is that the shortcut I take to the supermarket has got a bit slippy, so I have to walk the long way round. It adds, conservatively, about 45 seconds to my journey. One day a film will be made of my plight, and Morgan Freeman will win an Oscar for his sensitive portrayal of me.

It's hard to understand just how horrible it must be for those seriously affected by the floods and storms. It's impossible to even begin to imagine the unrelenting Canutish hopelessness of fighting off one storm while knowing that three more are cracking their knuckles on the peripheries of the Atlantic.

Instead, I've watched the cycle of familiar images and noises scroll past on the news. Submerged cars. Fogged-up camera lenses that give reports the look of a mid-period Barbara Cartland portrait. Giant arrows on weather maps, covering the country like a prisoner's uniform. But one thing has stood out above everything else. One phrase that's been repeated again and again, by reporters and villagers and strangers. Stay safe.

The sincerity of those words, when you hear them, is shocking. We live in a time of thoughtless have-a-nice-days and we-appreciate-your-calls, a time when people only say "take care" because it's three syllables shorter than "Yeah, whatever, bye". But a well-aimed "stay safe" cuts through everything. I found that out for myself last week.

The start of this column was an exaggeration. In truth, I did have the briefest of brushes with Wednesday's storm. I was heading south from Bradford just as the wind had picked up enough to batter tiles from roofs. I'd seen Virgin Trains' hilariously doom-laden "ALL CUSTOMERS TO ABANDON TRAVEL" tweet, and jumped on a train back to London before East Coast could pull the same stunt.

Ten minutes in, we came to a halt and the lights went out. The train ahead of us had hit a tree that had fallen onto the line. We were stuck. In Wakefield. Which I'm sure is a lovely town when it's not part of a pitch-black meteorological armageddon. Unless it's always like that. This was my first visit. I don't want to judge.

Perhaps I spend too much time on the internet, where the only acceptable reaction to anything is blind rage, but I fully expected everything to kick off. I expected cursing and tutting and violence. What I didn't expect was for everyone to immediately start checking that everyone else was OK. Whether they had phones, or needed to borrow chargers, or were comfortable enough. Or for Gary, the train's announcer, to be so disarmingly warm and transparent about the situation that my entire carriage audibly fell more and more in love with him whenever he told us how doomed we all were. Again, the phrase repeated more than any other that night, on that broken-down train or any of the replacements we ended up on, was "stay safe".

I got home five hours late. Which is an embarrassingly minor inconvenience compared with the flat-out misery of what people were going through 50 miles away in Crewe, where the station's roof blew off completely and then caught fire. But it was a microcosm. There was adversity beyond anyone's control and, for whatever reason, it brought out the best in people. Most people, that is – I held on to my buffet car sandwich because it was the last one and I wanted to auction it off for personal gain if things got hairy later, but that's only because I'm a unsalvageably reprehensible human being. Everyone else instantly thought of others before themselves. It became vitally important that people were OK.

You can see this instinct kicking in all over the country. The doctor and the landlord who opened a makeshift surgery in the honeymoon suite of a Staines pub. The convoy of farmers taking aid to Somerset on a fleet of tractors. The tens of thousands of sandbags being filled and distributed by hundreds of volunteers. The catalyst for all this sudden compassion sucks beyond belief, but the compassion itself is beautiful to witness.

Things, eventually, will go back to normal. The waters will recede and the power will return. Questions will be asked and fingers will be pointed. Steps will be taken to make sure this never happens again. Those steps will be blamed when this does happen again. And, over time, we'll fall back into our selfish old ways. That's OK, because indiscriminate compassion without end is creepy and annoying. But for now, if you happen to be up against it, sincerely, stay safe.