And for my hundredth post ...

This morning my Nationwide debit card decided not to work, leaving me with 2.2 reais. I needed 2.9 for a one-way tube ticket to Higienopolis to teach my English class and earn 50 reais (c. £20). I considered begging but then tried the metro station ticket office where I hoped they would accept a credit card. They didn't. But to my pleasant surprise, the man took pity on me and my perhaps dubious mugging story and waived the remainder. Enjoy the rest of your stay, he said, thinking I was here for a few days rather than 7.5 months. Did I imagine he had a slightly sorrowful or even ashamed look ?

The kindness of strangers is not given enough breathing space in our "computer says no" world. Older, less efficient societies are better at something we used to call "common sense", which is a form of kindness, related as it is to empathy, or putting yourself in someone else's shoes. But with increasingly atomised societies, staking everything on supposed computer efficiency, qualities such as empathy, flexibility and common sense all diminish or disappear. What is needed is both efficiency and kindness.

The currency of trust. How valuable is it ? Apparently it costs too much here in Brazil. A cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Since this mugging I am fluctuating wildly in my ability to trust others and my instincts. Is the nanny a co-victim who today also discovered that her aunt died and thus needed to leave early, leaving me as the sole babysitter for five hours ? Or is she laughing at my gringo gullibility, as she telephones the muggers to get her share of the loot ? Was she just a bit too well-groomed once she had changed into mufti before leaving today ? And yet I have had some sense of being a fellow traveller with her in the wake of our shared trauma. Attempting to discuss it and compare notes has even prompted a higher than usual level of my rotten Portuguese. We repaid her the 200 reais she had stolen.

Others here have continued to suspect her. In the end it doesn't matter because I'll never know. All that matters is that the muggers also made off with a trunk-full of trust, making me just that bit more Brazilian.

Is the UK really so much better ? My London flat is in a so-called gated community. All I can think is that my home country marched pretty high up the hill called civil society, even if now it seems to be marching back down again. Whereas Brazil never troubled itself with such a concept to begin with.

PS: I have now heard from two different people living in (relatively) leafy Higienopolis that everyone who has a pizza delivered must go down to the front entrance and receive it in person. That is definitely one big step down from cities like London and New York and even, I suspect, Buenos Aires, where I noticed much less security around the entrance of apartment blocks than here in SP, where they tend to resemble army camps.