It rolled out first from the Samaritans and railway companies. Small talk, they said, saves lives. It was a neat play on loose talk costing lives. The era of the stiff upper lip is gone. Thankfully.
The campaign, last week, came about because of startling figures. In 2016/17, some 273 people died in suicides on Britain’s railways. There is no nice way to sugarcoat that.
Don’t let the moment pass. Act. Speak. Start with ‘hello’ and busk it from there. You could change a life
However, there was something positive in the figures. For every life lost, six were saved. And they were saved because somebody spoke to them. A simple word, a remark about the weather, the smallest intervention was frequently enough to break people from the dark, locked-in moment. The campaign came with a video from Sarah Wilson, a woman on the brink of ending it all, explaining how she came through. It’s incredibly potent and moving.
Coincidentally, figures followed from a different survey that said two thirds of people in Scotland never stopped to speak to homeless people. This was not a survey designed to show up Scots as a particularly uncaring bunch. Rather, it was carried out in Scotland. And you can comfortably reason that similar statistics would be drawn in the rest of Britain.
We know this because our vendors tell us how bitterly hard it can be.
