How many creative ideas are lost to the world because our minds are cluttered with unhelpful input or clouded with preoccupations which could be got rid of? I thought about this when I considered the story of a friend in Liverpool.

What could be more English than a nanny. When my wife was on the Isle of Wight last year she watched sailing boats taking rookies out for a lesson. Accompanying them was a little boat to watch over their progress and safety. It was called appropriately, the nanny boat.

Friendship is a great blessing in life. Some people have few friends, some many. And, as Aristotle wrote, ‘Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.’

I was in Atlanta last month with others from Portland. We were there along with 300 people from 29 countries to attend an international conference for Moral Re-Armament with the theme ‘Building for the future.’

A scant mile from the devastated ‘green line’, the road to Damascus which separates the Muslim and Christian communities in Beirut and where from time to time we see on TV young men shooting at each other from amidst the rubble, is where my friend Fuad lives. I call him Fuad for the sake of this talk; to reveal his real name would be dangerous.

When an Indian friend of mine came here as a young rather overawed immigrant many years ago, he was asked at his port of entry by the immigration office, ‘Do you know anybody in this country?’ Not knowing the difference between know and know of, he blurted out triumphantly, ‘I know two people, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.’

I first met Alice Wedega 35 years ago when she was representing her country at a conference in Ceylon. Nearly twenty years later we were her guests in her beautiful country, Papua New Guinea. Alice was the first woman member of the Legislative Council and the first woman in her country to be decorated by the Queen of England.

A Buddhist couple from Laos who are alive today because of reaching out to others.

This International Year of Peace was marked in an unusual way last month by the Australian Foreign Ministry. It sponsored the showing in Canberra of a film about a great French woman, Irène Laure.

The heir to the British throne had been invited to be the keynote speaker at Harvard University’s 350th anniversary party. He was surprised that Massachusetts which wasn’t ‘too certain about the supposed benefits of royalty’ should even have invited someone like him, someone as one American paper put it ‘as appallingly undemocratic as the Prince of Wales.’