The soul's fairest blossom - gratitude

Stan has just turned eighty-one. Looking at his collapsed frame one couldn't imagine he was a soldier once. The chest, which in his younger day was puffed with the vigour of youth, now defines concavity.

His head - when he removes the beret - is a domed Bermuda-like area into which has disappeared every last vestige of a hairline. A sepia photograph on the mantelpiece bears fast-fading proof that this shiny, oily pate was indeed once forested with tight pepper curls.

In his eightieth year he accidentally tripped over an undone bootlace. That misstep led to hip surgery and a permanent shuffle thereafter, sometimes with the aid of a crutch (when the Antarctic drift is really severe and his arthritis plays up), and at other, warmer times with a walking stick.

In an emergency, if he is attacked (as Stan imagines he may be at any time, given his borderline paranoia) the leg of the crutch can be unscrewed and - once removed - the leg becomes the handle of a rather sharp instrument.

Ditto the walking stick, only it's the intricately carved lion head that's removable in this case. And so, suitably, subtly armed as such, Stan hobbles off on one of his perennial walkabouts. Such a shuffling, shambling figure naturally elicits sympathy from onlookers.

One time, at the grocer's, a kindly lady helped select the tomatoes, just to save Stan the instability that comes with balancing on one crutch. When he got home, however, all the thanks that the good lady received was a round of severe denouncing for having chosen tomatoes that were unripe and unready for the cooking pot.

A few altruistic onlookers, on the other hand, are wary of rushing to the aid of the seemingly disabled. Stan himself once chastised a young man who tried to help him climb the steep stairs of a bus.

He shook his elbow so vigorously to get rid of the offending assistance that he nearly toppled over, taking his genial, but by now embarrassed, helper with him.

Stan has a daughter whose emotions are so polarised she is several personalities in several minutes. Stan also has an older sister, living a contented life not too far away.

The sister hasn't wanted for much throughout her life's journey but seeing her brother in such a state of disrepair she feels it incumbent to provide him from time to time with some good home cooked food so that he doesn't have to live off take-away trash. This has, therefore, become a weekend arrangement.

Enough food is prepared and sent - usually through someone passing by - to tide Stan and his daughter over for Saturdays and Sundays. Not once have the errand runners returned to the sister to say, "Stan says thanks".

To be fair, neither have the errand people conveyed the kind of derogatory conversation Stan has had with them before accepting the food. Critical about the food, that is.

Never satisfied. One week, it was to say, "Why did she have to put peas in the fried rice? And then she forgot to add enough salt!" Another time: 'That was stuff cooked months ago, frozen and thawed. It had lost its taste.'

All this, of course, eventually became public after Stan suffered a bout of food poisoning. "It was the chicken curry, I have no doubt," he told the errand person, who was hovering on the doorstep with the next container full of lamb vindaloo. "I nearly died last night. People are trying to poison me," he said, holding out a weak hand nevertheless and accepting the preparation of lamb. Stan has a house.

He appears to have convinced himself that, as he moves closer to his maker, everybody else would like to possess this house.

In the process, he's totally forgotten that kindly thing called gratitude. A gentleman called Eric Hoffer once said, "The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings."

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.