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“Now it happened that Mr. Cherry, the carpenter, found a piece of wood that laughed and cried like a child.”

Books That Teach Us Human Values

Before my father died, he left me something more enduring than possessions; an awareness that life itself rests on moral ground. He often said, “Every story has a moral heartbeat, even if it’s faint.” It was one of those sayings that lingered. Years later, I’ve come to see how right he was.

Every good story, he believed, reaches a moral reckoning: the wicked fall, the just prevail, or at least, we sense what should have happened if justice had its way. When stories fail to do that, we feel cheated, as though the universe has bent out of shape. But why? If, as Richard Dawkins insists, we are merely “dancing to our DNA” in a purposeless cosmos, why do we care about fairness at all? Yet we do — instinctively, universally.

Martin Luther King once said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” My father, though not a philosopher, lived as if that were true. He saw in every narrative, every act of conscience, the reflection of a moral order that runs deeper than human opinion.

I grew up in Govan, a shipyard town on the edge of Glasgow. A place of stories. The air was thick with shipyard noise, but also with imagination. You could hear stories being told in pubs, at bus stops, or around the kitchen table. My father loved that world of words. He’d bring home books — sometimes borrowed, sometimes rescued from the dust of second-hand shops and leave them lying about.

When I was ten, I wandered into The Modern Book Shop, a cramped little cave of used books that smelled of paper, dust, and rain. Among the shelves, I found a small volume whose cover showed a wooden puppet with wild eyes. I opened it and read the first line:

“Now it happened that Mr. Cherry, the carpenter, found a piece of wood that laughed and cried like a child.”

That was my first encounter with The Adventures of Pinocchio.

Pinocchio fascinated me. He was mischievous, stubborn, and foolish, yet achingly human. Beneath the fantasy lay a truth I somehow recognised: to become “real,” he had to learn honesty, courage, and love. These weren’t arbitrary virtues. They were the warp and weft of what it means to live meaningfully. Even as a child, I sensed that Collodi’s tale was more than a fable; it was a mirror.

As I grew older, I began to see how that story echoed our own. We are all, in one way or another, wooden creatures longing for life. We stumble through temptation, wrestle with conscience, and yearn for transformation. The journey toward becoming “real” — authentic, upright, whole — is the human story itself.

That’s why I’ve never believed morality to be a mere social invention. If it were, why would the same moral chords resonate across cultures and centuries? Why do we root for justice, even in fiction? It’s because something within us — perhaps the image of God — knows that goodness, beauty, and truth are not imagined; they are discovered.

My father never spoke of theology. He didn’t need to. He simply pointed to stories. Sydney Carton’s self-sacrifice in A Tale of Two Cities, Aslan’s resurrection in Narnia — to him, these weren’t just plots; they were echoes of a greater narrative, the one written before time began: light overcoming darkness, love outlasting death.

Now that he’s gone, I see how profoundly his quiet faith shaped mine. His books still line my shelves, their pages bearing traces of his thumbprints. When I open them, I hear his voice, steady and sure, reminding me that life has meaning, and that our choices matter.

Like Pinocchio, I am still learning to become “real” — still stumbling, still finding my way toward courage and integrity. But the moral compass he gave me keeps its bearing.

In the end, the stories we cherish are never just about heroes and villains. They’re about us — about the moral universe we inhabit and the justice we intuit. My father believed that light, no matter how faint, will always find a way to shine. And I believe him still.

Image by Copilot

Image generated with the assistance of Microsoft Copilot

Too Young to Choose It

The '70s were the birth of the supermarkets. Safeway, the American chain, was expanding into Scotland. I worked the night shift at Paisley Road West while wondering what choices to make in life. One evening, we had a new employee. 

The night shift procedure was routine: pull out the pallets of stock, spot them in the appropriate aisles, price and pack the items. By the time the stock was cleared—around 3 a.m.—the weariness of the night overwhelmed us. The numbing fatigue was exasperated by the gentle rhythm of the David Bowie song on the radio: “You're too old to lose it, too young to choose it.”

“Okay, you two, start washing the floor,” the night manager said to me and the new boy.

“What part?” the new boy asked.

“All of it,” the manager replied.

The new boy took in a panoramic view of the floor and asked, “All that?” with a look of disbelief.

“All of it,” the boss repeated.

“I’m out of here. I’m getting my jacket.”

He walked into the darkness. A few moments later, he banged on the plate-glass window and shouted, “You’re all a bunch of losers!”

We all turned away and got on with the work, singing “You’re too old to chose it ” to the lyrics of Bowie’s song. I then mused over the remaining hours: What will I do with my life?

Image generated with the assistance of Microsoft Copilot

"No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted."
– Aesop

 Image generated with the assistance of Microsoft Copilot

The dark winters in Govan, exacerbated by tenements that reached the heavens—at least, that’s how it seemed when you were only ten years old—made life thick with gloom. The lamplighters had made their visit, so we hung around the close to keep warm and dry, stretching out the night with friends.

We heard joyful singing somewhere along the dockside of Copeland Road and went to investigate. It was the local church. Lured by the promise of cakes and drinks, we wandered in. We were given a songbook or song sheets and ushered into a pew.

We were soon caught up in the joyful spirit as we sang something like, 

“G double O D, Good, G double O D, Good.

I want to be more like Jesus, G double O D, Good.”

Afterward, we received home-baked cakes, drinks, and an invitation to the meeting the following week. But we were kids and soon forgot the kindness of strangers.

It was just a moment in time, but that song and evening, like the Northern lights that emerge from time to time, dance a joyful dance in my head.

Image courtesy of https://unsplash.com/@purzlbaum

The Yaghan people of Tierra del Fuego — I love saying this country—have this long untranslatable, Mamihlapinatapai. Now this is what this word is all about. Two strangers meet and gain eye contact. Both are desperate to initiate a conversation, but The Owl of Minerva flies at dusk, so to speak, and they miss that opportunity. Tis a pity.

I spent my first five years of childhood in a sort of solitary confinement. These were the days before nurseries, and I spent most days playing in the back yard. To add to the problem, I attended four primary schools before high school. Naturally, I grew up with a painful shyness. As a result, I missed many opportunities in life.

When I was eighteen, I bought a book on shyness; it changed my life. Often shyness relates to not knowing what to say. I know people who have never read a book. Who spend their evening hours watching TV and wasting time on the cyber-hive playing video games and social networking. Then, when they meet people, they don’t have much to say. And to be honest, they can be extremely boring as they repeat the same old stuff.

Learn to read, there are many book-reading meetings online.

Learn to start conversations,

“I see you are reading a book, what’s it about?”

“That’s a nice camera, do you have a website where you post your images?”

“Is this your full-time job, or do you attend university?”

These are a few questions I ask, and I have had the most interesting conversations with passing strangers. Think of the various scenarios in which you can use conversation starters. Go on, bite the bullet.