A friend texts me.
“I don’t usually boast about visiting somewhere expensive…but I’ve just been to the petrol station,” she said.
Another friend sends me a photo of car on its roof beside a petrol pump.
“Car faints at price of petrol” reads the caption.
Another sends a photo of a sign: “Wine is now officially cheaper than fuel, Drink, don’t drive.”
It’s selfish. But every so often I look up my small pension pot, flick to the graph view and watch with horror as the profit line plummets and hopes of happy days ahead recede.
“Time in, not timing,” says the venerable Michael, personal finance guru of these very pages.
Still, I’m not in Ukraine watching my world collapse; I’m not sleeping on somebody’s floor in Poland.
In a world raw with news, sometimes you need to turn off.
At the butt of all jokes - the petrol pump - we’re still wearing the plastic gloves to avoid picking up the C word.
And it’s amazing how the threat of a third world war has knocked the pandemic out of the park.
They think it’s all over…
So in the face of so much suffering, we’re trying to smile even if, at times, it is a rictus grin.
The outpouring of generosity for people fleeing from Ukraine is heartening.
People - as Anne Frank wrote in her diary before she was taken away to Auschwitz to die - are really good at heart.
Witness those willing to open up their homes to refugees; those trundling lorries across Europe; hoisting boxes and bag loads of food and medical supplies, nappies and shower cream.
Witness bag upon bag load of clothes.
But let’s draw the line at the red stilettos and the used bras. There’s giving and there’s taking the p***.
Witness a picture on Twitter of a helper holding up a pair of red shoes somewhere in the wilderness of refugee land.
Fancy tripping across the border in a pair of those?
What was the giver thinking?
Perhaps the crisis was also an opportunity to offload. I’m probably as guilty of that as anyone.
But the shoes brought me back to long ago Berlin on a reporting assignment in 1991.
It was not long after the wall had come down, after the dust had settled on all those joyous scenes of people wielding sledgehammers; cheering, laughing and drinking.
This was German reunification. This was the iron curtain sundered.
In 1992, you could still trace the divide between the wealthy west and the not so wealthy east. As the U-bahn train trundled across the divide it veered from bright and modern to more clinical, white tiled stations.
Yes, change was in the air.
You could trace it in the slow unstoppable march of the big bright western brand shops … rampant consumerism on the march.
Beyond the faded beauty of Unter den Linden, far from the grandeur of the Brandenburg Gate, the communist boulevards stretched out - enormous, bleak and functional.
But we found true grace in the strangers we met.
Take Wolfgang, a social worker in the industrial town of Cottbus in former east Germany.
He opened his door and his home to two journalist strangers, said: “Come, you’re welcome to stay.”
My assignment was to write about women from former East Germany and how their lives had changed following reunification.
I thought they’d be whooping and cheering … what’s not to love about west Germany …. Home of the trains that arrive like clockwork, the Weiz bier, the powerful Mark turned Euro.
But nothing is clear cut.
These former East Germans felt like second class citizens in this new reunified Germany.
They were proud of who they were before and tentative in the face of a conservative west that was so much more wealthy.
One woman I interviewed told me that she went down to the wall on the night that it fell. She wanted to join in the celebrations, sip champagne and dance.
Then a woman from the other side approached and handed her a pair of shoes. A gift.
“A pair of shoes,” she said with disgust. “What did I want with her shoes? I had my own.”
Her anger stayed with me.
So that when I saw the red stilettos someone sent out to Ukraine, I pictured that fierce, proud woman standing at the Berlin Wall.
I prayed for all those whose lives are torn asunder.
