Difficult to think of a more timely theme for this year than the “52 weeks of kindness” just launched on Scotland’s Breathing Space day and attracting support from Helensburgh organisations at all ages and stages last weekend.

Kindness is a much under rated virtue, one which seems to be going alarmingly out of fashion. But start to think about it and it’s little more than enlightened self interest; anyone who engages in random acts of kindness feels better about themselves, and the recipient is invariably happier too.

Young women running a rule over boyfriends as future partners/fathers are liable to check out looks, dress sense, sense of humour, and personal habits, dodgy and otherwise, before they stop to think if this man child has the kindness gene well embedded. Yet nothing will prove more important once the delightful insanity of love and lust abates.

When my husband died, just about every letter and note I received used the same phrase “a lovely man”. My mother, I recall, reported similar sentiments when my dad died. Lots of letters detailing people he’d helped about which she had known nothing. Random, instinctive, acts of kindness.

And from these relationships all manner of other bonuses flow. Women lucky enough to have had a great rapport with their dad will look on the male race benignly, and expect to make equally positive relationships as those they saw first hand as wee girls.

Obviously it matters just as much in the political as the personal.

The two torrid weeks of a Trump presidency have seen random act of malice; unthinking, irrational hatred towards whole nations and religions. That Donald Trump is temperamentally unsuited to run anything more damaging than a raffle is already only too evident – and you just know he’d rig that raffle.

This matters. Not just because he’s in a position to blow up the world with a typical act of hair trigger lunacy over some real or imaginary insult to his absurd person, but because the tone of any organisation or country is set by the person at the top.

It’s his ignorant posturing which has given permission to every town bigmouth and closet racist to come out and proclaim their brand of hate-filled “patriotism”. It’s his assertion that every refugee is a potential terrorist which has left those “tired, huddled masses yearning to breathe free” stranded in campsites or in foreign airport departure lounges after going through seven kinds of hell to leave war zones or famine or both.

It is true that American presidents are generally according a state visit to the UK. The norm is after two, sometimes three years. To issue an invitation to this man after barely a week in office is an act of desperation from a government needy for friendship and trade from, it seems, almost any quarter.

It is rumoured that the monstrous ego that is the new President is already issuing demands to play golf at Balmoral. This may or may not be “fake news”. But personally I’d like him stopped at the border.