When Bloodlines Become a Trap

When the Gene Pool Shrinks: What DNA Reveals About Inbreeding

It is well known that prolonged inbreeding can have serious consequences for a population. The reason is relatively simple. All of us carry some harmful recessive genetic variants without knowing it. Usually this causes no problem because we possess another, functioning copy of the gene.

If two unrelated people have children, they are relatively unlikely to carry exactly the same rare harmful variant. Close relatives, however, have inherited much of their DNA from the same ancestors. They are therefore more likely to carry the same recessive variant and more likely to pass two copies of it to a child.

Perhaps the easiest way to understand this is through the inbreeding coefficient, usually written as F. This expresses the probability that the two copies of a genetic region inherited by a child are identical by descent from the same ancestor.

The Habsburg experiment

Perhaps the consequences of this process are seen most dramatically in some of the royal families of Europe, where marriage between close relatives was repeatedly used to preserve territory, wealth and dynastic power.

The Spanish Habsburgs provide an extraordinary example. Genealogical research has calculated an inbreeding coefficient of 21.8% for Philip III of Spain and 25.4% for Charles II of Spain. Charles II therefore reached approximately the theoretical inbreeding level expected in the child of a brother and sister, even though his own parents were actually uncle and niece. The explanation is that both of his parents were themselves descended from generations of interrelated Habsburg ancestors.

This distinction is important. Charles did not acquire his extraordinary inbreeding level from one close marriage alone. It was the accumulated effect of repeated marriages between relatives over many generations.

One outward characteristic associated with the dynasty was the famous “Habsburg jaw”, or mandibular prognathism, in which the lower jaw projects prominently forward. A modern study comparing Habsburg portraits with their pedigrees found a significant relationship between the degree of mandibular prognathism and the calculated level of inbreeding.

Charles II also suffered from an extraordinary collection of health problems. It is impossible centuries later to prove that every one of them was caused by inbreeding, but his extreme level of consanguinity almost certainly increased his genetic vulnerability.

Modern medical reviews of Charles II describe developmental delay, dysarthria, skeletal deformities, recurrent infections, epilepsy and infertility among his many problems.

Tutankhamun: another royal example

A similar story may be seen in ancient Egypt.

DNA analysis published in 2010 concluded that the two mummies identified as Tutankhamun's parents were brother and sister. If so, his theoretical pedigree inbreeding coefficient would have been approximately 25% — strikingly close to the calculated 25.4% of Charles II.

Tutankhamun certainly suffered from physical problems. CT and genetic investigations identified abnormalities including problems with his feet and avascular bone necrosis, and malaria DNA was also detected. However, we should be careful about saying that these disorders were caused by inbreeding. His sibling parentage would have increased the probability of harmful recessive variants becoming homozygous, but it is not possible to attribute each of his conditions directly to consanguinity.

There is also an important difference between Tutankhamun and the ancient individuals whose complete genomes can now be examined. The famous Egyptian mummy study used genetic markers to establish relationships; it did not provide the sort of modern high-coverage whole-genome measurement of runs of homozygosity that can now be obtained from some ancient remains.

Ancient DNA allows us to see the process directly

Modern ancient-DNA techniques have transformed this subject. Instead of relying only upon a known family tree and calculating what the level of inbreeding should have been, scientists can examine an individual's genome for runs of homozygosity, usually abbreviated to ROH.

These are long stretches of DNA where the copies inherited from the mother and father are unusually similar because both ultimately came from shared ancestors.

The length and number of these stretches are particularly informative. Very long runs tend to indicate recent close-relative mating, while large numbers of shorter runs can reveal something rather different: a population that remained small and isolated for many generations.

That distinction becomes particularly interesting here in Malta.

The extraordinary genomes from Xagħra Circle

On Gozo, Malta's neighbouring island, the Xagħra Circle contained the remains of hundreds of people who lived during Malta's remarkable Neolithic Temple Period.

Researchers attempted to recover ancient DNA from several individuals. Three — Xaghra5, Xaghra6 and Xaghra9 — produced sufficiently good genome-wide DNA for detailed analysis. The researchers found that all three genomes contained unusually high levels of runs of homozygosity, indicating substantial inbreeding in their ancestry.

Xaghra9 was exceptional.

The researchers estimated that 19.12% of Xaghra9's genome was contained within runs of homozygosity. At the time the study was published, his was the second most extreme level of long ROH reported from prehistoric human remains, exceeded by the extraordinary individual buried at Newgrange in Ireland.

But Xaghra9 presents an interesting puzzle.

He was not a Spanish Habsburg with a documented family tradition of marriages between uncles, nieces and cousins. Nor does his genome look exactly like that of the straightforward child of one brother–sister union.

Instead, researchers found a mixture of long and shorter ROH. Their interpretation was that his extraordinary genome probably resulted from a combination of recent marriages between relatives and a population that had already been very small and genetically isolated for generations. They specifically cautioned against assigning Xaghra9 one precise parental relationship.

The other two Xagħra genomes reinforce that interpretation because, although less extreme than Xaghra9, they also contain unusually elevated homozygosity. One predates him by roughly four centuries. This suggests that the problem was not confined to one unfortunate family.

Just how small was the population?

The genetics offer an extraordinary glimpse of the size of this prehistoric breeding community.

Using one method, researchers estimated an effective population size of approximately 515 individuals, with a 95% confidence interval of 397–633. Another analysis gave a 30-generation average effective population size of only 382.

“Effective population size” does not mean that precisely 382 or 515 people were living on Gozo. It is a genetic concept referring approximately to the number of individuals contributing genes to subsequent generations. The actual population could have been larger.

Nevertheless, the result is striking. The researchers concluded that mating networks appear largely to have remained within the island, producing a genomic signature of an unusually small and restricted population over at least 400 years.

This makes Xaghra9 particularly interesting when compared with Charles II.

Charles II's 25.4% is a pedigree prediction based upon his known ancestry. Xaghra9's 19.12% is a measurement derived from his actual ancient genome. The numbers are therefore not precisely equivalent measurements, but both point towards an extraordinary degree of shared ancestry.

A society approaching its end

The story becomes even more intriguing because Xaghra9 and Xaghra5 lived close to a turning point in Maltese prehistory.

For more than a thousand years the inhabitants of Malta and Gozo had created one of prehistoric Europe's most extraordinary cultures. They built the enormous megalithic complexes at Ġgantija, Ħaġar Qim, Mnajdra and Tarxien, along with elaborate underground burial places.

Yet during the later third millennium BC this distinctive Temple culture disappeared.

There is unlikely to have been one simple cause. Archaeological and environmental evidence points towards a combination of pressures:

The ancient-DNA researchers themselves noted that Xaghra5 and Xaghra9 date from a period associated with a declining density of radiocarbon dates, worsening diet and nutritional status, increasing aridity and thinning soils.

Inbreeding therefore need not have caused the collapse of Malta's Temple culture. It may instead reveal something equally important: a population becoming dangerously small and isolated at precisely the time when environmental and nutritional pressures were increasing.

And then there is Newgrange

Perhaps the most extraordinary comparison comes from Ireland.

DNA was recovered from an adult man whose remains had been placed in the most elaborate recess of the great Newgrange passage tomb, constructed around 3200 BC. His genome revealed something remarkable.

His parents were first-degree relatives. Genetically, that means the relationship was consistent with either: brother and sister, or parent and child. Both relationships would normally produce an expected inbreeding coefficient of approximately 25% in their offspring.

Unlike Xaghra9, whose unusual combination of ROH probably reflects both recent relatedness and generations of life within a small isolated population, the Newgrange man's genome showed the unmistakable signature of an extremely close, first-degree incestuous union. The researchers described him as the adult son of such a union.

His burial place makes the discovery even more intriguing. He was not deposited in an insignificant grave but in the most prestigious part of one of prehistoric Europe's greatest monuments. Researchers have therefore suggested that he belonged to a powerful politico-religious elite in which such otherwise strongly prohibited relationships may have been deliberately permitted to preserve a sacred or dynastic bloodline. That interpretation is fascinating, although it cannot be proved from one individual alone.

So across thousands of years we can see very different routes leading towards the same genetic danger.

With Charles II, repeated dynastic marriage gradually accumulated relatedness generation after generation.

With Tutankhamun, the evidence points towards sibling parents within an Egyptian royal dynasty.

With Xaghra9, the genome tells of life within a tiny, isolated island breeding population, probably combined with relatively close marriages.

And at Newgrange, DNA reveals something more immediate and extreme: a man whose mother and father were themselves first-degree relatives.

It is extraordinary that thousands of years after these people died, their DNA can reveal not merely where their ancestors came from, but something as intimate as how closely related their parents were and how isolated the communities in which they lived had become.

COVID: When the Dust Settled

Having lived through the weirdness of Covid I kept thinking it was difficult to see the light clearly in the middle of a storm. However, I had hoped that when the dust settled there would be so many important lessons learned from this devastating outbreak. Some countries like Sweden avoided many of the compulsory restrictions imposed elsewhere, kept compulsory schools for younger pupils generally open and relied much more heavily on voluntary public-health recommendations. I wondered what was their experience in terms of excess deaths.

It is also clear that in 2021 wealthy countries had ordered billions more doses than they required for their own populations. Subsequently one wealthy country, the United States, ended up dumping more than 80 million doses. Although to be fair many of these wealthy countries were major donors of vaccines to other countries. 

It’s difficult to have a fair scoring card after all it was not a level playing field. Italy had a first-class health system in its North when the outbreak hit them, but it was one of the first to face the dire consequences of epidemic attacking the health system. No wonder they were quickly overrun with a shortage of ventilators and no available treatments. Others had time to observe their suffering learn from it and take preventative action that helped them cope better.

Perhaps one of the best scores was attained by New Zealand to emerge remarkably unscathed. It did help it was an island, not densely populated and had a leader who acted quickly to defend the population. But despite her evident success, she later became increasingly unpopular and was strongly criticised by sections of a population who perhaps did not know what they had been spared.

But even populations that should have known better had large numbers dying of Covid, not only stubbornly resistant to taking available vaccines but also to using masks or obeying basic isolation instructions. Even when my friend phoned her relatives in the US and learned of more deaths in their ranks all around them, their views remained unchanged. Perhaps the biggest lesson is how misinformation, always disturbing at the best of times, became deadly in the middle of the worst of times. How ignorance became a rock to cling to not a stepping stone to learning more.

You can see I have my own misconceptions and slant on the whole business but surely in six years someone intelligent with insight has gathered together all the experience and facts and made some progress and understanding what worked and what didn’t. So, this was my goal. Step back from my own particular view and consult others whose field of expertise is exactly this!

The Score Card

Probably the best single measure in comparing countries is generally age-adjusted excess mortality, rather than the officially recorded number of COVID deaths. This excess mortality successfully captures deaths missed by testing/reporting and some indirect effects of the pandemic. The age adjustment is required because it was the older population who were hit hardest and if you have a country with a huge population of older people then you would inevitably have higher numbers of deaths whatever your response. By using age-adjusted excess mortality you greatly reduce that variable when comparing countries, although many other differences between countries remain. WHO estimated about 14.9 million excess deaths worldwide in 2020–21, far above the officially recorded COVID death count.

But how did individual countries fare?

1. New Zealand was one of the clearest successes. Its elimination strategy—tight border controls, quarantine, testing, tracing and rapid lockdowns—kept COVID at bay until vaccines were available. Their vaccine uptake was high and it experienced exceptionally low cumulative excess mortality over the pandemic, with mortality actually below expected levels in 2020–21. Mind you islands generally coped better. There is an advantage in having a sea border to protect you. In fact, one international study found that islands fared about 3 times better in terms of age-standardised excess deaths than non-island countries.

2. Norway and Denmark also performed very well. Among the European countries these two had very low pandemic mortality. They reacted while hospitalisation numbers were still comparatively low. This is evidence that one of the strongest lessons to learn in a pandemic is that speed matters. Even a modest intervention at an early stage is much better than a severe intervention when hospitals are rapidly filling.

3. Sweden avoided many of the compulsory restrictions imposed elsewhere and initially suffered considerably higher mortality than neighbouring Norway and Finland, particularly in vulnerable elderly populations in care homes. However, in the longer term its overall excess mortality compared surprisingly favourably with many European countries. One interesting lesson from Sweden is that voluntary behavioural change can accomplish more than was thought.

4. Britain performed badly during the crucial first wave. It entered the pandemic with good scientific expertise but delayed important early interventions due to slow political decision-making and so transmission grew rapidly. It experienced high early mortality however, Britain did considerably better in vaccine development and deployment.

Early in the vaccination programme vaccines showed very high protection against symptomatic disease and also reduced infection and transmission, but this protection against infection became much less reliable as immunity waned and new variants appeared. Public-health messaging did not always make this changing distinction sufficiently clear. A useful message as the evidence evolved would have been:

“The vaccine may not prevent you catching COVID, but it greatly reduces your probability of becoming seriously ill or dying from it.”

That distinction might have preserved more public trust.

In particular, school closures carried enormous costs. Children had a relatively low risk of severe COVID and the long school disruption had detrimental educational and social consequences. Future pandemic policies may require a much higher threshold for closing schools. COVID mortality was extraordinarily concentrated among older and medically vulnerable people and responses should therefore be more carefully targeted according to risk.

In many other countries, those in nursing and residential homes were extraordinarily vulnerable to this pandemic. Protecting them should have been among the highest priorities. Lessons learned were the necessity of rapid testing of staff, good ventilation, adequate PPE, sick-pay arrangements preventing infected staff from working and the residents having early vaccination. More careful hospital-to-care-home discharge policies could have reduced the disease being channelled from hospital wards to the most vulnerable in society. Perversely, some countries concentrated enormous resources on restrictions affecting millions of comparatively low-risk people while the virus was allowed into institutions containing the people most likely to die.

Mind you many of these are easy in hindsight and perhaps much harder when you dealing with something of the unexpected scale of the Covid pandemic.

Another lesson learned was that SARS-CoV-2 is predominantly transmitted through respiratory particles, especially indoors. As a result, improved ventilation, filtration and air-quality monitoring should therefore become routine. Much less was achieved by washing surfaces. I had elderly relatives who spent hours using acholic wipes to clean each piece of grocery delivered by van from the supermarket.

The pandemic revealed that resilience really matters. Countries need spare hospital capacity, trained staff, surveillance systems, testing capability, vaccine manufacturing, strategic supplies and public-health organisations before a crisis begins.

And governments need something much less tangible: trust. People will put up with extraordinary restrictions for a limited period if authorities explain what they know, what they don't know, why a decision is being taken and what evidence would cause that decision to change. A recent academic paper concluded that Countries where people had greater trust in their government tended to have lower infection rates. Even more importantly, countries where people had greater trust in one another also tended to have lower infection rates. Lower government corruption was associated with better outcomes too. High-trust countries also tended to achieve higher vaccination rates once vaccines became widely available.

My asthmatic mother was hospitalised with Covid in her late eighties in Northern Ireland but thankfully survived. One of the genuine surprises of COVID-19 was that ordinary asthma did not substantially increase COVID mortality. In fact, some research suggests that asthmatic airways may have presented the virus with fewer convenient doorways into the cells and that some inhaled corticosteroids, used by asthma patients, may have reduced aspects of SARS-CoV-2 replication or the inflammatory response to infection. These remain possible explanations rather than established reasons for the unexpectedly low mortality risk. But there are conditions that really made catching Covid deadlier. Age is definitely the biggest contributor in risk of Covid death but diabetes and obesity also played major roles, as did a number of other underlying medical conditions.

Perhaps the Lancet summed it up best: the countries that did best weren't necessarily those imposing the most restrictions. They tended to be those that acted early, protected vulnerable people, maintained public trust, had competent health systems and adapted policy as the evidence changed.

That are probably lessons we should all remember.

While Disasters Scream, Progress Whispers

There is a saying that progress is silent while disasters scream. Every day we are bombarded with stories of wars, disasters, crime and political turmoil. The constant noise can make it seem as though the world is steadily unravelling. Yet news is designed to report what is unusual and alarming, not the quiet improvements that unfold over decades. To understand what is really happening, we need to step back from the daily fireworks filling our newsfeeds and look at the long view.

The evidence tells a remarkable story.

In 1830, around 80–90% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty. Today, despite recent setbacks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and rising inflation, the figure is estimated to be under 10%—one of the greatest transformations in human history.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, safe piped drinking water was largely confined to the wealthiest cities. Today, more than 90% of the world's population has access to at least basic drinking water services, and the great majority also have basic sanitation. Hundreds of millions more people than ever before enjoy reliable food, shelter, electricity and essential services, although significant inequalities still remain.

In 1900, global life expectancy was about 32 years. Today it is around 73 years. We are living longer than any previous generation. Since 1990, the mortality rate for children under five has fallen by more than 60%, saving millions of young lives every year.

Two centuries ago, fewer than one adult in five could read or write. Today, around 87% of adults worldwide are literate. Education for girls, once a rare privilege, is now the norm across much of the world, although important gaps still exist in some regions.

Slavery is now illegal in every country, even though modern slavery and human trafficking continue to blight millions of lives. Women have gained the right to vote in virtually every sovereign state, while legal protections against racial discrimination and greater recognition of disability rights exist on a scale unknown to previous generations.

Violence, too, has declined over the long term. Research suggests that in many prehistoric and early agricultural societies, 10–20% of people—and sometimes even more—died through violence. Today, the global homicide rate has fallen to about 5.1 deaths per 100,000 people, one of the lowest levels ever recorded. Although violence remains tragically high in some parts of the world, humanity is far less likely to die by murder than our distant ancestors. Torture, public executions and cruel punishments, once accepted almost everywhere, are now widely condemned and prohibited under international law.

The Second World War claimed an estimated 70–85 million lives, around 3% of the world's population at the time. Since 1945, no conflict has approached that scale of destruction, and wars between states have become much less common, even though civil wars and regional conflicts continue to inflict terrible suffering.

Medicine has also transformed human life. Smallpox, a disease that killed hundreds of millions of people, was eradicated in 1980—the first human disease ever eliminated. Polio has been reduced by more than 99% since 1988. HIV, once almost invariably fatal, has become a manageable condition for many with access to modern treatment. Vaccination programmes now prevent an estimated four to five million deaths every year, and deaths from measles have fallen dramatically since 2000, despite recent outbreaks in places where vaccination rates have declined.

None of this means that the world is perfect. Poverty persists. Wars continue. Injustice, disease and suffering remain part of the human story. But neither should we overlook how far humanity has come. It is encouraging to know that the long-term direction has been one of progress. 

Progress is rarely dramatic. It arrives quietly—in healthier children, longer lives, cleaner water, fuller classrooms, greater freedom and expanding opportunities. These victories will never make the headlines, yet they have transformed the lives of billions of people.

Recognising that progress does not breed complacency; it breeds hope. And hope, grounded in evidence rather than wishful thinking, gives us every reason to continue the work of making the world better than we found it.

A rare and precious manuscript

A large bag sits at my feet, full of purchases. One is a plastic container for The Lady's Newspaper from the 1850s, bought to protect it from Malta's humidity. The journal itself was an unexpected gift from my great-grandmother to my father—her granddaughter's new husband. She had often clashed with neighbours and even members of her own family, but for some reason, when she met my parents on their first visit as a married couple, she disappeared into another room, returned carrying this priceless collection, and presented it to my father.

It is full of exquisite detailed plates, instructions on lacemaking, fashion advice of the day, serialised fiction, reports from abroad, accounts of accidents across Britain and—even more surprisingly—move-by-move analyses of chess games! Modern women's magazines, by comparison, seem more likely to be filled with cosmetic procedures, celebrity news, relationship advice, fitness, fashion and gossip. Indeed, many modern tabloids are written in language considered accessible to a ten- or twelve-year-old.

I sometimes wonder what future historians will conclude if they judge our aspirations by the reading material we consume, whether in print or, more often, online. What will our magazines, newspapers, websites and social media feeds tell them about us? Would they see a broadening of horizons, or a narrowing of them? Have we become more curious, or merely more distracted? 

Mind you, The Lady's Newspaper can be mind-numbing in its own way. Its meticulous reports of life at the Royal Court include not only every event but lists of those who attended and even detailed descriptions of what they wore! Some things, it seems, never lose their fascination.

I also inherited my grandmother's letters to this same great-grandmother, written while she was studying at Stranmillis College after winning a King's Scholarship to train as a teacher. They are penned in magnificent copperplate handwriting rarely seen today. Through those letters her excitement shines: life in Belfast, the lectures, new friendships and the bustle of college life. Coming from an isolated rural community, the city must have seemed an exhilarating new world.

Perhaps that is what all this is really about. We become, to some extent, what we expose ourselves to and, more importantly, how we respond to it. Is that exposure a deliberate choice?

In my great-grandmother's day, people selected a periodical that suited their interests and often devoured it from cover to cover. The magazine was then passed around the family, becoming a shared experience and a starting point for conversations. Today we tend to drift alone through endless streams of information—Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Netflix, Disney and countless websites—wandering wherever the next algorithm leads us, sometimes into surprisingly dark tunnels. We have access to more knowledge than any generation in history, yet it has become much harder to distinguish nourishment from noise. I am not entirely sure which age is better, but I do wonder whether our digital diet can sometimes be more toxic to our mental well-being than we realise.

Fortunately, we are often drawn back into the light by people of genuine worth.

Can I confess that I already miss David Attenborough? In a world where so many seem intent on deception, greed or division, his life and work feel like a golden thread of goodness. I know it is premature to miss someone who, at one hundred years of age, is still with us, but I already dread the day the world loses such a remarkable man. People like him are indeed precious like a rare manuscript.

Pigeon beyond caring

I saw a pigeon today that looked exactly how I felt. I was struck by its utterly miserable expression and decided to take a photograph. Not wanting to frighten it, I edged slowly closer for a better shot. But this pigeon was beyond caring. It sat in a state of complete dejection, not even blinking. It reminded me of Michael McIntyre’s joke about suicidal city pigeons.

After taking the picture, I continued my walk, pondering the peculiar traits of modern life.

We had visitors staying with us last week, and on one of the buses back from Valletta there was an accident right in front of us. A middle-aged woman had been struck on the head, either by the bus itself or by its wing mirror. The driver immediately got out to call the police and an ambulance while we sat helplessly on the crowded bus.

What shocked me most was not the accident itself but the reaction of so many passengers. They instinctively reached for their mobile phones and hurried to the front window to photograph the injured woman. There was pushing and shoving as people jostled to get the best view. It made me wonder how many dying victims spend their last conscious moments staring into a forest of mobile phones pointed in their direction as they bleed on the pavement. Too often, onlookers seem more interested in capturing the drama than in staying out of the way of those trying to help.

I cannot pretend complete innocence. My own weakness is different. I sometimes watch those social experiment videos on YouTube where someone pretends to assault someone to see whether passers-by intervene. It is depressing to discover how few do. Of course, some of those videos may themselves be staged, with actors playing the roles of rescuers and bystanders. Yet not all are fake, and occasionally such experiments have gone badly wrong, with real injuries and genuine danger.

Perhaps the common thread is that we have become spectators and recorders rather than active participants. Often there are perfectly understandable reasons for hesitating. We ask ourselves: Have I misunderstood the situation? Is someone else already dealing with it? If nobody else is acting, perhaps I shouldn't either.

It reminds me of a famous psychology experiment. A waiting room is full of people while, in an adjoining office, a secretary is typing. Suddenly there is the sound of someone climbing a stepladder, followed by a loud crash and the cries of a woman calling for help.

When the waiting room is crowded, remarkably few people get up to investigate. Most look uncomfortable, glance nervously at one another, and wait to see how everyone else reacts.

Yet repeat exactly the same experiment with only one person in the waiting room, and that individual almost always rushes to the office door to offer assistance.

Our humanity is still there. Somehow, though, when responsibility is shared among many people, it seems to evaporate. Psychologists call it the bystander effect. Responsibility becomes diluted until, collectively, no one feels responsible at all.

No wonder that pigeon looked so miserable. It probably realised that if it collapsed on a crowded pavement, the one thing it could rely on was not compassion, but becoming another photo opportunity for some passing idiot.

Unexpected sweetness

I sit in the glorious air-conditioning of the shopping mall here in Malta. It used to be that you had to buy a coffee to earn the right to sit down, but they have redesigned the place and provided plenty of free seating. It is a courtesy to the public that is greatly appreciated. Mind you, the refurbishment must have cost a pretty penny, and you get the impression that all the shops are trying to recoup the expense by doubling the price of their goods. They have 50% sales on, but to be fair, a shirt priced at €162 after being reduced from its original eye-watering price is hardly an irresistible bargain. However, I did see a man emerge from an Armani shop carrying almost ten shirts in his arms, so clearly the strategy works for some!

As I watch the people around me, most seem, like me, to be browsing, examining the merchandise with interest, then moving on without buying anything. The air-conditioning, however, works its magic, and almost everyone looks remarkably relaxed as they wander around.

It is a far cry from the experience at the airport on my last Ryanair flight from Belfast to Malta. It is amazing how long passengers have to wait before the departure gate finally appears on the overhead screens. Then, with barely five minutes to spare before boarding, the gate number flashes up. Everyone rushes to get where they need to be, and it seems particularly unfair on the older passengers among us, who suddenly find themselves in a stressful race down long corridors, burdened with heavy bags. Then they are made to stand in steep stairwells, knees aching and backs protesting, crushed together like tomatoes in a tube of paste before being squeezed onto packed shuttle buses. Finally, one boards the aircraft only to discover, with dismay, that a large drunken stag party is already on board, shouting insults and swearing loudly at one another.

The cabin crew urged everyone to take their seats for take-off, but there was already a queue of at least six young men waiting to use the toilet. As the queue grew to a dozen, a flight attendant repeatedly asked them to return to their seats. Eventually, the captain announced—quite reasonably—that he wished to depart and everyone had to sit down immediately. They obeyed reluctantly, but the man in the seat in front of me took it as a personal affront that others had managed to use the toilet while he had not. He loudly informed his two friends that he was bursting to go and that the whole situation was grossly unfair. Later he complained to a passing flight attendant that the crew had been "f***ing rude" to him. I really do feel sorry for those who have to deal with drunken passengers on flights. It cannot be an easy job.

When the plane landed in Malta, several passengers immediately leapt to their feet and began pulling suitcases from the overhead lockers while the aircraft was still taxiing. Once again, the captain had to order everyone back into their seats until the plane had come to a complete stop. One wonders what dealing with such behaviour, day after day, does to airline staff.

This week, however, I was pleasantly surprised by an altogether different experience. My teenage grandson came to visit us and accidentally left his phone on the aircraft after disembarking. Three days later I took him to the airport's Lost and Found office, and, to our delight, his phone had been handed in. When he switched it on, he discovered that someone had taken a photograph with it. There, smiling back from the screen, were two flight attendants in uniform, waving cheerfully and giving enthusiastic thumbs-up signs. They had obviously found the phone and decided to leave him a little surprise.

Such unexpected sweetness amidst the challenges of their working day. It never ceases to amaze me when I encounter good humour and kindness in people whose jobs expose them to so much impatience, abuse and discourtesy. I like to think of it as a quiet form of excellence—the conscious decision to remain gracious despite being surrounded by rudeness. Those two young women will probably never know how much their small act of kindness restored my faith in human nature.

... observe courtesy, for above all else it is the prince of virtues.

Baha’u’llah

My Dear Cousin

We seemed to meet only at funerals in recent years. What a contrast to the joyous childhood gatherings in Dungiven, Newcastle and Bundoran. I remember sitting opposite you and your younger brother, all of us stiff with unfamiliarity because we met so infrequently. Yet within half an hour we would get over the awkwardness and simply enjoy each other's company. Every long gap between our meetings meant that same period of sizing one another up had to be repeated—especially during adolescence, when embarrassment and hormones build such difficult hedges between people. But the warmth of you and your brother always worked its magic, and before long we were kith and kin again, laughing together and relishing each other's company.

Then I moved away, and you moved first to the Scottish islands and later abroad. I recently found some of your letters from Malawi where, true to yourself, you were quietly doing good, as always.

The years passed, and we met mostly at funerals. I always chose to sit beside you because your heart was always open and unguarded, never shielded or veiled. How many times I saw a sheen of tears in your eyes as you spoke so honestly, laying your heart bare. Thank you for all those heart-to-heart conversations. I shall treasure them always.

At my mum's funeral this February, you were there in the undertaker's parlour and joined the family in our personal farewell to her. I asked you to say a few words, and you recited a beautiful psalm from memory, every sentence filled with heartfelt emotion. Thank you for the tenderness of that moment.

I cannot help but resent the years we might have shared ahead but now never will. Yet no one could have loved more generously than you loved all around you. For that, I can only be grateful.

During our last meetings, you seemed almost radiant, as though you had one foot in this world and one in the next—full of love, gentleness and spirit. These days your face often comes to my mind, and whenever it does it is filled with the same kindness and compassion I always saw in you.

People like you are a privilege to know. I am profoundly grateful that you have been, and always will be, such a special part of our family. 

Much love