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From Canon Ann Easter, Chaplain to the Queen:

One of the treats of being a chaplain to Her Majesty the Queen is that Christopher and I get invited to a Royal Garden Party each year. They are such lovely, happy occasions with everyone dressed up in beautiful clothes and gorgeous hats and the highlight is when Her Majesty and her family come into the garden; they spend hours talking to people, taking a real interest in their stories. I always feel that it’s as if fairy dust has been sprinkled above people’s heads as the Queen moves through the crowd and they smile broadly and glow with delight at being that close!

Each day she’s working, our Queen must greet hundreds of people and I thought of that when I discovered that today is World Hello Day. For the past 44 years, the idea has spread throughout the world that today, each of us might try to say hello to ten new people, mainly to encourage communication between people of different races and cultures – even Brexiters and Remainers! The hope is that we’ll have contributed to a huge wave of peace because, as Winston Churchill said, Jaw, Jaw is always better than War, War.

But I thought too of my friend Bill, who was a similar vintage to the Queen but a widower, with no children and few relatives or friends near, who kept phoning me for various inconsequential reasons on Saturday afternoons. ‘Have you chosen the hymns for tomorrow?’ he would say, or ‘I saw that actor you like on the One Show’. It took a few weeks before I realised that Bill had spoken to no-one that day and had called because he needed a little human contact. There are so many lonely people like Bill.

The bible talks more about greetings than hello; Jesus greeted people all around him and would often ask quite searching questions; he asked a blind man ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ and so got straight to the heart of the matter. We British people might not want to be quite so direct but a simple ‘hello’ today could change someone’s world for the better.