Today we're delighted to share the third piece of prose from Anil Sharma. We first published his work back in December when Anil arrived in Haslemere homeless. He now has a roof over his head and is already working on exciting plans for the future... one small step at a time. His writing has touched so many of you and we feel honoured that he continues to share his work with us all. 

This latest piece - One Hot Breakfast and Food Bag at a Time - really touched us. For us, it actually captures part of the vision and reasoning we had behind wanting to set up This is Haslemere. We are so aware of how scary the world can feel right now and we know that this can feel overwhelming for many. The reality is that we can't do much, if anything, to counter the global crises that seem to accumulate week on week. However, what we can do is to influence what happens within our own community. We can live in a space that feels safe, where people feel welcomed and loved and where community still thrives and kindness prevails. It may sound trite or possibly naive to some. But it's what we see every day in the amazing voluntary organisations that exist here and in the daily interactions that we witness taking place. 

Over to Anil who has dedicated this to the volunteers at the Methodist Church in Haslemere and to all volunteers at community centres, food banks, and overnight shelters.

One Hot Breakfast and Food Bag at a Time

By Anil K. Sharma Jr.

The world is a paradox of love and greed.

Last night I watched news reports of crises across Europe and the Americas, each one pulling me toward the conclusion that society is collapsing under the weight of fear and extraction. I speak from a place that sees not just events, but patterns — the way fear hardens people into categories, the way scarcity makes them forget their own softness, the way systems fray long before anyone admits they’re breaking.

There is collapse in the air — but collapse is not the whole story.

Because while one part of society buckles, another part quietly refuses to die. It shows up in small rooms, in ordinary acts, in the stubborn persistence of care. These gestures are not random. They form a pattern of resilience and solidarity that continues even as larger structures fail.

At the food bank at the Methodist Church on Lion Green in Haslemere, love and bread are offered without ceremony. As you step inside, the warmth isn’t an event but a rhythm — the everyday joy of a community that knows how to hold one another. Jo moves through the room with her steady, assured presence, keeping the treasury in order while offering the kind of welcome that lets people breathe again. Louise is at the counter, serving hot breakfast food with the ease of someone who has done it a hundred times and still finds meaning in every plate. Mo slips out from behind the tea station to chat, her Christmas Day video of laughter and turkey dinner still echoing the spirit she brings in person. Big Joe leans in to talk about next week’s bread delivery — a practical kindness disguised as logistics. And across the room, Nick, one of the regulars, re‑enacts Henry I, Act I to a circle of smiling faces. A volunteer, watching it all, says quietly, “I hope one day the food bank won’t be needed — but until that day comes, I’ll keep showing up.”

This is the counter‑current: the part of society that refuses to disappear, even as the structures around it falter. A place where dignity is exchanged freely, without cost, and where belonging is made real in the simplest acts.

I am not romanticising it.

I am naming it as it is:

A lantern.

And I am walking into that space today as a recipient who understands that presence is a form of resistance — where compassion is not sentimental, solidarity is not theoretical, and love is not a feeling but a practice.

That’s why this matters.

That’s why the food bank matters.

That’s why you and I matter in that room.

We are not witnessing the end of society. We are witnessing the end of one way of organising it — the brittle, extractive, fearful way — and the quiet emergence of another, built in small rooms where people hand each other bread and hope without asking for credentials.

Today, I will step into that part of the world that is still holding people and community together, one hot breakfast and one food bag at a time.

And that matters.