Why I built this.

This site started with two things that don’t obviously belong together. A discarded paper bag in a park, and my late wife Nicky.

I’ll tell you about the bag first, because it’s the easier story.

During a recent visit to Warsaw, I was struck again by something I always notice there: how clean and cared for the public spaces feel.

I was walking through a park, one of those long, ambling walks where you cover a few miles and quietly put the world to rights in your head. As I went along, I noticed a paper bag caught in the grass, the wind nudging it back and forth.

I picked it up, carried it for a while, dropped it into a bin about a hundred yards later, and carried on walking.

And then I couldn’t stop doing the maths.

If everyone in the UK picked up one piece of litter a day, that would be sixty million pieces. Every day.

Sixty million. In a day. From one country. The size of that number wouldn’t leave me alone. And it scales the same way for every small thing. One door held a day, sixty million doors. One stranger let out at a junction, sixty million strangers. One text to a friend you’re worried about, sixty million texts.

None of it is hard. None of it costs anything. And almost all of it goes unnoticed.

That’s the bag.

The other thing is Nicky.

My late wife Nicky passed away in August 2025, after a long battle with cancer. I will spend the rest of my life proud of how she fought it. I’m not going to write here about who she was, because there isn’t a paragraph long enough. But I do want to write about something that happened around us while she was ill, because it’s part of why this site exists.

People were extraordinary. Really. The love that came at us from every direction is the thing I’ll remember longest from those years. People we hadn’t spoken to in years got in touch. Neighbours we’d barely nodded at left food on the step. It was overwhelming, in the good sense of the word.

But there was one phrase. One particular phrase. I must have heard it a thousand times, and every time it threw me a little bit off.

“Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

People meant it. They really did. It was kind, and it came from a good place, and I was grateful for every single one. I want to be clear about that, because what I’m about to say sounds ungrateful and it isn’t.

But you don’t have the energy, when you’re in the middle of something like that, to project-manage the help. You can’t make a list. You can’t ring round. The brain doesn’t work like that when you’re running on adrenaline and fear and bad hospital coffee. The kindest thing anyone did in those years wasn’t to ask. It was to just do the thing.

The friend who dropped a lasagne off without ringing first. The neighbour who took the bins out for us for weeks running and never mentioned it. The friend who texted “I’ve booked an appointment for Saturday, here’s the slot, just turn up.” The friend who arrived with two coffees and didn’t need anything in return.

They didn’t ask. They just did it.

And the thing I worked out, somewhere between those two experiences, is that they’re actually the same thing.

One discarded paper bag, picked up by one person on one walk. One lasagne, dropped at one door, on one bad evening. Same shape. You see something, however tiny, that you could leave a bit better than you found it. You don’t wait to be asked. You don’t announce it. You just do it.

And if enough of us do it, the numbers get silly.

Just do the thing.

That’s the whole philosophy, honestly. The most useful sentence I learnt in the worst years of my life, and it turns out to apply to a paper bag in a park too.

So I built a map.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. A map of small good things people did without being asked. You did something today, however tiny. You drop a pin. You write a sentence. The world lights up a little bit. Tomorrow you do another one. The sixty million stops being a thought experiment.

It’s not a charity. There’s no organisation behind it. I’m not asking for money. I’m not trying to make anyone feel guilty for the days they didn’t do anything. I’m not collecting your email so I can sell you a newsletter about being a better human.

It’s simply a map for people to put pins in to show the simple acts of kindness they have done.

It’s one of the favourite things I’ve made, and I’ve made some things.

For Nicky.

What did you leave better today?

Andy