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Adele
The Huggy Merchant
Bumppo's Patron since [at least]:
May 17 2002
Status: offline
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 Posted - June 26 2003 : 1:13:05 PM
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From The Daily Telegraph, Wednesday 25th June, 2003
Join me - and be nice this Friday
Danny Wallace has founded a cult devoted to spontaneous acts of kindness. And, says Damian Thompson, the message is spreading.
Some religious cults practise "love bombing", smothering would-be recruits in bogus affection. Others make their members wear electronic headgear that harmonises their thought waves with those of the leader.
The followers of Danny Wallace do something almost equally strange. They hang around pubs, looking for a pensioner drinking on his own. When they spot one, they sidle to the bar, buy the old boy a pint - and dash out of the door before he can thank them.
"We are not a cult," protests Wallace, 26, a former BBC producer. But then, all cult leaders say that. What he cannot deny is that, in the space of little more than a year, he has acquired 2,500 followers, many of whom joined him without having the faintest idea what his movement was about. And nor, at first, did he.
In February last year, Wallace placed a classified ad in Loot magazine that read simply: "Join me. Send one passport-sized photograph to . . ." and gave his address. He had been bored that day: resting between projects, sitting around in boxer shorts eating toast. He just wanted to see what would happen.
Two days later, an equally bored man called Christian Jones read the advert over breakfast and, on an impulse, sent his photograph to Wallace. In doing so, he became Joinee Jones, the first follower. His flatmate Dave Cobbett followed suit. The two of them met Wallace, and a movement gradually took shape, known as "Join Me" and based around a single doctrine.
Joinees are required to perform an act of kindness, preferably for a stranger, every Friday. Hence "good Fridays". This can take any form, but the archetypal good deed, one that has almost acquired the status of a sacrament, is the unsolicited pint.
"Kind acts are easier to perform if you treat them as a joke," says Wallace. "It breaks through the embarrassment barrier that normally stops people helping strangers. If you're part of a cool little club, and you know you're going to be reporting your good deed to me afterwards, then it doesn't feel so weird."
Even so, some joinees have to screw up their courage. One recruit, an Anglican priest, bought a box of Roses chocolates to hand out to shoppers. "He told me he'd have felt less awkward robbing them," says Wallace.
We are sitting in the sunshine outside his favourite pub in Great Portland Street, central London. Britain's first postmodern spiritual leader is beefy and blokeish, with brown hair twisted into a pyramid. "I'm a scruffy, specky guy who eats processed cheese straight from the fridge. Why would anyone follow me?" he asks.
But this is disingenuous: he is also an award-winning producer who was part of the team behind Radio 4's Dead Ringers. Two years ago, he co-authored Are You Dave Gorman?, an account of an obsessive six-month search for men who bore the same name as his best mate and drinking partner. He ended up founding a global network of Dave Gormans.
In doing so, he made a curious discovery: thanks to the instant and malleable allegiances created by the internet, a sufficiently good joke can germinate into a community.
Cults and communes have traditionally been very hard to get off the ground. They have a tendency to fall apart almost immediately. In 1945, for example, a Swiss farmer named Gallus Breitenmoser decided to found a commune in the small town of Mosnang, near Zurich. He had plenty of land, and reckoned that he could realistically attract 100 people. He managed just three.
Danny Wallace is Gallus's great-nephew. He learnt about the glorious failure of the commune when he attended the old man's funeral. "It started me thinking," he says. "Why didn't people join Gallus? What would have happened if they had?"
Encouraged by Jones and Cobbett, he placed more adverts and
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