Why it's payback time for paying it forward and you should think twice about giving Kelly Brook a doughnut

Gary Bainbridge says: "Little thank yous? Do me a favour!"

Clickbait model and actress Kelly Brook being Kelly Brook

You might be familiar with the concept of “paying it forward”, but if you are not a fan of the later films of the boy from The Sixth Sense you will require an explanation.

Essentially, a favour when received is not repaid, but is instead passed on to a third party, and that favour is passed on in turn.

For example, I might give, for the sake of illustrating this column and increasing the number of clicks on it, the actress and model Kelly Brook a jam doughnut.

She might then explain to Peter Capaldi, the man who plays the TV character Dr Who, that he looks silly with his top button fastened , saving him from years of mockery. He might then explain to a Dr Who fan on the internet that Dr Who isn't real, and so on, and so on.

It becomes a scarf of virtue wrapping the world, touching everybody except me, the man who started all this, and who remains a doughnut down in perpetuity and, consequently, slightly bitter.

I suppose it is possible that the “paying it forward” chain would eventually return to me, in the same way that we are all cousins of the Queen if you go back far enough, but it would be difficult to tell.

The idea of little thank yous improving the world is currently being given an airing in a commercial for some bank or other, I can't remember which one.

It suggests that giving trinkets to customers, who can't be bothered switching their accounts because All Banks Are The Same, makes them a cross between Mother Teresa and Superman, instead of one of the city bookies who landed us with so much debt that we have only enough cash to pay for flood relief in Tory constituencies.

You'll know the commercial. It uses as its theme the old song “The Magic Penny”, which is coincidentally the amount of annual interest banks pay out on a £10,000 savings account these days.

And it is as unbearably sunny as the Irish woman who always seems to be on call for that terrible idiot on the Kindle advert, who only knows how to press the help button, despite the fact he is of an age which has used the internet since their first day at school.

I apologise for my grumpiness, but I am in a bad mood since I accidentally “paid it forward” for somebody this week, and it did not end well for either of us.

I was in a launderette, as part of my continuing campaign to “keep it real”. All the washing machines were in operation, so I sat next to a Chinese gentleman and waited.

I raised my eyebrows at him, the international symbol for “All the world is before men like you and me, lines of longitude and latitude slicing through cities and plains and mountains, and yet here we are, watching washing move around and around in some suds.”

But he did not reply, either verbally or with his eyebrows. Instead he regarded me coolly, and continued with his phone conversation.

He became agitated and looked at his watch, stamping his foot on the ground with impatience.

I am not very good at reading body language, but it was clear he thought he had better and more pressing things to do than this infernal laundry. But then, seconds later, his machine finished its cycle. And he stood up and took his conversation outdoors.

I was incensed. He was holding me up. Why couldn't he have his angry conversation in Cantonese in front of me? It's not as if I had any clue what he was saying. "Empty your machine, you total disgrace," I thought.

Then another machine a couple of spaces along stopped. A woman stepped forward and emptied it. “Hooray,” I thought. I filled the tub, then went to the central payment terminal, keyed in the number of my machine, fed it with money, and pressed the start button.

What happened was not my fault. How can I possibly be expected to remember a complex two-digit number? My washing machine was number 25. However, I had keyed in “23”.

And so it came to be that Angry Chinese Man rushed back into the launderette, grabbed a laundry basket, returned to machine 23, and was visibly distressed to see that the washing cycle had inexplicably resumed from the very beginning.

I kept my eyebrows to myself and sat somewhere else. And I hoped that I wouldn't be paid back.

What do you think?

Have you ever paid it forward?

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