I like an orderly queue. But this morning, the staff checking passports and tickets at the gate seemed keen to spice things up by starting a human stampede. Group-five passengers were allowed to shove in front of group-one folk (the injustice!). Seizing the opportunity, a group of older ladies with sharp elbows came out of nowhere in a bid to insert themselves in prime boarding positions. As another one of their troupe started pushing beside me, I edged my suitcase forward a few strategic inches to repel her attack.

“Oh, you’ll let everyone else in but not me,” she responded a little too vocally for comfort. “It’s like we are back in England already,” she said, trying to rally people to her cause. “Are you happy now?” she added like a child robbed of its inheritance by a wicked uncle. I assured her that I was, even if I might have begun to perspire just a little. Guess what? We were seat neighbours. Squeezed-in-economy-seat neighbours. Elbows-touching neighbours.

In future, I am going to try and be a little more James Talarico in my dealings with opportunistic queue jumpers. Because, while watching the campaigning and subsequent victory of the Texas senator-elect, I was struck not just by his youthfulness and integrity but the fact that he’s, well, a nice man.

“Nice” is a funny word. Indeed I remember our English-language teachers telling us to avoid its use, to search for richer, more evocative adjectives. “Nice”, we were told, hinted at something mediocre, pleasant but a little bland. I disagree. Nice is calm, enduring, welcoming, a safe haven. And after years of meanness and political egoism run amok, I would argue that nice is having a bit of a moment. Talarico certainly does nice very well; the new UK prime minister, Andy Burnham, seems nice; Mark Carney is definitely nice. Let’s see – but I have a feeling that the nice guy might be back.

Recently, on The Urbanist, I interviewed Amanprit Arnold, an activist for deaf people who is campaigning to open Deafcity Hub, London’s first cultural and business centre for her community. I liked talking to her, listening to how she believes that good design can ensure that deaf people are not isolated (echoey restaurants, for example, cause mayhem for people who wear aids, while large computer screens in offices make lipreading impossible).

One of the reasons that her work resonated is because I had an aunt, long gone, who was in a building struck by a Luftwaffe bomb during the Second World War. She survived but, in the years that followed, her hearing increasingly deserted her. At first there were hearing aids that fixed things but, in old age, she struggled. She was surrounded by a wall of silence. And that’s when the dementia struck.

This is why I have long understood the dangers of such isolation and believed that rich friendships, conversation and community are key to defending our cognitive abilities. We are going to pick up this theme in Monocle’s December/January issue, where we meet a man who has researched this very link and found places where dementia is rare. Beyond community, he also believes that you need to eat a vegetable-rich protein diet to keep your brain running smoothly. And avoid processed food.

On Thursday, I had lunch with a woman who I have known all my working life and who was instrumental in helping me find the confidence to be a journalist. She’s unchanged: funny, sharp, editing a new magazine. She told me that she’s reading a recipe book on the very topic of brain health and that, apparently, we need to eat 10 different vegetables a day. It seems a lot, unless you are a pet rabbit. But after our little Scandi lunch, I saw her scanning the now-empty plates. “We might have done 10,” she said rather confidently. It seemed her forensic veg audit included the carrot in the delicious cake that we had devoured.

Being generous to pushy fellow travellers and hitting this new veg target feels like a lot of self-improvement targets to embrace. But I’ll try my best and my new daily rallying call is going to be: “nice guys eat cake”. Who’s with me?

To read more columns by Andrew Tuck, click here.

The post You don’t have to be mean to get ahead. As it turns out, nice guys can have their cake and eat it too appeared first on Monocle.

​