There was a funny story doing the rounds on Twitter the other day. Somebody went into a supermarket and saw a young man with a trolley stacked high with toilet rolls. Angrily, she accosted him: “You selfish, inconsiderate XXXXX! How dare you ignore the needs of the elderly who are struggling to get one roll because of the pathetic likes of you!”

The young man replied: “Miss, I work here and if you don’t mind, I need to get on with stacking the shelves.”

I hope the real hoarders are starting to feel some shame or regret for what they did and equally, for the rest of us to channel the anger we felt towards them for more constructive purpose.

Since exiting out of my last restaurant Roast a while back, I have spent part of the last year undertaking duties in my capacity as High Sheriff of Greater London, the highlight of which has been presenting awards at The Supreme Court on behalf of The Queen. The awards go to members of the public who have shown exceptional acts of bravery which have helped apprehend people who have committed a crime. They were all nominated by judges presiding over the court cases involved.

Here’s one example. A 91 year old tube passenger was pushed over the platform and onto the tracks by someone who then ran away. Two fellow passengers, seeing that a train was approaching, jumped down onto the track and managed to push him up with others helping him over. A 60 year old passenger saw the culprit escaping the scene and ran after him, shouting to others to stop him, which they did and he was arrested.

Such is the way that news is packaged and sold, it is assumed we prefer to be angry than proud.

More and more we need a good news channel, one that way outlasts this pandemic. A neighbourhood restaurant can be a perfect means of providing one and can be one that acts as a platform for creating that good news. Once it’s safe to do so, we shall be setting the first one up in Balham and then a second in Chiswick.

I expect one of the more permanent impacts CV19 will have on many of us is the practice of working from home. On a superficial level, this could be good for the business as there will be more people hanging around in their neighbourhoods during the day so should mean better breakfast and lunch trade for us. It also helps fulfil a wider social ambition I have for these restaurants as hangouts – not just so people can check e-mails and conduct virtual meetings – but also to use these spaces for collective purpose and engage our concerns for the community around us. What can we jointly do to stop drug dealers peddling on our streets, what can we do about the homeless veteran we all see and ignore, how do we help the school around the corner build its library?

Alongside customer groups with whom we test our food, our wine, our beer and our cocktails, we will be led by local residents into what kind of movement we create and what activities we undertake, like a very localised version of the clothing brand Patagonia.

This goes, I hope, beyond Barack Obama’s request that we all be “useful and kind”. It has to be more integrated and connected than that. Recently I was on the site of the Balham space. The people who operated the previous restaurant on that site had left behind all their crockery, cutlery and glassware. It’s all high quality stuff – just not right for our brand. Our next meeting that day was with the headmaster of the school round the corner who had a fundraising target poster on a wall. You guessed it – it’s to build a library there.

I told him the day we get the keys, the first thing we do is get his PTA in to buy all the crockery, cutlery and glassware we’ll have inherited and the school fund gets all the money. It solves a problem for me, it benefits the school and I’ve got a bunch of loyal customers before we’ve even started. This goes way beyond writing out a cheque to charity – it binds people together with a common sense of purpose.

Let’s use this time of reflection to revive the notion of the active citizen. And if we can now combine that with a new form of prosocial businesses, at least some of the pain will have been worth it.