ON the long list of things I love about Spain, somewhere near the top, is the warmth shown to children in public spaces. Case in point: two years ago my wife and I were pushing our baby daughter in a pram around a Spanish town.

We took a seat outside a bustling cafe and tried to catch the waiter’s eye. He was young, maybe early twenties. And he was busy: hurrying from table to table, a serious look on his face, a precariously-balanced tray on his fingertips.

As he got closer, however, he saw our baby, and his whole demeanour changed. He knelt to her level and a huge grin spread across his face, and he made baby noises at her until she responded in kind.

It was a lovely moment. My wife and I beamed as proud parents do.

Eventually, with some reluctance, he took our order and returned to his job. But each time he passed us, he would engage with her again, and make her smile, again.

It was just one instance, on one holiday.

Other Spanish waiters and waitresses have since made a similar fuss of her. But the memory has stuck with me, largely because it feels unthinkable in British culture.

It is quite normal here for an older person to stop and make a fuss of one of my daughters, but for a young man to do the same would be genuinely surprising.

I sometimes think about this difference between Spain and the UK. I wonder how the presence (or absence) of these small public interactions – between strangers, across generations – shapes how a child sees the world.

I imagine that such little threads of connection help weave a culture in which people feel a greater sense of belonging to one another. And I suspect that if such moments were a barometer for the overall health of a society, then Spain would be a richer nation than ours.

One place these encounters seem more likely to happen, however, is in church. If you are unfamiliar with such places, they are an unusual social space.

Each Sunday you sit, stand, sing and pray alongside others, most of whom are neither strangers nor friends, but somewhere in between.

As I look back now at my childhood and teens, some of the small interactions at church, with those older than me, were instrumental in developing my self-belief and sense of belonging.

Even little moments – someone remembering my name, that I was in a band, that I was fundraising for a school trip – made me feel valued, because I felt others were choosing to invest in the person I was becoming.

That self-belief is still with me. It did not seem to matter one bit that these were often brief conversations.

I expect that that Spanish waiter intuitively understood this, but I find I need to continually remind myself: these small interactions with young people might just add up to something much greater than we will ever know.

Jake Lloyd

Crediton Congregational Church