The kindness of strangers: my new couch was stranded outside – then a burly gym guy helped move it upstairs

‘I never saw that man again – I wish I’d been able to tell him that he had restored my faith in people.’ Composite: Victoria Hart/Getty Images

I’d bought a nice new couch after my labrador chewed through the first one. But I didn’t put it in my apartment straight away. My plan was to swap the old couch for the new one right before my parents came to visit from overseas, so the dog wouldn’t have a chance to destroy it before their arrival.

My apartment was upstairs and the new couch was in storage on the ground floor, so I hired removalists to swap the two couches the day my parents arrived. They took the tattered old couch down – but didn’t carry the new one up. Instead, they left it on the street for anyone to grab, and were gone before I had the chance to correct them.