In The Beginning

Walking through Reading at 9pm with the Christmas lights on far past feeling festive. The most depressing thing about an overnight stay for work is (the cleanliness of the sheets, the universal hotel smell, the desire to return home when you know that really home when you’re there is a completely different animal) eating alone so you decide not to bother. You wander into a pub which seems unwelcoming but at least has a varied clientele. You order a G&T but comment on their having Adnams on tap to a man with chin-length black hair

Which begins

A conversation about psychiatric care, on which you have no informed opinion and have not yet drunk enough to form one at random. He’s maybe 35, handsome now, but you can see the hair, unchanging in cut for40 years, greying and coarsening, the same hard-wearing red coat fading, still striding, walking, hobbling into this bar with its varied clientele who become more reluctant to listen to his monologues as the things he’s seen at work that he certainly can’t say in this conversation with a stranger embed more and more deeply into his eyes. He’ll look, frankly, weird. But for now he’s normal and interesting and sad, unaware that even now you’re more patient than most

Which begins

A general sense of goodwill towards humanity in the semi-drunk psychiatric nurse who walks home along the river that he imagines has faded to customary bitterness but has in fact left an unconscious sense of responsibility that he hasn’t yet discharged

Which begins

An unacknowledged and misguided search for an opportunity to discharge it and continue with his previous personal life, as selfish as possible in order to keep his kindness for work. So when a shy woman, the type who fantasises about having been underestimated, asks him to go for a drink, he ends up in a chain restaurant the following Wednesday

Which begins

A bar crawl

Which begins

A process, post-meiosis, of cell development and mitosis, specialisation leading to a backbone, an ear for a tune, a smile. A child who may never know to use his inky hair to emulate down to his jawline or rebel with an electric shaver. A child with an unusual capacity for empathy and patience, but who chooses to direct it towards authors and writers, and there are limited options in this

Which begins

A teaching career filled with empathy directed towards, stumbling at, hard-eyed, well-armoured teenagers. Unambitious, very ambitious in that he believes that with his tutelage, the 15-18 year olds can possibly still like the books they grate down to sawdust within the classroom. Believes that learning Shakespeare at school can teach them to love it. Refuses to force it. Says not a word to the lad at the back of the classroom with his chemistry book open, because you can’t force it. So the young lad gets his homework finished, gives up English for A-Level, wins his place at Cambridge and comes off his motorbike on the A14 aged 25

Which begins

A fuss and furore around the posthumous PhD thesis until even arts students know that it was about protein folding. So when, 5 years later, a 40 year old who is studying degenerative illness from genetic mutation has not had a vital thought, he remembers that a 23 year old did, in fact, have that vital thought long before. That he can use that vital thought, which he would never so much as glimpsed at under normal conditions

Which begins

Life.
You should be proud of yourself for walking into that bar.