Danecdotes: Reminiscences and Reflections Concerning a Largely Wasted Life

Danny  Frederick

This book tells part of the story of my life in a succession of anecdotes, or ‘Danecdotes,’ as a friend called them. It generally focuses on the unusual and thereby offers material for reflection. I often include some more or less philosophical reflections within the anecdotes; and such reflections often raise further questions too. The book may be considered as a contribution to ‘the philosophy of everyday life.’ The anecdotes are autobiographical and are presented in approximately chronological order. However, the book is not an autobiography. Large segments of my life have been excluded, particularly those concerning my sex life and intimate relationships. So, although the book is highly personal, it is not so personal as to be uncomfortable, either for me, or for my sexual partners, or for my intimate friends, or for my family, or for the educated reader. The topics covered include growing up in the old Notting Hill slums (long since demolished), attendance (and non-attendance) at a comprehensive school in Shepherd's Bush, cohabitation, working in a rough pub in Notting Hill, my life as an aggressive drunk, beer festivals, my on-off academic career, work as a management consultant, workplace bullying, my career as a management accountant, excelling under pressure, fall into depression, anxiety and bruxism, attempts to regain sanity, and philosophical reflections on life, work, management, morals, politics, metaphysics, God, and how to discover oneself. The pdf is available here for free download. The paperback is available from Amazon at cost-price: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Danecdotes-Reminiscences-Reflections-Concerning-Largely/dp/B08QFCR79S/

Danecdotes Reminiscences and Reflections Concerning a Largely Wasted Life Danny Frederick Copyright © 2020 Danny Frederick All rights reserved. 2 CONTENTS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Introduction Living in a Slum Bunking Off School School Bookie Horseracing Riffler How I Became a Marxist and Then Ceased To Be One Marxism and Masturbation A Maoist Group Logic and Character Flaw at the LSE Hitched The North Pole: a Day in the Life The North Pole Smashed Again Rough Justice at the North Pole? Hell’s Angels at the North Pole Remembering Smiler (Tony Allum) Two Incidents in North London Moral Luck God and Me Evicted and Locked Up Why I Became a Veggie and Then Ceased To Be One Some Curiosities of Aggression Science and Mysticism Two Incidents in the Penny Farthing Back in the 1980s: Twentieth Century Schizoid Man Employees Behaving Badly What Mary Saw Working for a Sicko Misery Happiness Beer Festivals Politics and Ideology 3 5 7 10 12 14 17 19 23 25 28 31 35 38 41 45 47 49 52 55 59 62 64 67 69 71 75 78 81 86 90 94 100 32 Four Women and Some Excrement 33 When I Went Mad 34 Trying to Regain Sanity 1: Initial Responses 35 Trying to Regain Sanity 2: Hypnosis 36 Trying to Regain Sanity 3: Meds and Exercise 37 Trying to Regain Sanity 4: Psychotherapy 38 Trying to Regain Sanity 5: Autobiography 39 Trying to Regain Sanity 6: Acupuncture 40 Trying to Regain Sanity 7: New Environment 41 War and Peace, and Management 42 Terminal Cancer 43 What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up? 44 The End Appendix. My Popper: Finding Oneself by Trial and Error 4 104 107 113 116 121 125 129 134 137 140 143 145 151 153 INTRODUCTION This book is a collection of reminiscences, with reflections thereupon, which I have, over several years, posted to my Facebook timeline. Numerous people seem to have found them interesting or amusing. The anecdotes are autobiographical and the reflections are often philosophical, so one might count this book as a contribution to ‘the philosophy of everyday life.’ The anecdotes are presented in approximately chronological order. Although the material is autobiographical, this book is not an autobiography. Large segments of my life have been excluded, particularly those concerning my sex life and intimate relationships. So, although the book is highly personal, it is not so personal as to be uncomfortable, either for me, or for my sexual partners, or for my intimate friends, or for my family, or for the educated reader. The title of the book was suggested to me by a friend, Mick Turner, whom I hereby thank. The subtitle is my own doing. The photograph on page 120 is reproduced with the permission of Nick Turner (not to be confused with Mick Turner). The photographs on pages 89, 99, 115, 124 and 128 are reproduced with the permission of Roy and Pat Bond. The other photographs are family possessions. My mum, Joyce Frederick, née Gardiner, on holiday (Spain probably, early 1970s). 5 My dad, John Frederick, in Portobello Road, working on my mum’s dad’s fruit and veg stall on a Saturday, mid-1970s. 6 1. LIVING IN A SLUM After my parents got married, they moved into one of the Notting Hill slums, at 225 Latimer Road, W10. I was their first child, born in August, 1955, and I lived in that place for nine years and eight months. My two sisters and my brother, being younger, lived there for a shorter period. The phrase ‘Notting Hill slums’ may be somewhat misleading, in two ways. First, part of Notting Hill is very wealthy: it is one of the poshest places to live in Britain. So ‘Notting Hill slums’ may sound like irony. But the other part of Notting Hill is one of the most ‘deprived’ areas in the country. That is the case now; and it has been so for much more than a century. Charles Booth described the area as “one of the worst slums in London.” Second, the phrase ‘Notting Hill slums’ is often associated with the notorious landlord Peter Rachman. But Rachman’s properties were originally large, luxurious houses that were turned into slums: they had been run down, converted into multiple occupancy and packed full of tenants, often immigrants from the Caribbean, in insalubrious conditions. In contrast, the terrace of houses in the middle section of Latimer Road appeared to have been built as slums. One could not imagine that they were ever the type of houses in which well-off people would have chosen to live. In August 1958, a fracas outside Latimer Road station in Bramley Road (a turning off Latimer Road) developed into a riot which spread into Latimer Road and Bard Road. That was the start of the Notting Hill Race Riots. That was happening outside our house (we lived a few yards from Bard Road); but none of the three families in our house was involved. After then, the estate agents started calling the area ‘North Kensington.’ But we still called it ‘Notting Hill.’ The area is sometimes called ‘Notting Dale,’ to distinguish it from the posh part of Notting Hill. But I had never heard it called ‘Notting Dale’ until many years after I lived there. Our family occupied the middle floor of a three-storey house. On that floor there were two rooms: a bedroom just big enough to take a double bed, some cots and some drawers; and a small kitchen. All six of us slept in the bedroom. The tiny kitchen was also our living room. The floor below was home for another family of six (parents and four children). They had three rooms because an extension had been built on to the back of the house at ground level. The floor above us had two rooms and was occupied by a couple with a young child; but they moved out to be replaced by an elderly couple who were the grandparents of the children downstairs. There was no bathroom or shower in the house: my parents used the local public baths at Lancaster Road, and we children were bathed in the kitchen 7 sink. I was nearly ten when we were due to move out and I was still having my bath in the kitchen sink. Fortunately, I was small for my age (I was the smallest boy in the class at every school that I attended until the age of about sixteen). There was a back yard (no grass) with an outside toilet for use by all three families (fourteen people). It was cold out there in the winter! The toilet was inhabited by spiders; and the toilet paper was often old newspapers. My mum insisted that the house was rat-infested. I remember mice, but no rats. The house was part of a terrace of houses, all pretty much the same. The landlord was a local bookmaker. One of his sons lived next door to us on the ground floor with a wife and three children. However, unlike its middle section, the two ends of Latimer Road did not seem to be slum dwellings: they were just ordinary working-class terraced houses of the time; though some of them might have been maisonettes. There was no bell or knocker on our house’s street door. When we got home from school, we just kicked the door. Whoever was inside then let us in. The door was a panelled wooden door, but it had been covered with a sheet of hardboard on the outside. In the bottom right-hand corner of the door, the hardboard had become buckled and detached from the wood, under the impact of our kicks. The door had only a Yale lock, so it would have been easy to break into, and none of the doors inside the house had any locks on them. But no one broke into our house. Too many people in there? Nothing worth stealing? Community spirit? Probably a mix of all three. The houses in our terrace were officially condemned as unfit for human habitation while we were living in them, possibly even before my parents moved in. They were eventually evacuated and then bulldozed, along with many similar terraces in Notting Hill, as part of a slum clearance programme inaugurated by the London County Council and completed by the Greater London Council. The occupants were found alternative accommodation in council properties in various London boroughs. David Driver was the oldest child in the family living on the ground floor. He is ten-and-a-half months older than I am but we were in the same class at school (my birthday is toward the end of August) and we were best friends. Shortly before we were moved out, David and I got up on to the roofs of our terrace and removed all the lead from between the roof tiles. We brought it down in carrier bags and managed to fill two potato sacks with lead. A potato sack held fifty-six pounds of potatoes. I do not know what they weighed when full of lead; but David and I could not lift them. My granddad, Danny Gardiner, an ex-boxer and a very fit man, picked up the sacks, one in each hand, and took them to a scrap metal dealer. He returned with some 8 cash. I cannot remember how much it was, but it was a lot, which David and I split between us. David’s family were moved over to Roehampton. My family ended up in a three-bedroom end-of-terrace council house in Bentworth Road, Shepherd’s Bush/White City, a bit over a mile away from our old place. It was small, the smallest bedroom being just big enough for a single bed and some slim furniture. Downstairs there was a small living room, a small kitchen and a cramped toilet-and-bathroom. There were small gardens front and back. But it seemed like a mansion to me at the time. Still, the first night there, or perhaps even the first few nights, as I lay in bed, I got very nostalgic for Latimer Road. I could see the old house when I shut my eyes and I felt very sad. I have been unable to find any old pictures of our terrace in Latimer Road. There are many pictures of other nearby streets available on history websites. Mum, dad and me. Not at Latimer Road. 9 2. BUNKING OFF SCHOOL In my first year at Christopher Wren Comprehensive School, we had swimming classes at Lime Grove baths in Shepherd’s Bush, every Friday. I went a couple of times but I hated it. The swimming class was the final class before lunch. A coach picked us up outside the Bryony Road school gate and then dropped us back there at the end of the lesson. To get to the gate we had to walk past the boys’ toilets. So I used to pop into the toilets and wait there until the coach had gone. I then went home for an early lunch, which was some bread and a can of tomato soup, which I heated myself, my parents being out at work. That carried on week after week. One Friday, right toward the end of the school year, my system failed. I cannot remember why. Perhaps the coach was delayed, or perhaps the boys’ toilets were locked. But I ended up going swimming. At the pool, the teacher did not recognise me: he asked me if I was a new boy. Stupidly, I said “no,” which virtually amounted to an admission that I had been ‘bunking off.’ The teacher never followed it up; and he never saw me again. I managed to bunk off swimming almost every week for the succeeding two years, too, after which it was not compulsory. Another lesson I hated was games. It took up most of the morning, involved a coach trip of a few miles to either Sudbury or Warren Farm, and almost invariably got us back late for lunch. In the winter we had to play rugby; in the summer, cricket. Both bored me, and in the winter it was freezing standing around in the cold in shorts and shirt, since I avoided getting involved in the game. My mate, Frank Neale, did not like the games lesson either. So, beginning in our second year, we decided to bunk off every week. We were soon joined by another friend, whose name I cannot remember because I always called him ‘Fred Nerk,’ that being how he introduced himself to me originally. When the other kids were piling on to the coaches outside the school front gate, in Bloemfontein Road, the three of us headed for the school playgrounds, north of the gyms. At the far end was a wire mesh fence that separated the school from an old people’s home. Someone had helpfully cut a hole in the fence. We sat there by the hole, looking out past the old people’s home to the Westway where we could see the games coaches go by. Once they had gone we escaped through the hole. We then spent several hours walking the streets and getting up to mischief. We did not manage to bunk off every week; but we did do most of them. Our record for the number of consecutive games lessons that we successfully bunked off was fourteen. One week we bumped into a teacher (Mr. Mitchell, I think) who was walking home because he felt ill. We ran away from him. 10 He recognised our school uniforms but he probably could not put names to our faces (there were fifteen hundred boys at the school). Swimming and games were the only lessons I bunked off regularly. But there was also occasional bunking off, with different groups of boys, whenever anyone had an idea of something to do with the time. One day, after school, my earliest friend, David (who by then lived in Roehampton) turned up at my house. He was not in school the next day (I cannot remember why), but the next day was a school day for me. I decided I would go in and register, then bunk off with my friend John Foley and meet David. The three of us then spent the day, or perhaps just the morning, messing around in Shepherd’s Bush. On another of these ad hoc truancies, I bunked off with a couple of other boys, Ian Hills and Terry Jones, who were not from my usual circle of friends. We left the school, got to the Westway and then ran across that busy road. When we were halfway across the far side of the road, there was a car approaching us. I noticed that it was my dad’s car and he was driving. He noticed me too. But he never said anything about it to me, though I did overhear him mentioning it to my mum that evening. We also got caught that day by a school truancy officer, as we were approaching Ladbroke Grove. Back at Christopher Wren we had to report to the Head of the Lower School, Mr. Boone, who brought out his canes and laid them on his desk while he admonished us. But he did not cane us. The bunking off continued. Me at Thomas Jones Primary School, about six years old. 11 3. SCHOOL BOOKIE When I was twelve, I saw a programme on the television one evening in which several celebrities gave their tips for the following day’s Epsom Derby, which was held on the first Wednesday in June back then. Clement Freud went for Remand. I must have liked the name. I gave a shilling to my dad to place a sixpence each-way bet on Remand for me the next day. At school (Christopher Wren Comprehensive) the next day my class had a physical education session on the green just inside the main gate. When we finished, on the way back to the gym we had to pass a small building that was a kind of leisure room for the teachers. I looked through the window and I saw that there was a TV on and some teachers were watching the Derby. I stopped to look. One horse was well ahead and racing to the finish. I thought: I hope that’s Remand. But then a horse from near the back of the pack suddenly sprinted and flew past the others, caught up with the leader and flew past him too. I was astonished. I found out later that the winner was Sir Ivor. Remand came fourth. I had lost my money. But I now had an interest in horseracing and betting. At the start of September, when I began my third year, age thirteen, I discovered that a classmate, Trevor Banner, shared my interest. He used to bring a newspaper into school. I think it was the Express, because (from memory) that was the best paper for the horses back then. He sat in class studying the form. Then he passed his paper across the aisle that separated us so that I could do the same. The two of us decided to run a betting service in the school, taking bets from the other kids. We paid starting prices. Mostly we made small sums of money; but on big races we could earn a lot more. We took a great deal of money on the Cambridgeshire at the end of September. A lot of it was bet on Wolver Hollow. After school Trevor and I rushed to my house then turned on the radio to listen to the race. It ended in a photo-finish between Wolver Hollow and Emerilo. We waited tensely for what seemed like ages to get the stewards’ verdict. Fortunately, Emerilo was pronounced the winner. I was jubilant because we had made a packet and I was looking forward to the next big race. Trevor’s reaction was markedly different: he was just greatly relieved because we came so close to owing far more than we could pay out. Trevor decided not to operate the betting service any longer; so I carried it on by myself. In the playground one day my mate Frank Neale asked me: “Are you doing business with the black kids? They love a bet.” “I’ve asked all the ones I know,” I said. “What about Campbell and his crowd?” 12 “I don’t really know Campbell.” I knew who Campbell was. Everyone did. But I had never spoken to him. “I’ll take you over to him.” We found Campbell just north-west of the gyms. Frank introduced me and explained what I was doing. Sure enough, Campbell was interested. I gave him my newspaper. He selected a horse and he said he would bet sixpence to win. I passed on the newspaper to one of his mates, then I made an entry in my account book, took a shilling off Campbell and gave him a numbered betting slip. He burst out laughing and exclaimed: “He’s just like a real bookie!” I then gave Campbell his sixpence change. A few seconds later a teacher appeared. He grabbed me by the arm, pulled me away a few yards and said “Wait there.” He then went over to fire questions at Campbell. One of my classmates, Maurice Bitten, came over to me to ask what was going on. I told him I had been caught taking bets. I gave him my account book, betting slips and some of the pocketfuls of change that I was carrying. Then one of Campbell’s friends came over. He said that Campbell had told the teacher that I had borrowed sixpence from him the previous day and that I had just paid it back. So, when the teacher came over to question me, that is what I said. The teacher did not believe the story. Campbell was one of the biggest boys in my year (240 boys in a year, 1,500 at the school); and he often seemed to be in trouble with the teachers over something or other. I was the smallest boy in the year and I also looked younger than my age. The teacher might have thought I was a first-year rather than a third-year. When he saw me giving money to Campbell he presumably thought that I was being mugged. The teacher referred us both to our year-master, Mr. Toms. We saw him separately and we each told the same story. “How do you know Campbell?” Toms asked me. “I know Frank Neale and…” “Oh, I know Frank Neale!” I laughed. The case was dismissed. But if the teachers did not believe our story, they might have found the truth even less believable. I carried on taking bets on the big races for another two years, but only from my classmates, which could be done discreetly. 13 4. HORSERACING I had a bet on the Derby in 1968 (I was twelve). At school, I managed to see the end of the race when I saw a television through the window of a teachers’ common room. The way that the horse, Sir Ivor, in the wink of an eye, sprinted from almost last to first captivated me and made me a fan of horseracing. I began to run a betting service at school. Initially, it was a joint enterprise with my friend Trevor; but after a few months I ran it as a sole trader. When Trevor and I ran the service together, we used to pay bookmakers’ starting prices. Once I was doing it on my own, I often offered odds very different to those obtainable in a betting office, to reflect my own estimation of the likely results and of how much boys would be willing to bet if I raised or lowered a price. In the 1970 Derby, I would not accept bets on Nijinsky because I was convinced he would win (which he did), but I offered much higher odds than the bookies did for win bets on the rest of the field. My long-time friend, David Driver, was also interested in the horses; and so was his dad, John. It must have been some time in 1969 that John took David and me to Sandown Park, probably to see the Whitbread Gold Cup. As we waited in the queue to go through the turnstile to get into the tattersalls/grandstand (the more expensive area next to the final straight and the winning post), an official approached John and explained that adults did not have to pay an entrance fee for children. He then directed Dave and me to the gate next to the turnstile, where there was another official standing around who waved us in. We then waited inside for John to come through the turnstile after he had paid his entrance fee. Dave and I guessed that this arrangement would enable us to get in for free even if we were unaccompanied. We would just join the queue and stand close to an adult; then, as we approached the turnstile, Dave and I would walk off to the side gate and the official would wave us in, making the assumption that we were with one of the adults in the queue. We tried this at the next meeting at Sandown and it worked. After then, when there was horseracing at Sandown Park, we usually went and got in for free. We took a couple of quid with us for a bet. We were caught out only once. The official at the side gate, obviously suspecting that we were unaccompanied, followed us after we passed through the gate to see whether we met up with an adult on the other side. When we did not, he ejected us. We then bought tickets for the cheap area, further back from the winning post; but we still had some cash left for a bet. David and I also went to Epsom to see the Oaks in 1971. In 1970, I went to Kempton races with a very posh man who was involved with the Jockey 14 Club. I had to do a project at school, so I did one on horseracing. My form teacher, Mr. Keogh, suggested that I contact the Jockey Club for more information that I could use in my project. I did. The invitation to Kempton Park followed. It was a nice day out; but I was a bit upset that I had missed seeing Nijinsky win the Irish Derby on television on that day. I was still the smallest boy in my year at school, so my interest in horseracing naturally led to suggestions that I should become a jockey. I liked the idea. I had a picture of Lester Piggott on my wall. But I had never ridden a horse. There was a horse-riding school near David, in Roehampton. The instructors took people, mostly children, out riding in Richmond Park or on Wimbledon Common. David and I sometimes went along to watch. On one occasion we paid for lessons. But once atop the horses, we were terrified: it looks a long way down to the ground. We went out on the horses with a group of other riders, but neither Dave nor I got our horses to gallop or even to canter. A trot was frightening enough. I seem to recall, though, that Dave made a better effort than I did. Some time later, in Wales, my dad took me to a friend of his who had a farm and a horse. When we got there I was put up on the horse bareback. Almost immediately, the farmer slapped the horse’s rump and the horse went charging off across the field. I clung on but again I was petrified. We were going at quite a gallop when we came to a fence at the edge of the field. I was frightened that the horse would jump the fence and throw me off. Fortunately, he just came to a stop. The farmer’s boys then ran over to me and took charge of the horse, allowing me to get off. I stood there listening to them for a while. They decided to show me a little trick. One of them started rubbing the horse’s genitals and a long, pink-coloured shaft protruded. I watched this with a mixture of interest and disgust. But I had no desire ever to get on a horse again. Come 1972 I had lost interest in horseracing. By then I was into heavy metal. My interest in horseracing returned in 1980, when I was getting drunk day-in, day-out, because betting on the horses was one way of trying to relieve the boredom. But I lost interest again in 1983, when I was getting back into philosophy. Aside. The incident with the farmer’s boys reminds me of an incident that happened about a year later. In the summer holiday, 1971, when I was fifteen or sixteen (my birthday is in August), I was alone, upstairs, in my parents’ house. The back gate and the back door were open as usual and a couple of my sister Maxine’s friends came in looking for her. I expected them to leave when they saw that she was not in. But they stayed. I wondered what they were doing, so I went on to the landing at the top of the stairs to listen. It 15 turned out that they were masturbating our cat. I heard them giggling and talking about the pink thing that poked out as they stroked the cat’s genitals. One was describing to the other how, if you continued caressing, the pink thing squirted out white stuff. The two girls would have been thirteen. I was quite intrigued. I thought they should not be doing it, but I did not feel that I could stop them; and the cat was not being harmed. Me, age twelve, at Christopher Wren Comprehensive School. 16 5. RIFFLER Early in my fifth year at Christopher Wren, when I was aged fifteen, I was in a woodwork class when the teacher, Mr. Beasley, was explaining the different types of files that woodworkers use. One of those files is called a ‘riffler.’ That name struck me as highly amusing. I laughed, I pronounced the name and I laughed again. When Beasley went into the back room to get some wood, I wrote ‘Riffler’ on the blackboard. When he came back he saw it, rubbed it off, then continued with the class. At later woodwork classes, when Beasley was not looking, I got hold of the chalk and wrote ‘Riffler’ on the blackboard and, sometimes, on his desk. When he discovered it, he just wiped it off. He must have known it was me, but he never said anything. He seemed imperturbable. I then started doing similar things in other class rooms. In our form room in the Old Building, when the form master was not there, I would sometimes write ‘Riffler’ on the blackboard. Sometimes I would write it on the teacher’s desk or on the walls, always in chalk so that it was reasonably easy to remove. I then started doing it in other class rooms, whether they were in the Old Building or in the Main Building. I was also writing it, in chalk, on the desks of some of my classmates. I admit that this was curious behaviour and it was a nuisance for people who had to remove the chalk. But it struck me as funny that people would keep encountering the peculiar word ‘Riffler.’ It seems to have stuck some other kids as amusing, too, because they followed suit. Soon the word ‘Riffler’ was appearing all over the school; and it was not me doing it. Sometimes it was written with pens or ‘magic markers.’ I had started a craze. The school was covered in ‘Riffler’ graffiti. One day I went into one of the classrooms in the Main Building for a physics lesson when I noticed that someone had written ‘Riffler’ with a felt-tip pen on a glass lampshade on one of the ceiling lights. It was a high ceiling. The desks in that room were large and sturdy with gas taps at the end of them (for Bunsen burners) so the boy must have put a chair on the desk in order to reach the lampshade. The graffiti was most widespread in the Old Building, where the fifth year was based, and it had started there, so the teachers surmised that the culprit was someone in the fifth year. At a fifth-year Assembly, one of the teachers, Mr. Thompson, lamented the damage to school property and the extra work being caused for the cleaners. He said that it had to stop. He also said that the culprit must be a fifth-year boy. “This boy is sick,” he said, “and I don’t mean physically sick: he is sick in the mind.” That caused some laughter, and plenty of looks in my direction, since many, if not all, of the boys knew 17 that I was the originator. Thompson then announced, to groans all round, that the whole fifth year would be held on detention as a punishment. Clearly, the idea was that the identity of the culprit would be known to the other boys who would mete out some punishment to him to repay him for their detention. Mr. Beasley must have known that I was the culprit. Why did he keep quiet? Perhaps he did not keep quiet. Perhaps Thompson and the other teachers knew it was me but thought that the other boys would give me a better punishment than they could give me. Later that day, and before the detention, I was in a British Constitution class when the topic of the Riffler came up. Of course, it had nothing to do with the British Constitution. Perhaps it had been written on the teacher’s desk. The teacher, Mr. Mitchell, opined that Mr. Thompson’s assessment was wrong. “It’s not mental illness,” he said, “it is just someone’s warped sense of humour.” Did he know it was me? I think he had a better understanding of it than Thompson in any case. That afternoon, when the school ended, we in the fifth year were detained. I cannot remember what we did in detention. It would have made sense if they had us clean up all the ‘Riffler’ graffiti but they might have just had us do some school work. When the detention came to an end, we all got up and made our way out of the building. I walked along the corridor, down the stairs, through the door and into the open. Then there seemed to be a bit of commotion. Some of my classmates in front of me stopped me, there seemed to be the sound of a scuffle behind me, then I was pushed backwards. There was a boy crouching down behind me, so I went over. Multiple hands grabbed me by the arms and legs. I was then given ‘the bumps.’ I was raised high in the air, and as I went up I got some light kicks to the back; then I was let fall, without them letting go of me, almost until I touched the ground; then I was raised again for the second ‘bump.’ I cannot remember how many bumps I got. It was something that was normally done to boys on their birthdays and they got a bump for every year of their life, so I probably got sixteen. It was the only time it happened to me because my birthday was in the school summer holidays. It was a remarkably lenient and good-natured punishment. I suspect that the teachers expected something worse. 18 6. HOW I BECAME A MARXIST AND THEN CEASED TO BE ONE When I was in the sixth form at Christopher Wren Comprehensive I got friendly with Ian Scammel. He was the editor of the sixth-form magazine, which was a collection of articles written by sixth-formers (upper and lower). I decided to write a few bawdy articles for the magazine. Ian liked them and passed them to the secretaries to type up. But the secretaries alerted the Headmaster, Mr. Hooton, who promptly suspended the magazine. I was affronted. Other sixth-formers also complained about the suspension of the magazine and there was some discussion about it. Eventually, Hooton reinstated the magazine. I wrote another article, this time complaining about censorship and describing Hooton as a dictator. That was published. One of my earlier offending pieces was also published with it, as a sop to assuage the dissatisfaction that had been caused by the magazine’s suspension. Hooton’s banning of the sixth-form magazine, and the commotion it provoked, had politicised me. Previously, I had taken no interest in politics or current affairs. Now I became a rebel. The commotion led to a sixth-form council being set up. I got involved. I used the council to find fault with everything I could think of, and I came forward with many proposals for changes to the way the school was run. A few of them were agreed by the council and passed on to Hooton, though I think that none of them was implemented. My friend Ray Blakeborough began expressing an interest in Marxism and Maoism. Being, like so many teenagers, a ‘rebel without a cause,’ that gave me a ready-made channel for my rebellion. We went to Foyle’s bookshop in central London one evening after school and bought ‘The Communist Manifesto,’ by Marx and Engels, and a book containing selected writings of Mao Tse-Tung (not ‘the little red book’). That was never going to work. Marxism is about closed-minded conformity: everyone must think the same, everyone must do as they are told, all you need to know has already been written in the sacred texts, dissenting voices must be silenced. But I am essentially a maverick. I don’t conform. I usually want to try something different. If there is a general consensus about anything, I am the one who disagrees. If people start agreeing with me, I change my mind. The mere fact of consensus offends me. There is always a better way. In the summer holiday I borrowed numerous political books from the public library in Hammersmith. I soon found that anarchism appealed to me more than did Marxism. However, being repelled by Stirner’s panegyric on 19 selfishness, I ended up in the company of the left-wingers, Bakunin and Kropotkin. Nevertheless, shortly after I went back to school, I got heavily into Marxist theory. I think that the reason for that was simply that there were many more Marxists around than there were anarchists. I wanted to get involved in something; and Marxism seemed to be where the action was, or was likely to be. When I decided to go to university, I picked the London School of Economics (LSE) because it had the reputation at that time of being the most radical of the British colleges. I taught myself economics by reading R. G. Lipsey’s ‘Positive Economics’ (our economics teacher was fucking hopeless). I read it in ten Sundays and I got a grade A at A-level. So Marx’s ‘Capital’ seemed to me to be junk. The problem was not just that the economics was nonsense but that the whole thing was nonsense. It was supposed to be a theoretical treatise but it was really just bad poetry. I would not have put it that way at the time; it just seemed a rigmarole to me (I have never been able to get on with poetry). But I was interested in the Marxist theory of society and history, which I got from the writings of Engels, who wrote in prose, and who also wrote on philosophy. Although I read all that stuff with interest, I was sceptical: I wanted Marxism to be true, but I did not believe it. I was going on demonstrations frequently. On one of them, in June, 1974, we demonstrators were herded into Red Lion Square in central London before mounted police charged at us. A young student, Kevin Gately, was killed. Obviously, being in the throng, and being five feet and seven inches tall, I could not see everything that happened. But from where I was it looked as though the police had unleashed an unprovoked attack on peaceful demonstrators. I was shocked. Suddenly I thought: “My God, Marxism is true! The police are just an oppressive instrument of the ruling class.” From that point on, I actually believed in Marxism, and the nagging doubts I had endured up until then were largely laid to rest. When I started at LSE I was in the politics (‘Government’) department. However, the Marxist works in which I had taken most interest were those on philosophy, written by Engels, Lenin and numerous commentators. As a consequence, I had developed a general interest in philosophical questions. After a few weeks at LSE. I switched to the philosophy department. There I was introduced to works on logic and philosophy of science, including those of the philosopher Karl Popper. Popper’s philosophical views were in stark contrast to the epistemological and metaphysical views of the Marxists. For the latter, people are products of their circumstances, their ideas and theories are reflections or products of the material world, and scientific knowledge is derived in a passive way from observation, which is in turn regarded as a passive reception of data. In 20 contrast, Popper insists that the mind is active and creative. We do not derive theories from observations, we use our imaginations to invent them; then, if we are scientific, we test our theories by looking for things that are inconsistent with them. That looking is not simply observation; it is often a matter of thinking up experimental tests. Also, when we observe the result of a test we are not observing passively, we are interpreting what is happening in the light of a theory we hold, possibly, but not necessarily, the very theory we are testing. Further, there is no such thing as induction, no way of confirming a theory: even the most successful theory may be refuted the next time we test it; but we have ways of rating one theory as currently better than another. At first that sounded mad to me. I spent the whole of my first year trying to find fault with Popper’s ideas and arguments. But it was a losing battle. Bit by bit I came to acknowledge that Popper was right. A week or so into in my second year I read Appendix *x of Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery and that brought the process to an end: I rejected Marxist ‘dialectical materialism’ and I became a ‘critical rationalist.’ Despite that, I was still a Marxist in political matters. But, as a consequence of my critical engagement with Popper’s work, I was steadily revising or eschewing the remaining parts of my Marxist outlook. At Easter of my second year at LSE I gave up Marxism. Fittingly, I was twenty: Marxism is for teenagers. However, my rejection of Marxism, my reading of Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method, and some acute personal problems combined to bring about a personal crisis in which life seemed to me entirely meaningless. I was in a mess. I managed to put myself back together over the summer. Instrumental in that, in their different ways, were the philosophical works of Immanual Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer, and also the film The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (that will take some explaining). By the time I started my third year at the LSE I had reinvented myself as a party animal (no longer a member of the Animal Farm Party). My third year was devoted mostly to booze and sex. Addendum. When I began A-level economics there were, I think, five pupils. But we hardly ever had a full class: there were usually just two, or sometimes three, of us who turned up. Mr. Rubin, our ‘teacher,’ used that as an excuse not to teach: “There’s no point having a lesson if half the class is not here.” Instead he got us to do odd jobs for him, like emptying store cupboards, or moving their contents from one place to another. Sometimes, whether or not we had a full class, Rubin just did not turn up at all. We did not mind that, as we just had a chat. In the handful of lessons in which he did 21 teach, he just dictated notes. He spoke about descriptive matters, rather than analytical ones. The next year it was worse because all of the other pupils dropped out. I was the only boy left in the class. But three boys who had failed economics in the previous year, and had now returned to re-take it, then joined me. Rubin said that there was no point his teaching me since I could get the notes from the other three boys. I did try that, but they were not particularly cooperative and, in any case, their notes were not good – after all, they had all failed! Economics classes then took place, not in the classroom, but in Rubin’s office and they consisted of Rubin giving us bits of the Financial Times to read while he read his newspaper. I did see Rubin more than a decade later. I went to the Ear, Nose and Throat Department in St. Mary’s hospital in Paddington. While I was in the waiting room, I saw Rubin arrive with a fat old woman, whom I presumed to be his wife. They took a seat. I ignored them. When my name was called, Rubin’s head jerked up. He still remembered me. I was almost certainly the only pupil of his to get a grade A in the A-level. I was in with the doctor only about ten minutes. I had to leave via the waiting room and I felt Rubin’s eyes follow me as I walked out. He wanted to speak. But I did not turn to face him. I had nothing to say to him and I owed him nothing. Me, age fourteen, at Christopher Wren Comprehensive School. 22 7. MARXISM AND MASTURBATION Early in my third year at Christopher Wren Comprehensive School, when I was thirteen, I became aware that some of my classmates had discovered a new hobby, which they talked about quite a lot. It was known as ‘tossing off’ or ‘having a wank.’ I later learned that the correct term for it is ‘masturbation.’ I was very surprised at what they were doing, since it had never occurred to me. Of course, I tried it. But it did not seem to work for me. They were describing a very pleasurable sensation followed by a mess. I did get some pleasure from it, but not that much, and I never achieved the spurting that they all talked about. I just got sore and had to stop. The problem was that, being one of the youngest boys in my year, I did not reach puberty until quite a few months later. From then on, I was masturbating as frequently as the rest of them, at least daily, often several times a day. Teenage boys are driven mad by sex. They deserve sympathy; but they rarely seem to get it. Roll forward a few years… In my last year at school I spent a great deal of time studying the books of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and their various expositors, commentators and critics. One book that I enjoyed was AntiDühring by Engels, which contains much discussion of philosophical issues. The discussion is of poor quality, though I was not to know that at the time, but it did kindle me with an interest in philosophy. In that book I read something to the effect that, if an organism continually finds satisfaction of a desire in one particular way, then it becomes unable to obtain satisfaction of that desire in other ways. The sexual implication seemed obvious: if I did not stop masturbating, I would never be able to enjoy proper sex. I decided then not to masturbate again. Ten days later, I accompanied my family on a weekend trip to Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales, where we stayed with my dad’s family. I stayed at my dad’s sister’s house; the rest of the family stayed at my dad’s parents’ house, though my dad’s dad was now dead. The first evening, while the adults were out at the pub, I spent the time reading (I had taken a book with me). I went up to bed at around midnight, before the adults returned home drunk (there were always ‘after-hours’ sessions in the pubs in Merthyr). My dad’s sister had made up a bed for me, with nice clean sheets. That night, having not masturbated for ten days, I had a nocturnal emission, a ‘wet dream.’ I was woken by the feel of the warm liquid on my body. It was also on the sheets, those nice, clean sheets that my aunt had so kindly put on the bed for me. And there was loads of it – ten days’ worth! What a mess! By the morning there would be a big, visible stain! And it 23 would be obvious what the stain was! I was acutely embarrassed. What would my aunt think of me? She would think that I was a compulsive masturbator who could not control himself even for one night and who did not even have the shame to ejaculate into some tissues. But, in fact, it happened only because I was trying to control myself! It was a cosmic injustice! Fate was making fun of me. I could not look my aunt in the eye the next morning. Thankfully, she never said anything to me about it. But I was worried about what she might have told others. I resumed masturbating after that, but not excessively; just five or six times a week. Me, age eighteen, between school and university. 24 8. A MAOIST GROUP When I was in the sixth form at school, the headmaster suspended the sixth-form magazine after seeing some bawdy stories that I had written for it. That made me rebellious. My closest schoolmate, Ray, expressed an interest in Maoism. That prompted me to begin studying Marxist works. I soon got interested in anarchism but I ended up going back to Marxism, perhaps because there were more Marxists than other kinds of ‘ists.’ I sent a letter to the Communist Party of Great Britain. I was invited to meetings of the local branch. They were dead boring occasions on which no more than half-a-dozen of us sat around and discussed the Party’s plans as well as current affairs. At some of these meetings one of the Party’s ‘intellectuals’ would talk for a while on some aspect of Marxist-Leninist theory and its application to current circumstances. But it surprised me that there was very little interest in theory. It was as if everyone knew the answers without having to consider or understand any theory at all. The meetings were followed by a trip to the pub, which I eschewed, as I was at that time a teetotaller. After a few meetings I wrote them a goodbye letter. I said that I thought the Party should be undertaking secret military training as, according to Marx and Lenin, communism would be brought about by violent revolution; but the Communist Party favoured parliamentary debating. Apart from the branch meetings, I had also accompanied some members of the Communist Party to a public meeting on some hot topic or other. Outside the doors of that meeting there were various Marxist revolutionary groups handing out leaflets and selling pamphlets. I bought a number of items, including some pamphlets produced by a Maoist organisation and, as I had previously read some Chairman Mao, at my friend Ray’s suggestion, I thought that was the group for me. There were other Maoist groups in London but, not knowing of their existence, I plumped for the first one with which I came into contact. My Maoist group was based in North London. I used to travel there, on the tube, once or twice a week for evening meetings. At those meetings we studied a book by Marx, Engels, Lenin or Stalin. Somebody read aloud while the rest of us listened and followed our own copy of the book. The reading was followed by questions and a discussion. I found this a lot more congenial, because more intellectual, than the meetings of the Communist Party, though I rarely spoke. However, the meetings were not free and open discussions. After I had been attending for a while, we had two new members, a disabled man and his girlfriend. The man was intelligent and full 25 of questions. But the group members took that as a challenge to the doctrines that we were studying, which made them quite uncomfortable. As the discussion became more heated, the disabled man was drawn into making a lot of philosophical statements that were untenable, though none of the others engaged in the discussion seemed able to dispose of them. In view of that I made what I think was my first contribution and I was able to silence the man quite effectively. After the disabled man left, I was thanked by some of the others for my ‘support.’ The disabled man was barred from future meetings. These meetings were indoctrination sessions rather than open discussions. In addition to attending those sessions of reading and circumscribed discussion, I also helped to put together pamphlets, by collating and stapling paper. On weekends and some evenings I accompanied members of the group to meetings, where I helped to distribute leaflets or sell pamphlets or put up posters and such like. We also went on demonstrations and some of the members of the group gave speeches at public meetings. The group consisted of nice, middle-class people. The main protagonists were two polytechnic law lecturers and two teachers at state secondary schools. There were some other members and associates who appeared on a more occasional basis. There was also me, the newest member. The two schoolteachers were living together as husband and wife. They had previously been Christians; but having given up one rigid doctrine that had all the answers they now adopted an alternative one. The leader of the group was one of the law lecturers. His wife was involved in our activities only occasionally, due to domestic responsibilities. I remember very clearly one evening when she turned up, in her husband’s absence, to one of the reading and discussion meetings. She had her young baby with her and, part-way through the meeting, she bared her ample chest to breast-feed the baby. Given my complete absence of any sexual experience as well as my shyness and inhibition, that caused me acute embarrassment. I did not know where to put my face, which had turned as red as a beetroot. But, generally, I was quite comfortable with the group. They were very patient, kind and understanding given my reticence and introversion. I was still a member of the group when I began studying at the London School of Economics. I was an outsider amongst the Marxists there, because virtually all of them were Trotskyists. I also seemed to be an outsider because of my interest in Marxist theory and philosophy. With relatively few exceptions, the Trotskyists seemed to have little interest in abstract theory. Trotskyism was like a fashion that people followed without being bothered about its theoretical structure. Like those members of the Communist Party I had met a year or so before, even students seemed to be more interested in 26 practical politics than in ideas; more interested in bringing about change than in determining whether it was the right change. Again, they seemed to think that they knew the answers without having considered the questions. It could be said that Marx himself sponsored that attitude in one of his “Theses on Feuerbach,” where he says: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” In contrast, I was more interested in contemplation than in action. I was still attending political meetings and demonstrations, distributing leaflets and selling pamphlets, and even, by this time, writing some articles for my group’s pamphlets. There was a lot going on in Africa in the mid-1970s and, at different meetings, I met Ndabaningi Sithole and Robert Mugabe. But I was beginning to find the political activity a burdensome distraction from my studies. Also, as a result of reading Karl Popper, I was finding more and more of the Marxist philosophical framework untenable. I was trying to save what I could of the Marxist worldview but I began voicing some of my discontents within the group. A split was inevitable and it came at Easter of my second undergraduate year. We had a meeting in the refectory at the University of London Union. The first item of business was a matter over which I had come into disagreement with the rest of the group. It was a theoretical matter (on a practical one I would probably have conceded); but I cannot remember what the matter was. That might be because it was not that important in itself: I guess that it had just come to symbolise the range of dissensions that had been bubbling away for some time, ‘the last straw.’ I was told that either I gave up my view or they would eject me from the group. I refused to recant. They then looked at me in anticipation. I got up and left. As I walked down the stairs to the exit I felt euphoric, as though a burden had been lifted from my shoulders. I went home to my parents’ place, as this was now the Easter holiday period, where I continued to think and develop my own views, which took quite a radical turn and led to me ‘reinventing’ myself by the start of my third (and final) undergraduate year. 27 9. LOGIC AND CHARACTER FLAW AT THE LSE At the age of fourteen I began a slow process of introversion. That was not something that I did; it was something that happened to me. By the time I started at the London School of Economics (LSE) I was very quiet and inhibited; a condition that was not helped by the fact that, at least to begin with, I was very unsure of myself in that new environment. I came from the old Notting Hill slums and then a council estate in Shepherd’s Bush; and my school (Christopher Wren Comprehensive) was not an academic one (I recall wasting a lot of time doing woodwork, joinery, metalwork, pottery, bricklaying, plastering, technical drawing, etc. – and walking the streets having ‘bunked off’ games and swimming). So, although I did well at A level, I was unsure whether I would stand out at the LSE. One of the subjects I had chosen in my first year was logic. It turned out to be surprisingly like mathematics, which was my best subject at school. I loved logic, both intrinsically and because I could master it. The logic lecturer (whom I will not name) was a very good teacher. Unusually, he not only gave the lectures, he also took the seminars. But he appeared to have a character flaw (who doesn’t?). In the logic seminars I listened and took notes but I remained silent, except on one occasion, toward the end of the first term. The logic lecturer was running through a proof on the blackboard. It was a long and complex proof and the students seemed to have lost track of it. But I could follow it. In fact, I noticed that he had made a slip, but being so inhibited I could not speak up. Sure enough, the lecturer eventually discovered that he could not get to the desired conclusion of the proof. He racked his brains for a good while before giving up and dismissing the class. He sat down in his chair, which was opposite me, the other side of a large desk, and he began going through his notes. When some of the class had gone out of the door and the rest were heading towards it I said quietly to him that I could do the proof. I expected that he would quietly ask me to explain. But instead he jumped up and called back the class, even those who were half-way down the corridor. He went out of the seminar room to shout at them: “Come back, come back!” This was the last class of the day, it was dark outside, and the students, having been baffled for the past hour, were keen to get home. When they were all back in their seats, he exclaimed, in his customary loud voice, and with an air of disbelief and even ridicule: “We have here the man who will now show us how to do the proof.” With that, he handed me the chalk and gave me a broad smile that contained a hint of malice. He plainly expected me to fail. It 28 seemed that he wanted to humiliate me in front of the whole class, perhaps because I had been silent in his classes up until then, or perhaps because he was smarting for having failed and he now wanted to take it out on somebody. I got up and I did the proof. I did not quite finish it because he said, in an irritated fashion, “Okay, that’s enough, the rest of it is obvious from there.” I then explained, no doubt to his displeasure, where he had gone wrong and how. Six months later, just before the end-of-year exams I went to see him. I was working on a problem in the philosophy of science and I thought I had a novel solution. The solution depended on a claim that a particular proposition had greater logical content than another, which seemed intuitively correct, but I could not demonstrate it formally; so I asked his opinion. He worked out a derivation which seemed to tally with my intuition. In the scientific method exam, there was a question in my answer to which I was able to use my novel solution. I had to see the logic lecturer again just after the exams, for some end-ofyear business. He used the occasion to inform me that he had misled me about the two propositions I had asked him about. He had taken his derivation to show that proposition A had a logical content greater than proposition B. But in fact A had a logical content greater or equal to B. Another derivation showed that B had a logical content greater or equal to A. Putting the two results together implied that propositions A and B had equal logical content. He gave me a broad smile, again with that hint of malice, as he said: “I hope my mistake did not send you wrong.” Needless to say, I was acutely disappointed. My novel solution, that I had presented in the scientific method exam, was destroyed. But I still got a grade A in the scientific method exam. In fact I did so well in my first-year exams that I was shortlisted for a MacTaggart Scholarship (a prestigious award with a cash prize). I had to attend an interview for that, shortly after the start of my second year. The interview should have been a doddle. But, coming from a working-class background in those days, I had little idea of how things were done in academe. When I turned up for the interview I saw a student sitting outside the room waiting to go in. He was studying his notes. It was only then that I realised that I was going to be quizzed on the subjects I had studied the previous academic year (by then, three months ago). Being unprepared, I messed it up. I did not get the scholarship. How bad was the logic lecturer’s treatment of me? I don’t want to be hard on the man. He was young. I don’t know how long he had been in the job. It might have been his first academic position. He might have been having 29 doubts about whether he was good enough for the job. It was the LSE, after all, which is one of the world’s leading academic institutions. Then in the seminar he finds that he cannot complete a complex proof. He was probably acutely embarrassed; but he might also have been struck with self-doubt, even feeling like a fraud. Then, as if Fate was rubbing salt into the wound, a mere first-year student, who had been at the LSE for just a few weeks, pipes up and claims to be able to do the proof! He would not have been in the best frame of mind. We can all act out of character in such circumstances. When I later accosted him with my problem about the logical content of two propositions, I think he just made a mistake. I do not believe that he was trying to mislead me. I did not explain why I had the query, so he might have thought it was just some puzzle I was playing around with, so he did not bother to do the usual checks that one would do if it was a matter of importance. On the other hand, he never asked why I had the query and it was right on top of the exams. But I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt on that one. However, he was always aloof from me, never acknowledging me, as if I just did not matter. Perhaps he was like that with all the students. I never asked the others. Or perhaps he really was a petty-minded so-and-so! On the whole, my memories from the LSE are good ones and I learned so much there that it was a life-changing experience (I would have had no life worth living if I had not gone there), so I prefer not to think the worst of the logic lecturer. Me at Lancaster University, 1979. 30 10. Hitched Toward the end of the first term of my third year at the London School of Economics (LSE), I was in the bar of my hall of residence when I spotted an old acquaintance from my first year. He had with him his girlfriend and a friend of hers, Annette [not her real name]. I said a brief hello to my old acquaintance before getting involved in conversation with Annette, who made it clear that she was interested in me. Still, nothing happened that night. A week or so later I went to a Christmas party in Carr-Saunders hall of residence. Again I met there my old acquaintance with his girlfriend and Annette; and again I got into conversation with Annette. She once more made her interest in me clear but she also made it clear that she was annoyed that I was so slow on the take-up, and she left in a bit of a huff. I was at the time friendly with an American girl, Bonnie: we had gone out together few times, once to see the band Can, so I may have been pondering my options. One Saturday evening, early in the New Year, 1977, Annette came to the bar of my hall of residence on her own. She saw me and she came over to talk. She spent the night with me in my room. We stayed together the following day and she slept with me again that night. She came again the next weekend and the same thing happened. It was not long before she was sleeping in my room every night. She was not a resident in the hall. She was not even a student at the LSE (she was a first-year student at a different college of the University of London). But no one raised any objections about her sleeping in my bed. It imposed no costs on the hall in any case. I was happy with this arrangement with Annette, though I was not committed to it. From my point of view, it was a default arrangement that could be superseded at any time. When I was coming up to my final exams, Annette raised the question of where I would be going when I moved out of my hall of residence. She proposed that I move into the flat that she shared with my old acquaintance and his girlfriend. I agreed; but we also agreed that we would have an open relationship, so that each of us would be free to have sex with others from time to time. I am pretty sure that that proposal came from Annette. I accepted it in any case. This, after all, was the 1970s. After leaving the LSE, I remained in touch with those of my boozy friends from the LSE who remained in London. Looking through the Good Beer Guide, I discovered the Admiral Mann pub in Kentish Town. Annette and I went there on our own at first. We liked it. The back bar had quite a loud jukebox with some decent records on it, the bar was full of hippyish people and it had a friendly atmosphere. The next time we went we invited the rest of our crowd. They liked it too. The pub then became our regular. 31 When, in September 1977, Annette went to stay with her parents for a fortnight on the Isle of Man, the fidelity issue never came up. I accepted that, while she was away, she might be having sex with other men. When she returned, I never asked her about it. Similarly, I saw her absence as an opportunity to have sex with other women. So while she was away, I went out every night with my mates, Will and Steve. Most nights we went out quite late, getting to the pub at about 8.30 or 9.00, partly because Will and Steve had to go to work the next day, and partly because I was short of cash, being on the dole. To stretch my cash a bit farther, I took to cooking myself egg and chips as my only meal of the day, which was remarkably cheap. On these nights, I felt like a free man and one of my objectives in going out was to find a girl to have sex with. One regular of the Admiral Mann was a very attractive blond girl, a bit older and a bit shorter than I was, with long straight hair and massive breasts. She noticed me looking at her and she gave me a smile. On a Friday night when I was just with Will she came over to me and said that there was a party nearby if we fancied coming along. Of course, we accepted the offer. She gave us the address then disappeared. After the pub closed, Will and I found the place and went in. The blond girl was there and I joined her. We were standing talking in the living room where people were dancing, and some people were dancing quite close to us. Being drunk and aggressive I took to pushing people away from me when they danced too close. A little later I got into a verbal dispute with some man in the kitchen. Eventually, I was told to leave, in no uncertain terms, by a muscular black man who looked like John Conteh, the boxer. Will left with me, but he had a woman with him. I guessed that I would be in the way, so I made my way home on my own. Will and I were back in the Admiral Mann the following night, where I apologised to everyone concerned, including the blond girl, who was still friendly. But I did not pursue her, despite the facts that she was available, she seemed keen and I fancied her a lot. I had been due to go to York university for postgraduate study in October 1977 but due to some oversight I had not been offered a place in a student hall of residence. I withdrew from York and deferred my grant for a year. Some months later there was one evening when Annette did not come home from college. When I woke up the next morning, I went into the living room and she was sitting there. She told me she had returned late the previous night and, as she did not want to wake me up, she slept in the spare bedroom (my old acquaintance and his girlfriend had by now moved out). I think it is more likely that she stayed with someone else and returned home in the morning before I got up, which was probably about 11.00 a.m. She always 32 maintained that she had been faithful to me; in fact, she would volunteer that information. But women usually say that, even in an open relationship. Annette and I would quite often quarrel when we were both drunk; but we never, so far as I can remember, quarrelled when we were both sober. And, it seemed, neither of us held the drunken quarrels against the other. Indeed, when we woke up the next day, we probably could not remember what we had quarrelled about or, sometimes, even that had we quarrelled. When we were sober, we seemed to be remarkably compatible. When we were together, daytimes or evenings, we would often spend a lot of time reading, sometimes in different rooms, and then come together for conversation later. We always ate together. We sometimes watched television together. There were a couple of times in the spring or summer of 1978 when Annette and I had a drunken quarrel at the end of a night out in central London and I went back to my parents’ house in Shepherd’s Bush instead of going home with her on the night bus. On the second occasion I told Annette, in anger, that I was finished with her. We were at the northern end of Tottenham Court Road when we quarrelled, and I decided to walk to my parents’ home using the most straightforward route, all the way along the Westway. It turned out to be a lot longer walk than I anticipated, three miles along the Westway alone, and a lot more dangerous too. There is no pavement on the Westway, just a narrow ridge against the central barrier, on which it was difficult to balance in a state of inebriation. But I got home safely, knocked up my poor parents and then went to bed. When I woke up the next morning, as I lay there in bed, I pondered my future as a free man; and it felt good, as though I had been relieved of a burden. Yet I was in two minds; and a short while after getting up I had decided to go back to Annette. She took me. I cannot remember why I decided to go back to her. It might have been that I was due to leave her in October anyway, to go to the University of Lancaster, so I might as well stick with what I had for the time being. While I was looking forward to being a student again, Annette seemed worried about losing me. She wanted us to write frequently and she asked me to return to London for a weekend every few weeks. I was reluctant to do that, but I did say that I would come back to her once or twice during each term, though I doubted that I would do that. On the day of my departure, Annette came to Euston Station to see me off. When I got into the carriage, she waited on the platform outside, smoking a cigarette and looking quite forlorn. She was still there, looking at me, as the train pulled away. I think both of us thought it was the end of our relationship; but whereas I felt happy to move on to something different, Annette seemed to feel sorrow or perhaps bitterness. 33 We exchanged letters a couple of times a week and I agreed to return to London for the weekend at the end of the fifth week, half-way through the first term. There was a coach that left from the campus and I bought a return ticket in advance. Toward the end of the fourth week of term I was due a letter from Annette, but nothing arrived. I checked the post every day, but a few more days went by without any letter. I started to wonder whether something was wrong. Then her letter arrived. I received a shock when I read it. She said that she did not want me to come to London the coming weekend, she had ceased to miss me so much, she had enjoyed being free the past few weeks, and she would probably be out over most of the weekend anyway. She suggested that I sell my coach ticket and stay in Lancaster until Christmas and that after Christmas I could move my things out of the flat. I was stunned. I had to read it a few times to be able to take it in. There were elements of both irony and nemesis about this. It had been me who saw our relationship as temporary and ‘default,’ who had walked away from it on a couple of occasions, though only to return, and who had been hopeful for something new at the point of my departure for Lancaster. It had been Annette, on the other hand, who had asked me to move in with her, who was sorrowful about me leaving London and who seemed to view my departure with foreboding. One would have expected that it would be me who initiated the split and that, upon receipt of her letter, I would have been relieved and pleased. Yet, instead, she seemed to be having a fine time and I was in emotional turmoil. At the time, I put it down to the fact that she had rejected me rather than vice versa; but there was more to it than that. I spent the rest of the day in a dazed state, feeling sorry for myself. When the bars opened, I went and got terribly drunk; and I did that every night thereafter. I found that drunkenness turned my despair into anger, which I found to be a much less painful emotion. However, although it eases the pain, drunkenness delays the healing process, which is helped by one facing up to reality instead of running from it. Annette and I remained friends and our correspondence resumed. I think I was still hoping that she had not met someone else and that things might return to normal once I got back to London. Now that she had rejected me, I could not let her go. I stopped going to lectures and seminars for about a week. When I did start going again I was still getting drunk every night, so I was not very alert, having been stupefied the night before, and I was not very interested, due to my emotional disturbance. I did turn up, make notes, make the occasional, sometimes uninformed, contribution in seminars, and write the required essays per subject per term. But my heart was no longer in it. I eventually gave up on Academe and went to work as a barman in my dad’s pub, the North Pole. 34 11. THE NORTH POLE: A DAY IN THE LIFE In the summer of 1978, my dad packed in his job to become a pub manager. He wanted to manage the North Pole pub in Notting Hill where, in the 1960s, he had been a regular as well as a compère and singer. The pub had gone downhill; in fact someone had been killed in there. The case went to the Old Bailey, which meant lots of bad publicity, so the pub chain that owned it renamed it ‘The Brewster Arms,’ though everyone still called it ‘The North Pole.’ My dad thought he could make it a good pub again. He applied to the relevant pub chain and was accepted as a trainee, during in which time he managed a few pubs in west London filling in short-term for pub governors who were on holiday. All that went okay and he became the manager of the North Pole in late September 1978. At that time I went off to Lancaster for postgraduate study. I came back to London and stayed at the North Pole for my Christmas and Easter holidays. I liked it: it was a busy pub, with bands on most nights of the week, and a lively crowd of customers. I had one of my personal crises while at Lancaster (I have had a few of them). I decided to abandon my academic career and work as a full-time barman in the North Pole. My dad was surprised. He said that I could have the job but that there would be no favours: I would be treated just like the other barmen. That was fine by me. I started in July 1979. In August, I met a friend of mine, Nick, from the LSE who was not working and was not sure what to do with himself. I suggested that he could work as a barman in the North Pole. After some thought, he took up the suggestion. He joined us toward the end of August. The North Pole had a reputation as a trouble pub. There were a few incidents in there in my first couple of months but nothing serious. One Friday in November 1979 at lunchtime I was drawing a pint of beer and my dad was standing beside me also drawing a pint of beer from the next tap. We were at the top end of the bar, farthest away from the front door. Four men came into the pub and stood at the other end of the bar. I recognised them all. One was quite a big chap with jet-black hair. Let’s call him ‘Blackhead.’ He had quite recently been released from prison for the crime of manslaughter. I had seen him in the pub, and served him, a number of times. He often got very drunk but he was never out of order: despite some of the states he got into, he had always been respectful to me and the other staff. Another one was a quite tall ginger-headed man. He had thrown a glass over the bar a few weeks before. One of the customers had beaten him up for that on that night (he was taken away in an ambulance). The other two men were shorter and nondescript. 35 I mentioned to my dad that the ginger-headed man had thrown a glass over the bar recently. When my dad finished the round he was serving, he went down to the four men. Blackhead asked for four halves of lager. My dad explained that the ginger man had previously thrown a glass across the bar and would not be served. The four left, but not before Blackhead went into some prison-spiel including the phrase: “If you treat people like animals they will behave like animals.” My dad understood that as a threat. He contacted the police, told them of the incident and asked them to have plainclothed officers in the pub that evening, as he was sure the four would return. That evening, from opening time, there were about ten plain-clothed officers drinking in the pub. They stayed until a bit after 8.00. As the four men had not returned by then, the police concluded that they would not be coming. I had been on duty behind the bar since 5.30, so from 7.30 to 8.30 I was on my break, standing on the customers’ side of the bar, having a drink with one of the regulars. At about 8.20, three of the four men returned. The fourth waited for them outside in a vehicle. Two of the three had stocking masks on their heads; Blackhead did not. Each of the three was carrying a pickaxe handle. They then proceeded to smash things up. Blackhead went straight for the jukebox. Two young girls, Janet and Debbie, were sitting on it, so he asked them politely to move aside. When they did, he smashed the machine with his pickaxe handle. One of the hooded men went straight for me. He obviously recognised me as the barman: with long hair and dressed all in black I was pretty unmistakable. I dodged the pickaxe handle which seemed intended for my head and it thudded on to the bar, smashing my drink. I took one or two heavy blows on the hip before managing to make my escape through the door which led to the area behind the bar. Other things were smashed including glasses, chairs, the lighted plastic boxes and plastic pints of beer that sat on top of the beer taps, ice buckets and the glass in the doors and windows. The vandals then left and ten minutes later the police returned. The police were fulsome in their apologies. We later realised that the attackers had an accomplice who had been sent to the pub to make sure the coast was clear. When he spotted all the plainclothed police, he used the public telephone in the bar to call the four vandals, who were waiting in the Pavilion pub along the street, to let them know. The Pavilion also had a public telephone in its saloon bar. When all the police left, the accomplice again telephoned the vandals and gave them the ‘all clear.’ Very conveniently, there was a glass shop opposite the pub, on the other side of Latimer Road, and the men who worked there were regulars in the pub. They happened to be drinking in the saloon bar when the attack 36 occurred. My dad asked them if they would replace the glass in the doors and windows, at their emergency rate, and they happily complied. At about 9.00, Nick, who was on his day off, returned to the pub. He saw the glass-shop boys at work, noted the rest of the devastation and said: “They came back, then.” I showed him, and various customers, the bruise I had acquired on my hip. We carried on serving customers. But it was a quiet night because the jukebox was not working. In fact, where it had been smashed, it gave access to the records, and most of those were stolen. My dad always made money when the pub got smashed up, by overstating the damage and the costs of repairs. For example, when the glass-shop boys finished replacing all the broken windows, they presented my dad with a bill. He asked them to change the amount to add on £50 for themselves and £50 for him. The pub company paid the bill, and they will have reclaimed most of it from an insurance company. I guess that the attackers smashed between twenty and fifty glasses, but my dad’s official estimate was one hundred. If they smashed one ice bucket, my dad would have said two, and then taken the second one home. There were some other fiddles, too, which I will not go into. Over the following few days the police came to interview us about the incident and to take photographs, including pictures of my injured hip which, by then, had turned all sorts of colours. I was interviewed by detective inspector Ian Blair from Notting Hill police station. He later became the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. After a few weeks, the police had assembled three suspects for us to identify: Blackhead, ginger and one of the other two. The fourth one was never identified. Some months later, my dad and I had to go to court to make statements. But that was just the first stage in the process. The later stages of the process never happened, for whatever reason: there was never a trial. If Blackhead had not been with the other three on that Friday afternoon, they would have just left when my dad refused them service. But for Blackhead it was some kind of honour thing that he felt he had to avenge; and the other three sheep followed along. 37 12. THE NORTH POLE SMASHED AGAIN My dad took over as manager of the North Pole pub at the end of September 1978. I began working there as a full-time barman in July 1979. As I recounted in the previous reminiscence, the pub got smashed up by thugs with pickaxe handles in November 1979. Roll forward now to the spring of 1980. On Monday afternoons in the saloon bar there were often people in the pub who had decided not to go in to work that day, perhaps after a heavyboozing weekend, or perhaps just through a wish to extend the weekend. Similar things happened in other pubs and clubs in the area. That meant that Monday nights could be dangerous. People who had been drinking all day, first in a pub, then in a club, could turn up in our pub and start misbehaving, especially if they were not regulars. One Monday early evening a fat jailbird who never normally came into the pub, turned up drunk and started smashing the ice bucket on the bar top, shouting “Governor! Governor!” The governor, my dad, was upstairs; but the fat man left after a couple of minutes and we never saw him in the pub again. Another Monday evening at about 7.00, two big men whom I had never seen before came in. One of them was well-built, the other was quite fat. I’ll call them ‘Bulky’ and ‘Fatty.’ They were obviously drunk, but that did not bother me. I served them a pint of lager and a light-and-bitter. The pub was not busy. About twenty minutes later, I noticed that Bulky had finished his drink and had pulled some money out of his pocket. So I went to them and said to Fatty, who had not finished his drink, “Light and bitter?” which was what he had ordered the first time. He turned to me and shouted “Fuck off!” I had ‘a situation.’ It was not really within my authority to bar a customer, though if my dad was not around I would assume that authority. My dad was upstairs, due to relieve me at 7.30 p.m. so that I could have an hour’s break. I went upstairs and told him what happened. He told me not to serve the two men and he said he would be down in a moment (he had to put on some shoes and socks). I went back downstairs, behind the bar. My sister, Joy, was working in the public bar. She was due to finish at 7.30, when her place would be taken by the other full-time barman, who was in his room upstairs. I stood at the end of the bar waiting. A minute or two later my dad joined me. As soon as my dad appeared behind the bar, Bulky called him over to order a drink. My dad went over, refused him service and walked away. Bulky and Fatty immediately began shouting abuse and then each of them threw his glass at my dad. Both glasses missed their target. My dad then 38 picked up a large wooden club that we kept behind the bar. It was actually a table leg with a screw sticking out at a right angle at the far end. My dad started to prod the men hard with this as he gave them some verbal abuse. He told me to call the police. The ’phone number for the police was on a note on the wall above the upstairs telephone. As I dashed through the door that led out of the bar area, I came to the staircase and I saw the other full-time barman halfway down the stairs, on his way to take over from my sister. He was standing there, apparently hesitant about what to do. I shouted up to him to call the police. If he had done that, I could have returned to the bar to help out my dad. But he just stood there. I shouted again, “Call the police!” But still he stood. I ran up the stairs past him and I was on the telephone all the while the action lasted downstairs. Meanwhile, my sister Joy, had come around from the public bar to join my dad. She threw a soda siphon at the men. One of them picked up the soda siphon and hit her on the head with it. Bulky had managed to get the club off my dad: the screw in the end of it had proved to be a disadvantage, as it gave Bulky something to grab hold of. In the struggle over the club, the two men had managed to grab hold of my dad’s left arm. Bulky, who held the club in his right hand, had hold of my dad’s arm in his left hand. Fatty, who was to Bulky’s left, had hold of my dad’s arm with his right hand. The two of them were trying to pull my dad forward so that Bulky could hit him over the head with the club. Above the bar, a little above head height, there was a wooden shelf on which we kept glasses. That was between my dad’s head and the swing of the club, so they had to pull my dad forward to be able to land blows on his head. Fatty had his left hand on the bar and was pushing against the bar to help force my dad forward as he pulled him with his right hand. My dad saw what was about to happen. With his right hand, he reached to a crate, which was behind the bar and to his right, and he pulled out a full twolitre bottle of lemonade. That was heavy. He then slammed that down hard on to Fatty’s left hand that was pushing against the bar, breaking a bone. Fatty let go of the bar and of my dad’s arm. That enabled my dad to get free of Bulky. At that point the other full-time barman joined my dad behind the bar. He said later that my dad was pulling empty two-litre lemonade bottles from a crate behind the bar and throwing them at the two men, shouting “You fucking poxy bastards!” The two men made their retreat, smashing things as they went, including the plastic lighted boxes and plastic pints of beer that sat over the beer taps. As they reached the door my dad shouted: “Don’t smash the windows.” He had noticed that the glass-shop boys were in the pub and he did not want to miss an opportunity to make some money by overstating the repair bill. It was also probably an act of bravado on his part, 39 as if to say that he was unperturbed by it all. Of course, they did smash the windows: Bulky did it using the club, of which he still had possession. The glass-shop boys were fit, muscular men in their twenties and thirties. They used the pub regularly, were friendly with my dad and the other bar staff, and got some lucrative trade from the pub’s troubles. They must have noticed that two large thugs were throwing glasses and then trying to force my dad forward over the bar so that they could club his head, with serious and potentially fatal consequences. Yet none of them came to his assistance. Nor were they shamefaced about it: it apparently never occurred to them that they were under any such obligation. My dad never commented on this fact either. He evidently did not expect any of the customers to come to his aid. As we were clearing up the mess, I heard a couple of female customers talking about the incident. One of them mentioned Fatty by name. When the police came I passed on that information. But they did not need it. They visited the accident and emergency department of the nearest hospital, looking for a patient with a broken hand, and they found Fatty nursing his smashed knuckle. He admitted his guilt. He had to pay compensation to the pub for criminal damage. Why did my dad ask me to call the police? These sorts of incidents are over in a few minutes, long before the police arrive. It would have made more sense if I had stayed in the bar to help my dad deal with the aggressors. The police could have been called later. My dad must have understood that. It seems clear to me now that my dad wanted me safely out of the way, upstairs on the telephone. He could then sort out the thugs without having to worry about my safety. Then my little sister, Joy, came around from the public bar and got stuck in! He wasn’t expecting that. I would have done so, too, of course, if the other barman had called the police as I asked him to do. But I lacked judgement in following my dad’s instruction to call the police: I should have ignored it and stayed in the bar to help him out. Why did my dad want to become the manager of the North Pole, with all the trouble it involved? It might have been something like this. He was fortyseven in 1978, pushing fifty, and probably thinking that he had not done enough with his life. As a youngster, in the 1950s and early 1960s, he had ambitions in the music business; but he never fulfilled his potential there. He probably felt that he had to do more than he was doing - a pretty humdrum job and raising a family - and it was not going to be in the music business. What else then? The fact that the North Pole had gone downhill was, he thought, an opportunity for him to do something good. I remember talking to him about it in the summer of 1978. He thought he could make it into a good entertainment pub again, instead of the run-down trouble-hole it had become. 40 13. ROUGH JUSTICE AT THE NORTH POLE? When, in July 1979, I started working in the North Pole, the pub that my dad managed, I was a committed boozer and I saw no point in being in a pub, even as a barman, unless I was drinking. I also wanted to make sure that I was drunk every night. Some pubs have a rule that bar staff are not to drink while on duty. Some pubs ban their staff from drinking in that pub. Fortunately, my dad had no such rules. When I had an hour’s break between 7.30 and 8.30 in the evening, I would merely switch sides of the bar and have a drink with the customers. When I did not start until 7.30, I would spend the time from 5.30 to 7.30 drinking in some local pubs. When I was on duty, lots of customers would buy me a drink, which I would be very pleased to accept. I would also buy my own to ensure that at all times on duty I had a drink to hand. After the pub closed and we had finished tidying up, I would drink into the early hours with some of the other bar staff. There were a few evenings a year, such as Christmas Eve, when we had an extension until midnight. We had an extension until 12.30 a.m. on New Year’s Eve. There was at least an hour’s tidying up after each of those occasions. But no matter what time we finished we always had a drink afterwards, and I normally went to bed drunk, usually very drunk. There were also some early mornings. Barrels of beer were delivered probably once a week, and they usually arrived at about 7.30 a.m. The fulltime barmen, of which I was one, took it in turns to oversee a delivery. I did not find it easy getting up at 7.30 having been drunk the night before and up until the early hours of the morning. But it had to be done for a beer delivery. I decided that it did not have to be done for the window cleaner. Our window cleaner washed the outside and inside of the pub windows. To do the insides, he needed to gain entry to the pub. When I first started working in the pub, the window cleaner would come around, once a week, at about 9.30 or 10.00 a.m. But after I had been working there for a few months, he changed his routine and wanted to get in at about 7.30 or 8.00 a.m. He rang the bell, which was located just outside my bedroom door, thereby waking me up. Thinking that it must be a beer delivery I would jump out of bed, get dressed hastily, then go down to answer the door. I was very angry when I found it was the window cleaner. That happened a few times, after which I regularly dismantled the bell the night before the window cleaner was due. I put the bell back together after I got up. The poor boy complained about being unable to get into the pub early. I ignored him. The pub had measured taps which, when working normally, poured half a pint of beer at the press of a button. But the beer, when pumped, usually 41 produced a lot of foam (the head) which would spill over the top of a halfpint or pint glass, so the customer would not be getting a full measure. The pub therefore used twenty-four-ounce glasses instead of pints (twenty ounce), and twelve-ounce-glasses instead of half-pints. The glasses had a white line on them that marked where a pint, or half-pint, of liquid would reach. Since a pint, or a half-pint, fell short of filling the twenty-four-ounce, or twelve-ounce, glasses, it looked as if a short measure had been poured. That could lead to trouble. The pub had a lot of aggressive customers who took umbrage at being served what they regarded as being short measures and who were unwilling to listen to an explanation. I could lose patience too. One Sunday night, just after the last bell, which signified closing time, four strangers came into the saloon bar, two men and two women. They ordered two halves of bitter and two halves of lager. Legally, I should have refused to serve them, but they had just missed the bell, and they only wanted halves, so I poured them their beers. As I was pouring the fourth drink, one of the men passed me back one of the beers and asked me to top it up. I explained to him about the measured taps and the big glasses. He accepted the explanation and passed the beer to his male friend. His friend then complained about short measure. The first man explained the situation to him, but he was obviously not satisfied. He offered me his glass and said, “Put some more in there.” By this time I had had enough. I had just finished pouring the fourth drink, so I placed it on top of the lighted box over the bitter tap and then punched it at him. Beer and broken glass flew everywhere. I shook my fist at him and shouted: “Do you want some more of this?” The four of them left in haste. One Monday night, a smallish middle-aged man in a jacket, collar and tie came into the pub quite early on. None of us had seen him before. He sat drinking quietly by himself. Later in the evening, after the band had started, he was obviously drunk because he began dancing in front of the stage. He was making a bit of a fool of himself, but he was causing no harm, so we let him be. Then he puked up on to the carpet on the floor, by the side of the stage. He dashed off to the gents, perhaps to continue puking and then to clean himself up. My dad, who was sitting up at the bar listening to the band, went over to the door of the gents and waited for the man to return to the saloon. When he did return, my dad grabbed hold of him by the scruff of his neck and the seat of his pants and then half carried and half dragged him to the puddle of puke on the floor. The man realised what was going to happen. He pleaded: “No, don’t rub my nose in it!” My dad did rub his nose in it, then half carried and half dragged him to the front door and threw him onto the street. We never saw him again. 42 One of the glass-shop boys, a tall Scot with a broken nose, came to the bar and ordered a round. When I placed his drinks on the bar, he handed me some money and said “Have one yourself.” I thanked him, opened a bottle of Guinness, went to the till, then handed him his change. “Thank you,” he said, “you’re a gentleman.” “And a scholar,” I said. “You’re no fucking scholar!” he guffawed, as he walked away from the bar. I had previously studied philosophy at two universities, as an undergraduate and as a postgraduate. But I spoke with a cockney accent; and I was a barman; and a drunkard; and I punched glasses of beer at people… Many of the customers I served would, after I had completed their round, offer me a drink. I never declined. I usually took a bottle of Guinness and, because there was not much time for me to drink behind the bar, the bottles would line up on the shelf behind me and I would drink them after closing. I took that to be a mark of my popularity. I resigned from my job in August 1980. My last night was a Thursday night. I made sure I told as many people as I could that I would be finishing on that Thursday night. With them all knowing it was my last night, I expected to get a record number of drinks bought for me. I even remember saying to Nick, the other full-time barman, that I would be disappointed if, by the end of the night, I did not manage to fill at least a crate with half-pint bottles of Guinness that customers had bought for me (a crate held twelve bottles). That was on top of the bottles I would be drinking through the course of the evening. As it turned out I was acutely disappointed. I had only three or four bottles bought for me all night. People who normally bought me a drink did not do so on that evening. I was puzzled and offended. But if I had remembered the economics I had studied, I would have understood. Selfinterest is more common than altruism. When someone buys the barman or barmaid a drink, it is more often to ensure that he or she gets served quickly in future than an act of charity. That Thursday night was not busy. So there was no need to buy me a drink to ensure quick service on that night. Also, as I would not be there after that night, there was no point in buying me a drink to get quick service from me on a subsequent night. An investment in buying a drink for a barman can only be repaid if he is going to be there providing service into the future. I should, then, have been pleased rather than disappointed. For I should not really have expected to have any drinks bought for me at all. The three or four drinks I did get were pure acts of kindness, unless they were from drunks forgetting that it was my last night. The saloon bar of the pub was closed for renovation for a few weeks in the second half of 1981. It re-opened in September or October. It did look much improved. Previously it had been made to look like a cave; but now it 43 looked liked a pub, with new wallpaper, better furniture and a red patterned carpet. The first Saturday after it opened, I was a customer, sitting drinking at the far end of the bar with some friends. At the other end of the bar, by the door, there was a little crowd of semi-regulars. Three male strangers entered. One of them was acting in quite an aggressive way, strutting around the pub as though he was looking for trouble and saying things like: “So this is the North Pole, the hard men’s pub.” Such remarks were accompanied by a sneer. After a few minutes, one of the semi-regulars, little Gary, lost his temper. He lunged into the three men and started head butting. One of the three was quick to run and managed to escape injury. The mouthy one and the other one had their faces battered. The two of them stood there with their faces pouring blood and one of them saying: “I knew this would happen.” Meanwhile little Gary was growling as his friends coaxed him away from the strangers. My dad, who had been upstairs, then appeared. Little Gary offered to pay for a couple of glasses that had been broken in the scuffle. My dad declined the offer, then he told the three strangers to leave, which they did. The rest of us agreed that the choice of a red colour for the new carpet showed prudent foresight. The North Pole, a.k.a the Brewster Arms, managed by John Frederick from September 1978 to September 1982. 44 14. HELL’S ANGELS AT THE NORTH POLE I worked full-time behind the bar of the North Pole pub in Notting Hill from early July 1979 to the Thursday before the August bank holiday weekend in 1980. In September or October 1979, on a Friday night, at about 9.00, I had my back to the customers while I poured a spirit from one of the optics, at which point I heard the sound of breaking glass, and a number of glass fragments scattered around me. Someone had thrown a pint glass over the bar. The culprit was Derek, a tall, ginger-headed man. Apparently, he had been spitting beer over the bar for a while prior to this, saying “This beer’s piss.” I later learned that this was something he did regularly in pubs, probably when he had become too drunk to swallow any more. Anyhow, the glass that he threw was not entirely empty, and as it sailed through the air some of the beer that was inside it went over a man who happened to be standing next to him. That man was Big Brian, who was a bulky man and a member of a notorious chapter of Hell’s Angels. Fisticuffs ensued. I saw Brian laying into Derek in the pub doorway, as Derek and his fair-headed friend (whose name I cannot remember) tried to make their escape. Derek and his friend did eventually manage to escape from the pub, but Brian went after them, catching up with them half way across Latimer Road (the North Pole pub was on the corner of Latimer Road and North Pole Road). By this time I had come out of the pub to get a view of the proceedings. I was just in time to see Derek fall to the floor like a sack of potatoes. An ambulance was called to take him away. The best part of a year later, in July and August 1980, a gang of Big Brian’s chapter of Hell’s Angels began visiting the pub on a Wednesday night to see the rock band, Uncle Sam. Their number grew over time. By September, a few weeks after I had stopped working behind the bar, twenty or more of the Hell’s Angels were in the pub on Wednesday evenings. I was there too, as I enjoyed the band. Inevitably, one night there was some trouble. Some of the Hell’s Angels started a fight with a couple of men (not regulars) who were drinking at a table. The two men got beaten up, one quite badly. That was a case of bullying, as the Hell’s Angels had far superior numbers. In later weeks there were some further incidents. The band was then cancelled for a couple of weeks to see if that discouraged the Hell’s Angels’ attendance. On one of those Wednesdays without the band, it was early in the evening and there were three Hell’s Angels in the pub, sitting at a table upstairs on the middle floor of the saloon bar. Downstairs, at the bar, a little way along from me, there was a small crowd of regulars, young fellows with cropped 45 hair, aged between nineteen and early twenties. One of them, Dave, belonged to a set of three brothers, all tall skinheads, but his brothers were not with him that evening. Dave was, apparently, disturbed that his regular pub was being taken over by outsiders; particularly, perhaps, because the outsiders were not well-behaved and, on top of that, were Hell’s Angels. He went up to the Hell’s Angels on his own and said: “Do you want a fight, you cunts?” One of the Hell’s Angels got up and punched Dave in the face. Dave hit back and a couple of Dave’s friends ran up to help him. Further blows were exchanged. One Hell’s Angel jumped over the railing into the downstairs bar and fled out of the door. His two friends then came running down the stairs and followed after him. The Hell’s Angels stopped visiting the pub after that. But Big Brian still looked in from time to time (he was local). From the left: mum, dad and friend, Alfie Webb, in the public bar of the North Pole, late 1978. 46 15. REMEMBERING SMILER (TONY ALLUM) At the start of July 1979 I began working as a full-time barman in the North Pole pub in Notting Hill. My dad had been the governor there since the previous September. There were bands on stage several nights a week. On Wednesdays it was a rock band called ‘Uncle Sam.’ That was the busiest night of the week because that band was very popular. One of the regular customers was a boisterous and noisy young chap, aged about twenty or twenty-one, quite short (about five feet and six inches) but also quite stocky, with a round and slightly ruddy face. He was Smiler. He enjoyed the band and he made his appreciation known by shouts of approval. I talked to Smiler about music over the next year or so. He was a nice, decent, friendly man who was always smiling. Then I stopped working in the pub and set out to spend all my savings getting drunk day-in, day-out. Some of this drunken revelry was spent with Smiler, both in the North Pole and in other venues (including the Clarendon club in Hammersmith). In 1982 I was broke and my visits to pubs were infrequent. But one Saturday night, I was drinking at the bar in the North Pole. Behind me there was a group of regulars including Smiler, little Tony and Graham (I omit surnames to avoid possible embarrassment). A scuffle broke out. I turned around to see little Tony pushing and kicking a man who was unknown to me. Then, as the man headed for the door, Graham threw a glass at him. But Graham’s aim was off. The glass hit me on the back and smashed, leaving fragments twinkling in my hair. I knew the glass was not intended for me, and it did me no harm, so I ignored it. But Smiler walked over to me, took a look at the sprinkling of glass in my hair and then head-butted Graham around the pub. When Smiler had finished, Graham’s face was all swollen and purple. In that condition, Graham came over to me. “Dan, you know I never meant to hit you with that glass don’t you?” he said. “Yeah,” I said, “don’t worry about it Graham.” Then Graham left. Later that year the North Pole got a new governor. He was Eddie, an Irishman. He wanted to put his stamp on the place. On his first evening, I was drinking in the pub with John Proudlock, a heavy-drinking but sweetnatured man. Eddie approached me. “I’ve sacked all the old bar staff” he said, “and I’ve barred them from drinking in the pub. I don’t want anyone as a customer who was employed by the previous management. Have you worked in the pub before?” “Yeah, I used to be full-time and since then I’ve done bits here, there and everywhere.” 47 We looked at each other in silence for a few moments. Then Eddie smiled and held out his hand. “From now on,” he said, “I think you and me are going to be very good friends.” He had bottled it. I smiled too and we shook hands. Later that evening there was a little crowd of regulars behind me including little Tony and Smiler. Eddie then barred little Tony more or less on a whim. “I’m not leaving,” said little Tony. “If you don’t leave, I’ll get my truncheon.” “Get it then.” Eddie went behind the bar. Several people, including Smiler, urged little Tony to leave; but he would not. Eddie then returned with his wooden truncheon, but little Tony still would not leave. Eddie then attacked little Tony, hitting him around the head with the truncheon. At that point Smiler jumped on Eddie, got the truncheon off him and proceeded to batter him around the head with it, while several others in the company, including little Tony, weighed in with fists and feet. Eddie had half-a-dozen friends, bulky Irishmen, standing around at the other end of the bar, but none of them came to his assistance. Once Smiler and company had let Eddie go, Eddie went back behind the bar, humiliated. Smiler took possession of the truncheon and left. My sister Joy’s boyfriend of the time had been at school with Smiler (Holland Park Comprehensive). He said Smiler was often head-butting people at school. I think I can guess how that came about. Potential bullies, mistaking his smiles and small stature for vulnerability, could easily have picked on him. He would then have beaten the living daylights out of them. Early in 2004 I telephoned my other sister, Maxine, as I did every Sunday morning. She asked me if I had heard about my brother John’s mate. “Which mate?” I asked. “Smiler. He killed himself. He threw himself under a tube train at Ealing Broadway.” “What? Oh no! Why did he do that?…” My voice broke and the tears were falling from my eyes. “He had been living alone after separating from his wife or live-in girlfriend and several children. He was suffering from depression.” “Oh God… I’ve got tears running down my face.” “I know,” she said. How could that always smiling, happy and good-natured man end up killing himself? Poor old Smiler. R.I.P. 48 16. TWO INCIDENTS IN NORTH LONDON One night in September 1980, my mate Roy and I went to a pub in Barnet to see a band. When we got there we found that there was no band on: either the show had been cancelled or Roy had got his dates mixed up. We decided to stay there for the rest of the evening. When it got to about 10.00 p.m. or a bit later, I was not as drunk as I usually got by that time, so I decided I would get a whisky. I asked Roy if he wanted one and he said he did. I drank my whisky quickly and had a sip of beer. I then wanted another whisky. “Do you want another whisky,” I asked Roy. “I haven’t touched this one yet,” he said. That irritated me, as the pub would be shutting at 11.00 and I was not as drunk as I wanted to be. So I picked up Roy’s tumbler of whisky with my left hand and then punched it with my right hand. The glass and whisky went flying across the room and some of the whisky went over the trousers of a man who was drinking close to the bar. He was a drunken Scotsman who, we had noticed, had been looking for a fight for some time. He looked over at me with an aggressive stare, but I ignored him. “You just wasted my whisky,” Roy said. “You should buy me another one.” I thought that sounded reasonable and it would mean that I could get another for myself, too, so I got up to go to the bar. Roy noticed that the drunken Scotsman was still angry about the flying Scotch and was still looking vindictively in our direction. “Hold on,” Roy said, “you’d better leave it for a few minutes or there’ll be trouble.” “Fuck him,” I said. I got up and went off to the bar. As I approached the bar the drunk went for me. He did not try to punch me: he tried to grab me, apparently at the throat. But I saw him coming. “Fuck off, you silly cunt,” I said, as I brushed him away dismissively with my arm. He came back at me again. “Get out of it,” I said, pushing him away with my forearm, contemptuously. At that point I caught a barman’s eye and ordered my whiskies. At the same time, unbeknown to me, the pub governor grabbed the Scotsman and ushered him out of the pub. The governor and bar staff would not have seen me punch the whisky glass across the room, so they probably thought the Scotsman, who was bigger than I was, was picking on me. When I got back to my seat, a young fellow came over to join us. He was a regular in the pub and he had been impressed by the confident way in which I had dealt with the aggressive drunk. He told us that the Scotsman 49 had been causing a nuisance before that. He was interested to know who we were and what we were doing there. * One Friday or Saturday night in November 1980, I was in the Admiral Mann pub, in Kentish Town, with my mate, Roy. We got talking to a couple of fellows who sat at our table. One of the men, who was sitting opposite me, obviously liked AC/DC, because ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution’ was playing on the pub jukebox and he was tapping the table in time with the music, as I had been too. The jukebox was not very loud. That gave me a pretext to start on the man. “Stop fucking banging on the table: I can’t hear the fucking jukebox!” I said to him, in an intense and aggressive manner. He stopped for a while but then resumed. “Stop fucking banging on the table, you cunt!” He punched me in the eye. I responded with a flurry of punches, which made him jump up from his seat and move away. The pub governor shortly appeared. He told the man standing that he was barred. He then looked at me. “You’d better go too”, he said. “No, he’s all right: it was the other bloke who started it,” said a man who had been sitting on a stool at the bar, just a few feet away, and who sometimes worked in the pub part-time. So the governor said that I could stay. Perhaps the part-time barman saw the first punch but did not hear the abuse from me that led up to it. The governor then joked that he had a steak in his fridge that I could put on my eye. I had been using the pub fairly regularly for more than three years, so he knew me. A young chap who was sitting at the next table then sat opposite me and started to talk to me about the incident. I said to him that I should have hit the man harder or hit him more. But the young chap said that, from where he was, it looked as though I had acquitted myself admirably. The man I hit was significantly bigger than I was. My eye did develop into a shiner. * These incidents raise a couple of questions. First, after each one, a young man in the pub came over to talk to me. Normally, when there is a fight in a pub, other customers keep a distance from the participants, unless they happen to know them personally, because they do not want to risk getting involved in a fight themselves. So why were these young fellows befriending 50 me? I can only guess. I think it was my appearance. Although I was twenty five, I looked younger, probably no more than twenty. I was a pretty boy. I was small, being just over five feet and six inches tall and of slight build. And I had, at that time, long hair which gave me a girlish appearance. Each of those things, I think, would have given me an unthreatening air. Further, in each case it looked to the young fellows that I was defending myself from an aggressor, so they might have felt it safe to speak to me and they might also have wanted to offer some sort of support. They were not aware that it was me who started the trouble. That brings me to the second question: why was I starting trouble? My life has been punctuated with personal crises, when I become convinced that the sort of life I am living is wrong for me. I then think about what I should try next. My mate Roy, who has been a friend for more than forty years, said to me in the 1990s, “Most people stay the same, but you change every few years.” I had a personal crisis in my second year at the London School of Economics: my abandonment of Marxism had left me without moorings, and I had no social or sexual life. By the end of my second year I got a new philosophical direction from Schopenhauer and Kant and by the start of my third year I ‘reinvented’ myself as a party animal. I was soon drinking heavily and I became aggressive when drunk. I did not reflect on whether I should be aggressive, so that became a part of me without being vetted. When I was doing postgraduate study at Lancaster I had another crisis. But, being a party animal, my response then was to get drunk, night after night, instead of trying to think rationally about available options. Being a drunk is not consistent with being an academic. So I gave up my academic career to become a barman in the North Pole, the pub of which my dad had quite recently become manager. Working in the North Pole presented me with many examples of ways in which one could be aggressive. My new identity was that of an aggressive boozer; and it did not seem to me to be wrong because there were plenty of aggressive boozers in the working-class circles in which I moved. It seemed to be a culturally acceptable form of lifestyle and I did not bother to question it until later. Fortunately, I largely turned my back on the aggression in the late 1980s. Unfortunately, I did not give up getting drunk until April 2002. 51 17. MORAL LUCK In September 1982, the North Pole pub in Notting Hill got a new governor, Eddie, an Irishman. In my reminiscence of Smiler, earlier, I mentioned how, on his first day, Eddie tried to set his stamp on the place by barring some people. After Eddie attacked little Tony with a truncheon and got beaten up by Smiler and a few of the boys, little Tony went to the Pavilion pub just down the road. In there was his friend, ‘Molly’ (a nickname – of a man). I stayed in the North Pole with John Proudlock and ‘Peanut.’ Toward the end of the evening, Molly came in on his own. Obviously enraged, he entered the doors shouting at Eddie: “I want you!” Eddie was behind the bar, but he ran upstairs as Molly threw glasses and furniture over the bar at him. Eddie’s half-a-dozen Irish friends were still drinking at the bar, right next to where Molly was, but none of them did anything but watch. That all happened on a Monday, which was actually a day of the week on which there was often trouble in that pub. I was in the pub every night that week, as I found it quite an interesting time. Eddie continued to bar some of the regulars, in a more or less arbitrary fashion and, predictably, he elicited violent responses. On the Saturday night, John Proudlock and I were drinking at the bar and there were only two other people in the pub, a manand-woman couple who were not regulars. Then John Singleton came through the door, threw a stool over the bar and shouted: “Where’s the governor? Tell him to bring his truncheon down.” Eddie did not appear. John Singleton, whom I had thrown out of the pub three years before, gave me a smile, then left. Over the next few weeks, even more of the regulars got barred, including John Proudlock, a sweet man who never caused any trouble. In the Pavilion pub one Saturday evening I was playing cards with some friends when Eddie walked in with a friend. I could not believe the audacity of the man: it made me jump up from my seat. I then saw Eddie being set upon by several exNorth Pole customers. One of them, ‘Mutley,’ appeared to be using Eddie’s face as a punch ball. On Christmas Eve I was in the Latimer Arms, just down the road from the North Pole. After the pub closed, a group of us, including John Proudlock and blond Paul, began walking home. When we reached the North Pole we saw that the public bar doors were open. We thought there might be ‘afters’ so we went around to the saloon bar. But in the porch of the saloon bar one of the barmen was fighting with one of the customers. We looked past those into the pub, where we could see another scuffle going on. We also saw that some of the pub furniture was out on the street. I grabbed hold of a bulky 52 wooden chair and made as if to throw it through the largest pub window. I was just pretending. But blond Paul said: “Go on, Danny, do it.” So I did. I threw it with all my force and it went straight through the big plate-glass window, smashing it to pieces and landing in the upstairs of the pub. I hung around for no more than a minute, then I said goodbye to my friends and walked home. One of my mates, Kevin, was upstairs in the pub. He was looking out of the window when he saw me pick up the chair. He shouted “Run!” at the people upstairs in the pub and he got them all away from the window. As a consequence, there were no injuries from my reckless action. On Christmas day, I was in the Pavilion for the lunchtime session. When Molly came in he gave me a big smile and said: “Oi, thug!” Several others praised my destructive act. I had been a recipient of ‘moral luck.’ When that chair went through the window, hurtling great shards of glass around the pub, it could easily have caused serious injury to some local people who had been enjoying their festive celebrations. Young men and women could have been scarred for life or blinded by the flying shards. If the chair had hit someone on the head it could have killed him. I would then have been reviled instead of celebrated. But my action would have been the same. I was just lucky that Kevin happened to be there and happened to be looking out of the window (probably looking at the fight going on in the porch) and noticed, perhaps out of the corner of his eye, what I was doing. If not for Kevin, I might easily have been guilty of grievous bodily harm or even manslaughter and I might have ended up in prison. As it was, through no merit of my own, I was guilty only of criminal damage. So, spare a thought for those poor souls who, unlike me, experienced moral BAD luck. They may be in prison having committed a wrongful act which, due to some chance circumstance, turned out to be a much worse act than the one that they intended. Postscript. On Boxing Day, two days after I smashed the window, I was in the Pavilion for the lunchtime session with many of my North Pole drinking partners. There was talk of going into the North Pole that evening for a drink. John Proudlock was keen to go back in, despite being barred. I said I would go too. When someone asked Graham if he was coming, he said “Yes.” He then spotted me and asked his interlocutor: “Is Danny going?” He received a nod. He then decided he would give it a miss. Other people also seemed to reconsider, since it seemed certain that there would be trouble if I was in the company. 53 We had been expecting that there would be fourteen or fifteen of us going. But that evening, when we met in the Pavilion at 7.00, there was only about eight of us. In the end, only six of us went: ‘Algernon,’ ‘Tattoo,’ ‘Archie’ (all nicknames), John Proudlock, my brother and me. I walk fast, so I ended up in front, and I was the first to enter the North Pole. The bar staff suffered consternation at the sight of the six of us striding in. I ordered six pints. I wondered whether I would be served; but I was. We stood there drinking and chatting for about ten minutes, then two or three wagonloads of policemen came in and the governor, Eddie, came down from upstairs to meet them. “What’s the problem governor?” asked one of the policemen. “He,” Eddie was pointing at me, “smashed that window up there; and he,” pointing at John Proudlock, “is barred. I want all six of them out of my pub.” “Do you wanted to press charges for the damage to the window?” “No, just get them out of my pub.” The police then escorted us outside, took our names and addresses, then let us go. 54 18. GOD AND ME I was brought up in an irreligious, but not an anti-religious, household. My dad was an atheist; but he never mentioned it unless asked. My mum, when troubled, would sometimes go to a church to light a candle; but that was a superstitious ritual rather than evidence of a religious commitment. So far as I am aware, none of the extended family were regular churchgoers. If any of them believed in God, they kept that to themselves. I had never given much thought to the question of God’s existence until I became a Marxist, when I denied that God exists, because that is what Marxism says. I jettisoned Marxism when I was twenty but the atheism lingered on. In 1982 I was re-reading some historical philosophers and pondering metaphysical questions. I came to the view, under the influence of Leibniz and Kant, that the physical world in space does not exist: it just appears to exist. Each of us is a non-physical mind or spirit which has the illusory experience of the familiar physical world, each from his own perspective. Because our illusory experiences all interlink in this way, we belong to a community, with a shared experience. But, I surmised, there are other communities of spirits with which none of us is currently connected. Each of these communities shares its own illusory experience of a different physical world. Death is the transition from one spiritual community to another. To put it crudely, if I were to die now, I would stop having this ‘dream’ that I share with you and I would start having another one that I would share with a different set of spirits in another community. That may sound somewhat religious. I accepted the possibility that God had arranged all this and that the passage from one community to another represented a moral progress toward the ‘Kingdom of Heaven.’ But I thought that was only one possibility amongst many others. The same could be said about my view concerning the communities of spirits. I had come to hold that view because I did not want to die. I tried to read Fichte but I could not tolerate his turgid prose (it was like reading poetry). But perhaps under his influence I became a solipsist, that is, I thought that I was the only thing that existed and that the whole world of physical things and other people is an illusion constructed by my subconscious. In effect, that made me God. The difficulty with that view was that, as the Yanks say, “shit happens.” If I had created the whole shebang, why did it so often frustrate me? Why could I not delve into my subconscious and get it to bring about a world much more to my liking? It may sound as if I had gone mad. But I had not. I was doing metaphysics. When we start thinking about deep and difficult issues 55 concerning the ultimate nature of reality, we are led into entertaining all manner of weird theories. Physicists have given us quantum theory, which no one understands, general relativity, which denies the absoluteness of simultaneity, and metaphysical speculations about a multiverse. Metaphysics becomes physics when we find ways of using experience to decide between theories. An infinity of future time is easy to conceive. An infinity of elapsed time is more difficult. How could the world ever get to now if an infinity of time had to be gone through first? Of course, the answer to that question is that the infinity of elapsed time never started: it extends back infinitely. But it is difficult to understand how any real process, that is, one that is actually happening, could be one that had never started. So, late in 1982, I thought that the world had a beginning in time. Either it just popped into existence or it was created. If it was created by a pre-existing Creator, then He too must have come into existence at some finite time before now, if an infinity of elapsed time is impossible. So did He just pop into existence or was He created? To avoid an infinite regress, it seems, we have to say that either the world just popped into existence or its ‘Creator’ exists outside of time; in which case ‘creation’ was not an act but rather some form of dependency of the world on an atemporal being. I had come to believe, following Plato, that abstract entities, like concepts, propositions and numbers exist objectively and timelessly. These things exist independently of us but they are ‘grasped’ by our minds and they enable us to interpret the world. There are logical relations between these abstract entities. For example, the concept horse implies the concept animal, since if anything is a horse, then it must be an animal. Similarly, the concept odd excludes the concept even, since if a number is odd then it cannot be even. Because of such logical interrelations I thought that all abstract entities were just facets of one and the same eternal being. It seemed a short step from there to the hypothesis that the world depended for its existence on a single, infinite, abstract being that existed outside of time. Such a being could be identified with God. That would, of course, be an idea of God very different to the traditional religious conceptions, especially since I did not connect this abstract entity to the demands of morality or the good of humanity. Through 1983 I became increasingly interested in taking seriously the religious interpretation of that metaphysical picture. But we should distinguish theism from religion. I had never been a Christian and I was not inclined to become one. I had no interest in any movement or organisation that adhered to a historical creed, a ‘sacred text,’ an ossified dogma. Traditional religious texts can at most be regarded as contributions to religious thought, from a primitive time, that are now open to critical 56 discussion, re-interpretation, modification and, in some cases, rejection. So, although I had become a theist, I did not adhere any religion. The closest I ever came to belonging to a religion was during my dalliance with Marxism. Marxism, and socialism generally, is religion for godless folk. I do not think it is merely a coincidence that the rise of socialism in the West coincided with the decline of belief in God. By the later part of 1983 I came to believe in God as a being on which the whole world depends for its existence and as a force for good. As a result, I saw the world in a different way, as a place made for me and for other people by a beneficent Being. My attitudes changed accordingly; in particular, I became more concerned with moral and immoral behaviour, both mine and other people’s. I developed a fascination for churches, which I would admire as I walked by them. In the autumn of 1983, walking through Notting Hill in a dusk breeze, I thought I could actually feel God in the wind. The empiricist philosophers maintained that all our ideas come from our experience. What nonsense! My experience of the world had changed because my ideas had changed. My theistic mindset started to wane in 1985 and by 1986 I was again an agnostic, which I have remained ever since. I no longer experience the wind as God; it is just a nuisance. My changes from unthinking agnosticism to unthinking atheism to thoughtful theism to thoughtful agnosticism were not brought about by argument, though arguments were always in the picture. If Marxism is true, then there is no God. I accepted that argument, so when I became a Marxist I became an atheist; but, as I explained in an earlier reminiscence, I did not accept Marxism as a consequence of arguments. My consideration of arguments against various solutions to some metaphysical problems played a part in determining the details of my theistic view; but my adoption of theism seemed to have other causes. Similarly, my rejection of theism was not due to a decisive argument against it; it just seemed to emerge. There are no decisive arguments for or against anything; arguments are helps, not deciders. There are numerous reasons why there can be no decisive arguments. Here are some. Instead of accepting the conclusion of an argument you recognise as valid, you might instead reject one of the premises. Even if you accept the premises, you may doubt the validity of the argument. Even if the argument can be shown algorithmically to be valid in standard first-order predicate logic, you may reject that logic (there are numerous alternative, 'deviant' systems of logic). A decision is a mental act, and an act is by its nature under the agent's control; therefore it cannot be determined. 57 However, while the decision regarding atheism/agnosticism/theism cannot be compelled by any argument, it should be informed by argument; more particularly, it should (if rational) be informed by the current state of the debate. That is not to say that, if the current state of the debate indicates that p, then you ought to accept that p. Here is a famous example. In the 1840s scientists derived from Newton’s theory predictions about the motions of Uranus. They also plotted the orbit of Uranus from their observations. The two did not marry up. Newton’s theory said that Uranus should be here; but we can see that it is over there. The state of the debate at that time indicated that Newton’s theory was false. I have never heard of any scientist who, at that time, accepted that Newton’s theory was false. There were possibilities for changing the current state of the debate. In particular, Leverrier suggested that Uranus’s anomalous motions could be due to the gravitational pull of another planet, one previously unknown. He used Newton’s theory to calculate how big and whereabouts a planet would need to be in order to exert a gravitational pull on Uranus that was sufficient to account for its observed positions. If there were such a planet, that would rescue Newton’s theory. Leverrier’s calculations implied that the supposed new planet would be visible in a particular place at a particular time. Telescopes were pointed; and there it was! They called it ‘Neptune.’ All we need to understand is the logic of the situation. The current state of the debate indicates that p. But are there possibilities for turning around the state of the debate? If so, then one may accept the current state of the debate but set out to produce a contrary state of the debate some time soon. Anorexic me in 1984, age twenty-eight. 58 19. EVICTED AND LOCKED UP In May 1984 I moved into a bedsit on the top floor of a big house in Stowe Rd in Shepherd’s Bush. The owners of the house, an elderly couple who lived in the basement, let out all the rooms in the two floors above them. When I first met them, a few days before moving in, I asked them if it was a quiet house. They said it was. “Do you like a quiet house?” the woman asked. “Yes,” I replied. “Oh, thank God!” she said. Mr. B, in the room adjacent to mine, was almost six feet tall. One day I overheard him tell the landlord that he was sixteen stone and used to be a prison warder. But he was now a bus driver. When he was at work, the house was normally very peaceful. But when he was home and awake, he always had the radio or the television on with the volume pretty loud. The wall between us was thin. I thought it was hardboard but it might have been plasterboard. His noise was not just a distraction when I was trying to read. He worked shifts. When he did the late shift, he arrived home around 1.00 a.m. or 2.00 a.m.; and, because he did not have to get up the next morning, he would stay up listening to the radio or watching the television, which woke me up. I asked him on several occasions to keep the noise down, but he obviously thought I was being unreasonable, because he went to the landlord to complain. When the landlord came to see me I explained the problem. The landlord then spoke to Mr. B and the noise abated; but only for a few months. And from April 1985, his noise got worse. I asked him regularly to reduce the volume and he always complied, but after fifteen minutes or so the volume rose again. I had lost a lot of weight. In part that was due to my giving up booze. I had been eleven-and-a-half stone in 1981, when I was drunk all the time. But by May 1984 my weight had dropped to eight-and-a-half stone. I enjoyed being slim again; but then it became something of an obsession. I began to cut back on food. Then, in September 1984, I become a vegetarian. By the summer of 1985 my weight had dropped to just over seven stone, less than seventy percent of the healthy weight of a man of my height and age. I looked skeletal, with painfully hollow cheeks and skinny arms that showed just attenuated remnants of the muscles that used to be there. I used to get up at 5.45 a.m. for work during the week; and I kept to the same routine at weekends. On Saturday 1 June 1985, I went to bed at about 9.30 p.m. and got off to sleep. Some time later, I was woken by the noise of a television or radio. I felt quite refreshed, so I thought it must be about 5.30. I 59 looked over at the clock and saw that it was around midnight. I decided that I had had enough. I got out of bed, put on a pair of trousers and a pair of shoes; then I went to Mr. B’s door and knocked. When he opened the door, I punched him in the mouth. I doubt that there was much force in my punch, as I had become a ‘seven stone weakling,’ less than half the weight of Mr. B. But Mr. B was taken by surprise and he stepped back quickly into his room. I followed after him and landed another blow to his face. He did not hit me back, so I stopped. “Oh, you’ve done it now,” he said, “I am going to see the landlord.” He then went downstairs to the basement. I went back to my room. The next morning the landlord came to see me. He had Mr. B with him. “I want you to leave the house by tomorrow,” the landlord said to me. “I went to the police station last night,” said Mr. B, “and I reported your assault. If you don’t leave, I’ll press charges.” “I’ve paid rent up to next Friday,” I said, “so I should stay until then.” The two of them looked at each other then nodded. Before that Friday I bought a stereo cassette-player. I also visited my parents’ house and used my brother’s record player to make taped copies of AC/DC’s ‘High Voltage’ and the Scorpions’ ‘Lovedrive.’ On the Friday morning, I got up at 5.45 a.m. as usual, and I started playing the music. I did not play it too loud, as I did not want to disturb everyone in the house, only Mr. B. I packed all my things, which did not take long. I then listened to the music while I waited for my sister’s husband to pick me up in his car. He turned up around mid-day with one of his ‘business associates.’ Mr. B, as an ex-warder, might have recognised the two of them. More than a year later, in the autumn of 1986, I was out drinking with my cousin, Jonathan, in Hammersmith. We ended up in The Swan pub at the top of King Street. It had a video jukebox. AC/DC’s ‘Shake Your Foundations’ played a couple of times. Being drunk I sang along with it, quite loudly, while punching the walls in rhythm. When the pub shut, Jonathan and I were going different ways but he decided to walk with me to my bus stop because he was worried about me getting home in one piece, as I was drunk, aggressive and small, and Hammersmith could, in those days, be a pretty dangerous place just after the pubs had shut. He waited with me until a bus approached. He then said goodbye to me and walked off. The bus stopped, the doors opened and I entered. I had the money for my fare in my hand. Sitting in the driver’s seat was Mr. B. “Oh, fuck you!” I said, putting the money into my pocket, walking past him and taking a seat on the bus. “Pay your fare please!” he shouted at me. I said nothing. 60 “Pay your fare please! This bus will not move until you’ve paid your fare.” I went back to him, with my fists clenched. “Fuck off, you cunt!” I said. “I ain’t paying my fare to you, you fat wanker!” He was sat behind a tough, transparent, plastic screen, so I could not actually hit him. He then started sounding the bus’s horn. The bus stop was outside Hammersmith police station. After a few minutes a couple of police officers came out and escorted me into the station. I explained to them that I was not someone who went around threatening bus drivers, that my quarrel with that particular driver was a personal and long-standing one. I told them his name and address, so that they could check out my story if necessary. I got very stroppy with the police officer who took down my name and address. He displayed remarkable patience with my idiotic behaviour. Then he locked me in a cell. I quickly got bored in the cell and started shouting “let me out” when any officer walked past the cell door. They ignored me for an hour or more; then they let me go. Me, age thirty, in 1986. 61 20. WHY I BECAME A VEGGIE AND THEN CEASED TO BE ONE On 4 September 1984, I became a vegetarian after considering a simple (in fact, simplistic) argument: we can live without eating meat; therefore, eating meat means sacrificing animals purely for the sake of our palate; that is immoral. I took no pains to work out a balanced and nourishing vegetarian diet. I just ate very largely what I ate before, minus the meat. So a typical meal would be a plate of parsnips and potatoes with four slices of wholemeal bread. After a few months I noticed some significant deterioration in my long-distance vision. But that may have been due to my spending a great deal of time indoors with my head buried in a book. In April 1986, I went with my brother to the USA for a fortnight’s holiday in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. We ate in Mexican, Italian and other restaurants. There were always vegetarian options. However, at Disneyland, seeing lots of people eating hot dogs and hamburgers, I finally relented. It seemed to be a missed opportunity to be in America and not eat a hot dog. So after one year and seven months I gave up my vegetarianism. Having not eaten meat for so long, and having given it up for what I took to be moral reasons, I struggled with the hot dog, as I was trying to overcome a taboo. But once I had eaten it, I found further consumption of meat easy. I began having steak and eggs for breakfast. Incidentally, I was disappointed with the size of the steaks. We had heard stories of Americans eating massive steaks, but all the ones I got, for breakfast or evening meal, were the same sort of size as was customary in England. My decision to resume eating meat did not follow a process of moral reasoning in which I undermined the case for vegetarianism. So, the moral reasons for vegetarianism should have appeared to me as strong then as they had done before. I was surrounded by other people enjoying meat, so I simply put the moral argument out of my mind and succumbed to temptation. That sounds like moral weakness. However, although I struggled with that first hot dog, I did not feel guilty after I had eaten it. If I still thought that it was wrong to eat meat, should I not have felt guilty, at least when in a moral frame of mind? Further, I went on to eat lots of meat, with gusto and without compunction. That seems to indicate that my abandonment of vegetarianism was not moral weakness but, rather, a change of view, even though it was not a change of view arrived at by means of a critical appraisal. Was it an abandonment of reason for instinct, like David Hume’s rejection of the sceptical arguments which “admit of no answer but produce no conviction”? Perhaps I just thought that it could not be wrong to 62 eat meat if all these decent people were doing it, despite the force of argument to the contrary. But that is a very dangerous attitude in matters of morals, where we must remember the injunction: “Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.” Just think of ordinary Germans turning a blind eye to the persecution of Jews under the Nazi regime. What surprises me now is that, in becoming a vegetarian, I made a substantial change to my life after considering a very weak argument. I seemed to have abandoned my critical faculty! It is true that our consumption of meat means that, annually, billions of animals are slaughtered, often when they are young because the quality of their meat deteriorates with age. But it is also true that the vast majority of those animals would not have lived at all if they had not been bred for their meat. So, by eating meat, we give each of those animals a life, albeit a short one in many cases. For many of them it is a pretty good life: on the better farms, animals live comfortably among their natural companions, they are well-fed, protected from predators, cared for when disease afflicts them and, ultimately, killed humanely. In the absence of meat-eating, they would have had no life at all, nothing! It seems much better to give them a life which is later taken away humanely than to give them no life at all. The moral argument seems to be on the side of the carnivores. Of course, there are abuses in farming, as in any human activity. But that does not show that eating meat, or the farming on which it depends, is wrong. It shows only that we have a duty to rectify abuses. Parental child abuse, for example, does not show that raising children is wrong. So, it is far from clear that there is a moral case for vegetarianism. Indeed, the moral argument seems to favour the meat-eaters. Consequently, the moral preaching with which some vegetarians belabour us is out of order. Indeed, even vegetarians eat at the expense of multitudes of small animals that are killed when fields are ploughed, eco-systems destroyed and poisons put down to protect the crops. Animal death and suffering seems to be an unavoidable condition of human existence. If that is so, it cannot be the case that we ought to eat without killing animals, because ‘ought’ implies ‘can.’ One may, of course, be a vegetarian for non-moral reasons. 63 21. SOME CURIOSITIES OF AGGRESSION On a Monday night in July 1985 I was drinking up at the bar in the North Pole pub with a mate, Brian. The pub was relatively empty. At about 10.00, two local girls came in and stood next to Brian to order their drinks. Brian knew them well and he started to talk to them. I knew them only by sight and I felt excluded. Bored, I had a look around the pub, to see what else was going on. I saw a group of four young men sitting at a table. I knew only one of them, John Singleton. One of the other three was a black man with lightbrown skin. He was about my size. The other two were white, one of them a bit bigger than I was, the other much bigger. As I glanced over at them I noticed that the black man was staring in my direction. He seemed to be staring into space. Or was he staring at me? I looked around the pub again and then looked back at the black man. He was still staring my way. I went into a rage and walked quickly over to him. In a loud and aggressive manner I said: “What’s up with you, mate? Wha’d’ya keep fucking looking at me for?” John Singleton jumped up and pleaded: “Danny, leave ’em alone… they’re with me.” “We ain’t looking for trouble,” one of the white strangers said. “We are just out for a quiet drink,” said the other, larger one, with a smirk. “What do you say?” I asked the black man. “I wasn’t looking at you,” he replied, calmly. “Okay, I’ll leave it,” I said; then I returned to my mate Brian, who was still talking to the local girls and who had no idea that I had just been involved in an incident. About half an hour later the three strangers left. At pub closing time, I went across the road to the fish-and-chip shop and bought a bag of chips to eat on the way home. I took my usual short-cut down Eynham Road, a small side street. I had not got far down that street when I heard a noise behind me. When I looked over my shoulder I saw the three men from the pub. Each was carrying a baseball bat. As soon as I saw them I received a blow on the shoulder from one of the bats and I fell to the floor. Once on the floor, I covered my head with my hands and arms and curled into the foetal position as the blows rained down. As I lay there being beaten I thought: this is the end, this is where I die, this is how I exit the world. At that point the blows stopped. As I lay there still, the black man crouched down and said: “Don’t ever speak to me again like you did in that pub tonight.” The three of them then left. I waited a few moments then I got up and dusted myself down. I looked for my bag of chips on the floor, but my attackers had 64 taken them. I was remarkably undamaged. I had only some minor bruising on my back and on my arms, which had been covering my head. The next night I went back to the pub. I had not originally intended to go out on the Tuesday, because Tuesday was the deadest night of the week. But I felt that I had to go back in case the three men were there. I could not let them get away with it. As it happened, none of the three turned up; but John Singleton was there. I told him what had happened. He expressed surprise and said that he had no idea they were going to do such a thing. He told me the black man’s name; but he did not know who the other two were. About eighteen months later, on Christmas Eve 1986, I was in the North Pole. By that time the pub had a pool table installed upstairs. I was downstairs, with my back to the upstairs, drinking with my brother and about ten of our friends. I glanced upstairs and saw that the black man was there, playing pool. I was affronted that he had come back into that pub. I did nothing immediately; but anger simmered. Five or ten minutes later, I was irate. I put my glass down on the bar, turned around quickly and dashed upstairs to the pool table. I looked around for the black man but he was not there. With rage evident in my face and eyes, I looked at the man with whom he had been playing pool. He seemed to feel threatened, as he stiffened his pose and held the cue apparently in readiness to use it as a weapon. But I had no argument with him. I looked around again for my target, but when it was clear that he was not there, I returned to my friends downstairs. It was probably another ten minutes before I glanced upstairs again. The black man was not there and the man with the pool cue had left. In retrospect, I guess that the black man just happened to be in the gents when I sped up the stairs. When he returned from the gents, his friend probably told him it was too risky to stay; or his friend might have gone to the gents to tell him that. It must have seemed obvious to him that I was going to start a fight; and I had about ten friends with me. My behaviour in the incidents described was discreditable; and, I am ashamed to say, it was typical behaviour for me through most of the 1980s. I did not always get off so lightly. Dean Toth knocked me out in 1981. In 1987, someone coshed me on the back of the head and fractured my skull leaving me part deaf in my right ear. I do not know who that was; but I was not robbed, so it seems to have been someone with a grudge. I had my nose broken by Gary Horgan in 1988. My point in relating the story is that it has some curious aspects with which most, perhaps all, men will be familiar. First, that Monday evening in July 1985, I could see that the black man was staring in my direction and that he was not staring at me. Even if I was genuinely in two minds about it, I should have given him the benefit of the doubt. Instead, I decided that he was staring at me because it gave me a 65 reason to start trouble. The odd thing is that I was genuinely angry when I stormed over to him; so I had convinced myself that he was staring at me. I had deceived myself by dismissing my doubts about his stare so that I could believe what I wanted to be true. Second, the black man and his two friends were cowards. In the pub, they had odds of three-to-one in their favour and two of them were bigger than I was; but they backed out. They had to arm themselves with baseball bats and sneak up on me from behind before they dared to mount an attack. Worse still, when they were hitting me with the bats, none of them put in any seriously hard blows. It seems that each was depending on the others to do the nasty work while he just went through the motions (that is a phenomenon familiar to psychologists). What a bunch of wankers! Third, it might seem that my picking a fight with three blokes was an act of bravery. It was not. As Aristotle says, the brave man is the one who feels fear but who overcomes the fear to do the right thing. But I felt no fear. I never even considered the potential bad consequences of my actions for myself. I was reckless. I often picked fights with big blokes whom I could not realistically beat because I was fearless (not brave). Luckily for me, the fearless man often strikes fear into others. Me, early 1986, age thirty (passport photo). 66 22. SCIENCE AND MYSTICISM In September 1986, I was living with my parents. On the sixteenth, my parents had gone out early in the morning, leaving me alone indoors. I was preparing to go out in the afternoon. It was mid-morning and I was having a shave at the bathroom sink when something odd happened. My heart began to palpitate violently. It seemed to be jumping around inside me, jarring my whole body. I felt weak and I had to hold on to the sink to keep my balance. The episode probably lasted just 5-10 seconds, but it seemed longer. Then I was back to normal. A while later, perhaps forty-five minutes or an hour, the telephone rang. It was my mum calling from St. Mary’s Hospital in Paddington. My dad had had a heart attack as he walked by my mum’s side at Notting Hill Gate. He fell to the ground. My mum panicked. Three builders working nearby came to his assistance and tried to jolt his heart back into its usual motion. One of these, my mum said, jumped on my dad’s chest, breaking several of his ribs thereby. My dad was now lying in the hospital in a coma. Two months previously he had celebrated his fifty-fifth birthday. After nine days in a coma, the machine that was keeping him alive was switched off and he died. I have suffered milder forms of palpitation since then. But several checks, the last one around 2005, have shown that my heart is healthy and that I have never had a heart attack (apparently, such an incident leaves traces). I do not know whether my violent palpitations on the sixteenth of September 1986 coincided with my dad’s fatal heart attack. The two events certainly happened around the same time. They might even have happened at exactly the same time. Let’s assume that they did. What is the explanation? Here’s a possibility. There is a spiritual bond between father and son. That filial bond enabled a transfer of psychic or spiritual energy through which I was informed of my father’s fate. Two souls were in communion. Views of that sort were popular with the Neoplatonists in the early Renaissance. They viewed the world as an organic whole in which different parts were linked by natural sympathies. Such views had ceased to be respectable by the later Renaissance, being displaced by the new mechanical philosophy which tried to explain everything mechanically, in terms of the collisions of small particles. The mechanists were successful in developing testable explanations of a range of phenomena. A mechanist would insist that the simultaneity of my dad’s heart attack and my violent palpitations was just a coincidence. There is no physical mechanism by which a heart attack in one person could trigger violent palpitations in another person, especially when they are separated by 67 almost two miles of heavily built environment; and the fact that the two people are related as father and son is not causally relevant. The crowning achievement of the mechanical philosophy was Isaac Newton’s theory, published toward the end of the seventeenth century and heralding the Enlightenment. Newton’s theory was one of the most successful scientific theories ever. Ironically, its mechanical explanations depended essentially on a non-mechanical principle, namely, the so-called Law of Gravity. According to that law, every particle of matter has a natural attraction for every other particle of matter, even across vast distances of empty space. Many of the mechanical philosophers initially rejected Newton’s theory because they regarded such universal attraction as occult. Newton himself was embarrassed about it and even declared it absurd; but he was never able to replace it with a purely mechanical principle. He surmised that it was evidence of the existence of God. Eventually, all the scientists, and virtually everyone else who knew anything about it, accepted Newton’s theory, along with the ‘occult’ force of gravity, because the theory was so astoundingly successful. For example, Leverrier used Newton’s theory to predict the existence of a new planet; and when telescopes were pointed at the appropriate places in the sky, Neptune was discovered. The Neoplatonists had their revenge. So, what of the supposed filial bond that, telepathically, lets the son know of his father’s fatal heart attack? Simply to rule it out as ‘occult’ would reveal an ignorance of the history of science. But simply to accept it as it stands would be to indulge in childish fairy-stories. The force of gravity became scientifically respectable because it was part of a scientific theory. A scientific theory is one that makes falsifiable predictions that survive testing; that is, it makes predictions which, for all we currently know, might turn out to be false, but which, when we test them, appear to be true. Telepathic theories are notoriously either unfalsifiable or falsified. It is possible that a scientific telepathic theory that can explain the two cardiac phenomena may be developed; but, so far as I am aware, we do not have one yet. So what is the explanation of that strange concatenation of events over thirty years ago? No one knows. Newton’s force of gravity was eventually eliminated from science by Einstein’s general relativity theory, which instead of gravity uses the curvature of space-time. But the most fundamental scientific theory, quantum physics, has reintroduced non-mechanical effects: two photons moving away from each other may be related by an equation so that, if we interfere with the motion of one, we can predict how the motion of the other will change, despite the fact that there can be no physical influence between them. The Neoplatonists’ revenge again! 68 23. TWO INCIDENTS IN THE PENNY FARTHING In the mid-1980s a crowd of us from the North Pole used to drink in the Penny-Farthing pub in King Street, Hammersmith, on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. In the late-80s it became a gay bar; but in the mid-80s there were lots of attractive young women in there, which is why we went. My brother John met his wife in there. One night, probably a Saturday, I was there with Alan Beaney, Archie, Fatman, Tattoo, and Little John (all nicknames apart from Alan, R.I.P.). We were standing in two rows facing each other. I was opposite Little John, next to me was Tattoo and opposite him Alan; next to Tattoo was Archie and opposite him Fatman. We were well inside the pub, just beyond the end of the bar. Beyond us was an area used as a dance floor encircled by tables and chairs. At one of the tables sat two male-female couples. One of the men in that seated group got up, walked over to us, stood behind me and started mouthing abuse at the six of us. I was engrossed in a conversation with Little John, so I did not hear him at first; but I gradually became subliminally aware of a stream of abuse from a male voice behind me. “You fucking Pommie bastards are a load of wankers, you are a bunch of fucking…”. I turned around and I saw a huge Australian chap. He was at least six-feet-and-four-inches tall, broad and bulky, and in his mid-thirties. I turned back to Alan. “Is he swearing at us?” I asked. Alan nodded yes. He also smiled (he knew what was coming next). I launched myself into the Aussie. I started pushing him hard with my left hand, still holding my pint glass in my right. As I was pushing him I spoke to him angrily. “Who are you fucking talking to, eh? Who are you fucking talking to, you cunt? Eh? You fucking talking to me, you cunt? Are you fucking swearing at me, you fucking poxy bastard?” As I pushed him, he moved backwards. I ended up pushing him back about ten feet. He said nothing once I started on him: his stream of abuse stopped immediately. Within a minute his friends came to the rescue. They put themselves between him and me, and they offered me their apologies. After the pub closed, Little John left with a girl. The two of them saw the big Australian man in the street. He promptly punched John in the face. Some weeks later, I was in the Penny-Farthing again, waiting at the bar to get a round. There were two bar staff behind the bar but they were down the other end. The rest of the staff must have been collecting glasses or tending to stuff down in the cellar. After I had been waiting a few minutes, I started 69 to get angry. I then became aware that another man was standing next to me, also waiting to get served. I was now anxious lest he got served before I did. Then one of the barmaids appeared. She went straight to the man standing beside me and asked him what he wanted. In anger and resentment I turned to that man and shoved him hard with both hands. “You cunt! I was here before you!” I shouted. “Okay, Okay,” the barmaid shouted at me, “I’ll serve you first. There’s no need to hit him.” I had both fists clenched and I was now a few feet from the bar. The man was now several feet away from me, looking at me warily but angrily. The concern in the barmaid’s voice had touched me. Her shouting had also brought me to my senses. I went back up to the bar and gave her my order. The other man returned to the bar too and resumed his place at my side. As I turned to walk away from the bar with my drinks, I stopped and looked at him. He would not look at me at first, but he soon turned his head. He was wary of looking at me, probably because he was unsure as to whether I might start again. But when our eyes met I said to him, I hope with obvious sincerity in my face: “I’m sorry about that, mate.” He nodded. I said, “Cheers,” and walked off to join my friends. A few months later I got a job in Hammersmith Town Hall. The manager introduced me to the people in the office. As we entered the room, I saw a man I recognised, though I could not place him. He obviously recognised me, too, though he said nothing to remind me of where we had met before. I never asked him. That was fortunate. A few days later, I realised who he was. He was the man I had started on in the Penny-Farthing because the barmaid tried to serve him before me. He was not unfriendly toward me; but he was not friendly either. 70 24. BACK IN THE 1980s: TWENTIETH CENTURY SCHIZOID MAN Through much of the 1980s I was grossly drunk, often aggressive, and given to outlandish behaviour. One evening in 1980, sitting on a stool at the bar in the North Pole, I just fell back unconscious onto the pub floor. My sister Maxine thought I had dropped dead. In a panic, she picked up an ice bucket from the bar and emptied its contents over my face. Most of the ice had melted, so the bucket contained freezing cold water. I jumped up with a start, saying angrily: “Who fucking did that? Who fucking did that?” One Saturday night in 1981, on my way home from the Pavilion pub with a couple of friends, Little John and Vit the Viper, we came across a great hole in the pavement where workmen had been digging. A barrier, consisting of plastic bollards connected with tape, had been erected around the hole, but I still managed to fall into it. After climbing out of the hole, with some assistance from my friends, I walked for a further five minutes or so and then blacked out, tumbled to the floor and gashed my eye on the edge of the curb. At the lunchtime session in the North Pole the following day I had the most incredible black eye: swollen, purple, almost entirely closed up, and adorned with a scab of dried blood. Most people found something to say about it; others were conspicuous by their studied indifference. In 1981, the Wellington pub on Shepherd’s Bush Green had a rock band on Saturday nights and was open until midnight, so a few of us went there one Saturday. We were not too impressed, but I liked the change of scenery, so the following week I went there again with my sister Joy and her boyfriend. Late in the evening I got into an abusive exchange with a young man. I do not know if it was he or I who started the aggression. I suspect it was me. I remember he sat quite quietly as I swore at him in a loud and threatening manner. It never came to blows. After the pub shut, Joy, her boyfriend and I walked the five minutes along Uxbridge Road before crossing over Wood Lane and turning right. At that point Joy burst into tears. I asked her what was wrong, but she would not explain. We were walking past a wine bar that had opened on that day, though it was now shut. I was angry with Joy, but I could not hit her, so I turned to the wine bar and put my fist through one of the windows. The glass cut my wrist and blood started dripping on to the pavement. Joy gave me a handkerchief to press on to the cut as I continued to walk along. I then walked ahead of the other two as, even walking briskly, the Accident and Emergency Department was about thirty minutes away. I was worried about bleeding to death. Just then, a car pulled up. It was a barman from the Pavilion, with his wife. He asked if I 71 wanted a lift. I asked if he could take me to the hospital. He very kindly obliged. I got my wrist stitched up. Fortunately, the cut had fallen three millimetres short of the main veins. On Christmas Eve 1981 I drank ten pints of draught Guinness then went home to bed. I was sharing a bedroom, in bunk beds, with my brother. I was sleeping on the top bunk, as I had done when we were growing up, before I went to the London School of Economics. On the morning of Christmas day, probably at about 8.00 or 9.00, and still in bed, I threw up. The vomit hit the wall and slithered down the gap between the wall and my bed toward my brother’s head. He felt it on his face, which woke him up, and he got out of bed, complaining. I felt too ill to get up then, so I just had to lie there with the stench of it all. In 1984 a gang of us went to a night-club in Soho, Le Beat Route. The club was popular with fashionable bands such as Spandau Ballet and Culture Club; but it offered reduced entrance fees and cut-price cocktails on Wednesday nights. The club was packed. That meant that it could take a while to get served. That made me angry. After I had been waiting for what I considered to be a long time my anger erupted. I hit the thing nearest to me, which happened to be a till. Amazingly, the tills in this place were sitting on the bar. The bit of the till that I hit was the button that opens the cash tray; so that flew open. There were two barmen working, but both were so busy that they had not noticed the till open. Obviously, I had noticed it and I was looking at a bundle of £20 notes in the till tray that were within easy reach. I helped myself to one (equivalent to almost £70 in today’s money, according to RPIX). Shortly afterwards one of the barmen noticed that the cash tray of the till was open. He looked a little puzzled, but he just closed the tray and then served me. The next time I wanted a drink, there was again a wait, so again in frustration I punched that button on the till, and again I helped myself to a £20 note. Once more the barman was puzzled when he found that the tray was open. He must have reported it to the management because the till was then moved. These acts of theft on my part arose from a desire to punish, for making me wait. If the motive had been theft, I would have taken a bundle of notes. I spent most of the stolen money on cab fares, as my cousin Jonathan and I tried to find a kebab shop that was still open at 3.00 a.m. Many of the North Pole boys lived in flats not far from the pub. In 1986, some of those flats had been let to students who began using the North Pole and the Pavilion pubs, where they were subject to gentle provocation from the locals. My mate Tattoo lived with his parents in one of the flats. His mum was sometimes disturbed by the noise from the music played by the students in the flat below. Those students held a party one Saturday night and 72 they invited their immediate neighbours, including Tattoo. Fatman, Archie, Alan Beaney and I accompanied Tattoo to the party. We took plenty of beer with us. I was quite enjoying the party. There were some attractive girls there and I was quite happy being among students. Tattoo was, somewhat unreasonably, concerned about the noise, so he asked the students to turn down the music which, he feared, would be annoying his mum upstairs. The students obliged but a little later the volume rose again. Tattoo made another complaint and, as a consequence, got into a verbal exchange with one of the male students. That did not go on for long because Fatman punched the student in the face. A few seconds later, Fatman punched him in the face again. The student was still standing, so Archie punched him in the face and the student fell to the floor. I do not know what happened in the next five or ten minutes, as fists were flying everywhere. But several students were laid out and I had managed to pick up a black eye. There was only one toilet-and-bathroom in my parents’ house, located on the ground floor. My bedroom was on the first floor, right above it, overlooking the back garden. The bedroom windows opened at the top: there was a kind of flap that pushed out. When I went to bed drunk, I often woke up during the night needing to urinate. Being still drunk, I could not be bothered going downstairs to the toilet. So I got out of bed, naked, climbed on to the windowsill, bent slightly at the knee so that my middle was level with the window-flap, opened the window, pushed my penis through the gap and then urinated. In the middle of the night, no one would have seen that. But it was often daylight when I woke with a need to urinate. It could even be as late as 10.00 a.m. Any of the neighbours in their gardens, any of the nurses who lived in the apartments across the other side of the Central Line, and even passengers on Central Line trains that passed by could have seen me, stark naked, standing on the windowsill, urinating out of the window. Actually, they would not have seen my face, since the top of the window frame obscured the top part of my body. One sunny morning, probably about 9.00, as I clambered up on to the windowsill, I heard my mum softly talking to herself as she swept the garden path under my window. But I proceeded to urinate nevertheless. As the urine splashed on to the path, I heard my mum say to herself: “Oh, what’s that? Is it raining?” She must then have looked up because she shouted angrily “OOHH! DANNY!” I laughed, finished my task, and then went back to bed. These are just a few snippets of my behaviour during the 1980s. In earlier reminiscences I also recounted some incidents of me picking fights with great big fellows or with more than one man at a time and smashing things up. I got barred from three pubs and a Chinese takeaway. Overall, the impression is created of someone who is out of control. Yet during the same 73 period I also presented the image of someone very much in control. From 1981 I made a gradual return to academic study, financing my own postgraduate study at Birkbeck from 1984 to 1987, and obtaining a job teaching philosophy at King’s College London. These two modes of living were incompatible. But I was able to avoid acknowledging that by living my life in different compartments. In one set of contexts I was a wild, aggressive drunkard; in another set of contexts I was a calm and thoughtful philosopher. But there was one incident that forced me to confront the contradiction. A few weeks after the student party that ended in a rumpus, I was walking to the University of London Library from Birkbeck College, just around the corner, when I saw, coming the other way, one of the students who frequented the Pavilion pub, though he had not been at the party. I did not know whether to acknowledge him because I did not know how: as Danny the boor, or as Danny the intellectual. In the environment of the University of London I was strongly inclined to be the latter. But here in that environment was a person who knew me only as the former. I felt ashamed. We pretended not to notice each other as we passed each other by. Me, June 1988, age thirty-two. 74 25. EMPLOYEES BEHAVING BADLY I abandoned Marxism in 1975 after studying some works of Karl Popper. At the same time, I lost interest in politics, so I did not undertake a review of my political views. Consequently, whenever a decision came up for which a political view was relevant, I relied upon my old socialistic views (one can be a socialist without being a Marxist). After leaving the London School of Economics in 1977, I wanted a job as a makeshift before I went back to university to do postgraduate study. Given my socialistic views, office work seemed to me to be a sell-out, so I got a job as a labourer. When I abandoned my academic career in 1979, I became a barman. I had some other unskilled manual jobs before becoming a university teacher in 1987. That job opened my eyes to how much could be earned in office-based carers. I was also distancing myself from the socialistic views I had previously held. I spoke to a careers advisor in the University of London and I got some ideas for possible suitable office-based careers to pursue. After a couple of short-term administrative jobs I obtained my first serious position in an internal management consultancy in a medium-sized organisation. It was an alien environment for me in which I felt like an imposter. That made me very unsure of myself, with a desire for approval that must have been evident to others. My lack of confidence in my working relationships with others was a real obstacle to doing well. I had to interview members of staff who were usually more senior than I was while I felt unsure as to what authority I had to take up their time with my enquiries. Most of the people I met in the course of my job could see my problems of diffidence and insecurity. Some of them responded by helping me: they were patient, understanding, friendly, helpful and encouraging. Others, however, perceived my vulnerability and responded cruelly. Vince was a short, paunchy, ugly, little man in a cheap, ill-fitting suit. He was in charge of central administration, a moderately important job. He looked after many of the records to which my colleagues and I often needed access, so he knew us all, and I had spoken to him once or twice to obtain some information. He and his colleague sat in the same open-plan office as we did, so he was visible from where I sat. One day I had to go back to him to ask a question about some of the information he had given me. He could have answered the question from memory and it would have taken no more than twenty seconds. I saw him sitting at his desk, so I approached him and spoke to him. Before I could finish, he said: “I’m at lunch, can you come back later?” “Oh, it’s just a quick question.” 75 “No, I’m at lunch, I’m not dealing with it now,” he said, emphatically. Humiliated, I had to return to my desk. Was Vince’s exercise of power over a junior staff member cruel or just thoughtless? Another senior administrator to whom I had to speak was a middle-aged woman with a very posh accent and a somewhat haughty demeanour. When I arrived at her desk, in another large open-plan office, she was busy with something. She saw me arrive and, as I was on time, she must have known who I was. Rather than acknowledge me and offer me a seat, she ignored me while she continued with her task. I waited impatiently and anxiously, feeling unwanted, useless and embarrassed. Eventually, she looked up and, as if already bored with my presence, she asked: “You want to ask me some questions about confidential waste?” “Yes,” I said, expecting her to offer me a seat or to lead me away to a meeting room. “Fire away, ” she said, still without offering me a seat, while she continued with her task. Standing there, looking like a fool and feeling like a fool, I asked my questions, to which she responded in a curt and dismissive fashion while focusing her attention on her other business. The interview was over quickly as, under those circumstances, I did not want to hang around any longer than I had to. I left, feeling pretty worthless. She doubtless felt differently, having presumably derived enjoyment from the cruelty as well as from the sense of power. But she could have enjoyed the sense of power if she had acted in a humane and respectful way. Then she would have had the satisfaction of helping someone instead of the pleasure of cruelty. She made the bad choice. One lunchtime, I had been out to the shops and I came back into the office building with both hands full. I got into the lift with two other men. I knew that they worked in the cashiers’ section and that one was a middle manager. It was customary in the lift to call out the floor you wanted so that the person nearest the buttons could select the floor for you. “Four, please,” I called out. “I’m not a lift man, press it yourself,” said the middle manager. “It’s a bit awkward for me at the moment because my arms are full,” I said, nodding at my arms full of carrier bags. “Move up close to the buttons, stand on your toes and twist your body around so that you can reach.” “Could you press number four for me?” I said to his colleague. “No,” said the middle manager, “he’s not a lift man either. Do it yourself.” His subordinate smiled, obviously enjoying my discomfort. We then came to the second floor and the two of them got out. I thought that the subordinate might press the button as he walked out of the lift, which he could have done 76 without his boss seeing, as the boss went out first. But he did not. I then had to struggle to press the button for the fourth floor. That was another petty man – in fact two of them – seizing on some real or imagined rule or demarcation in order to override a common courtesy and treat someone cruelly. If I see a person struggling in my vicinity and I can help easily, then I help. I do not first check my job description to see whether I am required to help. What was appalling was that the main culprit was a middle manager. How did he treat the staff for whom he was responsible? A few years later, having gained experience and seniority, I was often in a position similar to those three managers, with the opportunity to behave cruelly to some or other junior member of staff whose diffidence was evident. I never took such opportunities. I never wanted to. The situations were also opportunities to help, to encourage, to give confidence. That was how I responded. There is another kind of bad behaviour from employees. When a number of people in the office building came down with some relatively minor illnesses, it was thought that there could be a connection with sick building syndrome. There was a meeting called at which the director of personnel explained the problems and what was being done about them and gave assurances that it was safe to work in the building. One of the trade union representatives, speaking from the floor, in a loud voice, protested that much more needed to be done and that he was “scared shitless” to be working in the building. No one believed that he was terrified, as was clear from the reaction to his remarks. But what struck me, on this occasion and on many others, was that trade union activists, like political activists generally, whatever their persuasion, are often routinely dishonest. They seem to think that lying to achieve their aims is unobjectionable or even demanded. But then what sort of aims are they? And what sort of a life is that? 77 26. WHAT MARY SAW In the early 1990s I worked in a medium-sized organisation as a member of an internal consultancy team which had responsibilities for contriving innovative solutions to organisational problems in order to improve efficiency and effectiveness. I was not at that time an accountant. One job in which I was involved was to resolve some problems in the Payments section of the Finance Department. I had to spend a whole day in one of the Payments offices trying to discover how things were done and what the problems were. It was a large open-plan office with windows on one side and, on the other side, a row of smaller offices for senior staff. There was an aisle that ran the length of the big office, alongside the doors of the smaller offices. At the ends of the aisle were doors leading to stairwells or lifts. A woman appeared from out of a door to one of the smaller offices down at the far end of the room. She walked along the aisle, toward me, and went through the door at the end of the aisle. I could not help noticing her coming along the aisle. What I noticed first was a large pair of breasts in a tight sweater. Then I looked higher to see a pretty face, in a sophisticated-looking kind of way, and short blond hair. Her skirt came down to her knees and it was quite tight. As she walked by and headed for the door at the end of the aisle I was mesmerised by her backside. My thought, I recall, was “Bloody hell! Who’s that?” Let’s call her ‘Mary.’ A little later she came back through the door and walked up the aisle to her office. Through the course of that day she did that walk, back and fore, several times. I was wondering whether she was doing it for my benefit. It turned out, though, that the door at the far end of the aisle led to a Ladies’ toilet. I hardly saw her again until a few years later. I was involved in developing internal markets within the organisation. For that purpose, the organisation had been split into two types of unit: direct services to the public and support services to the direct services. The support services covered things like payroll, invoice-processing, accounting, legal advice, information technology, personnel services, and so on. The idea was that the direct services would get better and cheaper support services if they could negotiate with support services to get a better deal (a more tailored service or a cheaper one), rather than having to take what they were given with the cost being outside of their control. All the support services had been allocated to a huge new department headed by the man who used to be the Director of Finance and was now the Director of Support Services. I started off playing a minor role in this large project but after a year or so I was in the lead role, which was very high profile, as the project affected all 78 the service managers in the organisation, each of whom participated in the project in one way or another. There were often little task groups dedicated to specific problems; and I was involved in all of those. Mary was involved in one of them. She was representing the Director of Support Services. But we did not get on too well. She was critical of my approach. In fact she made some comments that seemed to suggest that she thought that she could do a better job than I was doing if only she had been given the dedicated time to do it, as I had been. Still, I had my way: my proposals were implemented. It was decided to review the new arrangement after a year. There would be a number of ‘focus groups’ containing members of support services and of direct services who would try to identify what in the new arrangements was working and what needed changing. When this review was being planned the Director of Support Services had assumed that he would chair the focus groups. However, that was a non-starter because, to perform that function, we needed someone independent, someone who was neither a manager of a direct service nor a manager of a support service; someone like me, for instance. I had to meet with the Director of Support Services to explain that simple point. But I messed it up. “You’re not a suitable person to chair the focus groups,” I said. “I think it would be better if I did it.” He was taken aback. Quite angrily he said: “There’s no need to be rude!” “There would be a conflict of interest if you did it,” I explained. He was startled for a moment but, being an accountant, he understood the point. “Okay, you chair the focus groups,” he conceded abruptly, still aggrieved. Mary was at that meeting. She was taking the minutes. Since I had made a mess of it I thought that I must have sunk even lower in her estimation. When I left the Director’s office, Mary left too. I opened the door for her, expecting her to glide by haughtily, but instead she smiled at me submissively, almost curtsied, and then hurried past me as though she should not keep me waiting. I was astonished at the dramatic change in her behaviour, previously so superior, but now just like a little girl. What had happened? I think that she must have misread my social ineptness as power. When I offended the Director, it might have seemed to her that I offered a brave challenge to a powerful man. When I responded to his anger quite impassively, pointing out the conflict of interest and not bothering to explain that I did not intend to be rude, it might have seemed to her that I was bold, confident or assertive. The fact that I got what I wanted perhaps looked to her like macho effectiveness or dominance. 79 In fact, I had let myself down, as I could easily have got what I wanted in a tactful way, without souring relations with that very important man. But if I had acted in a smooth and socially accomplished way I would not have excited Mary. I think that this piece of personal history illustrates two general points. The first is that what we see depends not only on what we are looking at but also upon the theories, ideas, conceptual frameworks that we use to interpret what we see. What Mary saw was not what happened. The second point is something that is well-known and generally accepted, as well as being explained by evolutionary biology, despite being politically incorrect; namely, that the men whom women find attractive are usually those who have resources or power or, if they are young men, those who exhibit qualities that suggest that they will become wealthy or powerful. But even that is not a rational calculation on the women's part: they find themselves responding to their biology. It is not deterministic, of course: we all have the ability to reflect on what we are doing, feeling, etc., and criticise it and refuse to act on it. Me, 7 August 1991, age thirty-five. 80 27. WORKING FOR A SICKO From December 1988 until January 1998 I worked for a medium-sized organisation in west London as a member of a unit styled an ‘internal management consultancy.’ The purpose of the unit was to diagnose organisational problems, consider options for improvement and make recommendations. The head of the unit was an elderly man to whom we had to refer as ‘Mr. Lawrence.’ One day, I pushed open the door to the floor on which our office was situated, then I checked over my shoulder to see if there was anyone behind me. There was: Mr. Lawrence. I held the door open with my right hand, so that it did not slam in his face, expecting him to put out his right hand to keep the door open for himself (which is what people usually do). But he kept his arms by his sides and walked through the door and past me, leaving me holding the door open for him, as if I were some kind of footman. I lost respect for him after that. The deputy head of the unit was also called ‘Lawrence,’ but that was his first name. He was openly homosexual but not camp. The rest of the unit was divided into two teams, one headed by Wade, the other by Sydney. I was in Sydney’s team. Early in 1990, the two Lawrences left, one to retire, the other to die of AIDS. Wade became the head of the unit. Sydney, whom Wade despised, was in his fifties. He was deprived of management responsibilities and made into an IT specialist, despite never having used a computer before. He surprised everyone by taking to his new role as though he were born to it. Sally, a member of Wade’s team, was made the head of a small team. Apart from the members of Sally’s team, everyone else in the unit reported directly to Wade. In consequence, I had to acclimatise to Wade’s overbearing management style. Wade had rather fixed ideas about how things should be done, though he was sometimes amenable to persuasion. He checked on one’s progress periodically and he was full of criticism for any shortcomings, omissions or errors in the work. There is nothing too wrong in that. What was wrong was the way in which he gave his criticisms. He delighted in finding things wrong, and when he found something to criticise he often expressed himself angrily and scornfully. He loved an opportunity to tell someone off or to put him or her down. He was usually impatient and bad tempered and he would often shout. When he showed you a better way, or his preferred way, to do something, he did so either angrily or, what was almost as bad, in an unctuous, supercilious, headmasterly kind of way. “That makes more sense, doesn’t it? Hmmm?” His voice rose at the end of that “hmmm.” The stark irony was that this man, with his appalling management 81 style, was now the leader and official representative of the organisation’s management specialists. I got my first taste of Wade’s bullying in the spring of 1990. We went to a meeting room to discuss my progress with a project. The ‘discussion’ turned out to be a dressing down. At least it was done in private; he was later to neglect that nicety. He pointed out a number of shortcomings in the work, but he did so in an offended manner that suggested that I had done him some grievous harm. He then stood up abruptly, sighed deeply and angrily, picked up his jacket off the back of the seat and walked out of the door. That was it. I was shocked, intimidated and humiliated. When he jumped up and I realised he was leaving, I got up too and I followed him out. We went back to our desks and carried on our work, though I lacked the presence of mind, after that, to be very productive. I later learned, from a colleague, that Wade treated everyone in that way. He said that Wade had reduced poor Sally to tears. Sally left in the summer of 1990. Peter, being the next-longest-serving member of the unit (after Wade and Sydney), took over the management of her team. Toward the end of 1991, Richard, the next-longest-serving member, was made leader of another team. That meant a pay rise for him, as well as new responsibilities. I was a little perturbed because Richard had started only about six months before I had, he had not (as I had) obtained a distinction on his management diploma, and he had not received promotions as quickly as I had, so I could not have been very far behind him in terms of seniority. I thought that I should at least have been considered for the teamleader position and had a chance at an interview to make my case. I suspected favouritism. Peter and Richard had joined the organisation as members of Wade’s team. I had instead started in Sydney’s team. Wade might have seen me as Sydney’s representative and transferred to me some of the disdain that he had for Sydney. The result was that were two teams, with their heads reporting to Wade, plus Sydney and me, who reported, separately, to Wade. Although Richard had been made a team leader in preference to me, some concession was made to my seniority in that I was allocated other, more junior, staff to supervise with respect to specific projects. I also had the use of our various administrative assistants to help me with some mundane tasks on projects, as well as a couple of school students on work-experience placements. Early in 1993 I was made a member of Richard’s team. I guess that that was done to allow Richard to be promoted to a higher grade, making him now two grades higher than the grade I was on. It was a humiliation for me. Further, I had never got on well with Richard. We could not see eye to eye on the projects that we worked on together. I thought his approach was 82 mechanical, inefficient and ineffective. I thought his ideas about, and evaluations of, potential options for service delivery were stale and bureaucratic. He never paid me the respect of considering what I had to say. He was the boss and he thought that he knew best. He was very prescriptive, trying to control what I did in detail, leaving little scope for my own initiative and judgement. I found that stifling and de-motivating. My productivity and the quality of my work deteriorated significantly. In the more than four years prior to being managed by Richard, I had had only four days in sick leave, an average of less than a day per year. In the eighteen months during which I was under Richard’s supervision, I was off sick for ten days, giving an average of more than six days per year. Being unhappy at work, being mismanaged, depresses a person; and depression weakens the immune system, leaving the person more likely to be brought down by whatever bugs are going around. In my case it was only bouts of the common cold; but I was coming down with those more frequently and for longer periods than before. There were also some days when I had recovered sufficiently to go back to work but, because I could not face going in, and because I still felt under the weather, I stayed at home. My relationship with Wade also started to deteriorate. He was clearly aware of the shortcomings in my work. They would doubtless have been emphasised by Richard, partly to shift blame from himself and partly because he did not like me. Wade was probably displeased that he had made an error of judgement in making Richard my manager, but he probably blamed me for that. As a consequence I was often subjected to Wade’s angry and accusing diatribes, usually within earshot of other people in the office, which added to the humiliation. In connection with a new project I was starting, I had contacted several people in departments with a request for information. But the corporate management team had not yet given us the official go-ahead for the project. I should have checked that. Still, it was a minor error, since in organisations things often start informally in advance of official sanction. As was standard practice, I put copies of the memoranda I had sent out into our ‘outgoing’ file. When Wade saw these he came charging into my office and berated me for violating standard procedure, shouting at the top of his voice and shaking with anger. He was screaming at me, about this rather trivial matter, as though I had raped his mother. It was intimidating and uncomfortable for me. I was not frightened of physical attack from Wade; he did not have that in him. But I might have been worried about losing my job. Notably, I did not at that time see Wade as being at fault: I blamed myself. That doubtless gave Wade encouragement to repeat that kind of behaviour. 83 As well as angry outbursts, Wade also subjected me to constant harassment. Sometimes it would concern my claims for legitimate expenses. He never disputed that the expenses were legitimate; rather, he objected that I could afford to pay for them myself. But his main iniquitous nag concerned my timekeeping. In particular, he repeatedly complained that I normally left for home at about 4.50 p.m. I was contracted to work for thirty-five hours per week, that is, seven hours per working day, on average. As I normally arrived between 8.30 and 9.00 in the morning and took only about half an hour for lunch, I was doing my daily quota and working within the flexitime scheme. Also, in the spirit of that scheme I stayed late to finish a job whenever necessary, sometimes staying beyond 6.00 without claiming for the time worked after 6.00, which went beyond the flexitime hours and so was not counted by the computerised timing system. Yet when I left the office at around 4.50, Wade purposefully looked up at the clock, moaned and give me a scornful look. One day he shouted at me: “you haven’t been here long enough to leave yet!” Another day, when I had returned to work after two days off sick, as I was leaving for home at 4.45, he looked at the clock and said: “Not leaving already? Don’t you have some hours to make up?” As I had three hours and forty-one minutes in credit on the flexitime system, he was presumably trying to imply that I was not entitled to the sick leave I had taken. Richard joined in with this harassment. In June 1994, as he told me about an impending deadline for a project, he said that I would have to put in some extra hours and not keep leaving for home at 4.45. When he said that, other people were in the office, so he was making me sound like some kind of shirker in front of them, which was a humiliation and was doubtless intended as such. That was particularly invidious, as he did not usually arrive at work until 9.30 or later, and he regularly took lunch breaks lasting between an hour and ninety minutes. The harassment, which was without grounds, was a form of bullying that enabled Richard and Wade to enjoy a sense of power and the infliction of cruelty. In the case of Wade it also gave him opportunities to be angry. In fact, Wade seemed to value his job primarily as a rich source of opportunities for him to bully, belittle and berate. It enabled him to play the role of niggardly, irritable stepmother from which he seemed to derive his consummate enjoyment. On 21 June, 1994, I went to see Wade. I explained that his nagging about my ‘early departure’ was groundless and that it could therefore constitute harassment, in infringement of the organisation’s human resources policies. I said that I did not want to hear any more of it. He accepted that. I also suggested that as Richard was merely following his example, Wade should have a word with Richard to the same effect. Wade agreed that he would. I got 84 no more comments of that kind from either Wade or Richard. I was surprised at how easy it was. But within a few months or so, Wade did resume glancing at the clock whenever I left at around 4.50 p.m., though he did not say anything. Unfortunately, I never confronted Wade about the shouting, which continued. Around 1990, from the left: me, sister Maxine, family friend Pat Simpson (face hidden), sister Joy, mum, mum’s sister Carole, John’s wife Sharon, brother John. 85 28. MISERY At the start of 1996 I was pretty miserable. I had been in my job, in a medium-sized organisation, for just over seven years. My salary had risen significantly during that time as I gained experience and a postgraduate management qualification (with distinction). However my boss had made it clear that there would be no further promotions. He was also putting pressure on me to work additional hours without additional pay, which I normally resisted. Further, he was given to bullying and shouting (at the top of his voice). He plainly had some mental disorder, which made things difficult for everyone in our unit. I was living alone in Park Royal, London, in a semidetached house. I had bought the house in October 1994, hoping thereby to obtain the peace and quiet that I had been unable to get at my parents’ house or at any of the bedsits in which I had lived. But it turned out to be the noisiest place I had ever occupied. The problem was that the party wall provided poor noise insulation. I could hear my neighbours’ television in every room in my house; and I could hear the parents having sex at nights on the other side of my bedroom wall. In addition, they had a teenage son living at home who played loud music from time to time. My journey to and from work was often horrendous. Hanger Lane was often blocked with very slowmoving traffic. The alternative of journeying by tube involved going into London, changing trains and then coming back out again; and at that time there were various problems on the tube causing trains to be delayed. As my journey depended on two trains, it was odds-on that at least one of them would be delayed. On a good day it would take me half an hour to get to work; but often it would take me the best part of an hour, sometimes longer; and it quite often took me up to an hour and fifty minutes to get home in the evening. Mad boss + noisy home + bad commute = misery. It seemed that peace required a detached house; but there are not that many in London and they were expensive. London’s transport problems at that time meant that a better commute would probably require moving out of the capital. I had learned some basic accountancy when I studied for my postgraduate diploma in management studies; and at work I had for some time been engaged on some projects in which I had to work with the accountants. The accountants praised my work. They were paid a lot more than I was. I came to the conclusion that I should get a job as an accountant in another part of the country where I could afford a nice detached house not far from my place of work. To do that I would need to obtain an accounting qualification. I was sure that my boss would not agree that my employer 86 should fund such a course of study. In any case, I wanted to do it in order to get a better job, so I decided to pay for it myself. I wrote to the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) asking for details of their course of study and how to go about it. I wanted to study from home. I could not attend a college during the day, as I would not be given paid time off work to do it; and I did not want to travel to a college in the evenings. In fact, I did not want to attend a college at all and I felt sure that I did not need to do so. I had always learned most effectively by reading on my own. Further, as I was self-financing, I did not want to pay expensive college fees. It turned out that I did not have to be registered with a college to sit the exams. The course had four stages. Each stage comprised four modules and normally took a year to complete, with four exams at the end of the year. CIMA gave me details of the curriculum and a comprehensive reading list. CIMA produced their own study packs which covered the whole syllabus. The study packs were quite cheap and the fees for the exams were not high. Further, exams were held in May and in November. That meant that anyone failing a stage in May could re-sit it in November and then take the next stage the following May. It also meant that it was possible to do all four stages in two years, sitting four exams every six months. I decided that I would do that. I registered with CIMA in January 1996. I was granted exemption from two of the exams at Stage 1 in view of my having a diploma in management studies. I decided to do the other two Stage 1 exams in May. I had already booked a trip to Amsterdam in the middle of February, so I decided to start working for those two exams after that long weekend away, leaving me a little over two months to complete the course of study. I read the CIMA study packs plus Frank Wood’s Business Accounting 1 before the exams, which were held in Hammersmith Town Hall. The two exams were on consecutive days, so I booked two days’ annual leave for them. I was feeling confident. But the night before the first exam I had a problem. The adults next door had gone on holiday leaving their teenage boy behind. Their daughter, aged about twenty, came back home to stay with him. She and her brother stayed up well into the early hours, talking and playing music. The music was not loud, but I could hear it plainly. I gave up trying to get to sleep in my own bedroom. I went into the spare bedroom, pulled out the single mattress and carried it into the study, which was separated from the neighbours by two walls, but was only marginally quieter. I laid down there and put in some ear plugs. That did block out the noise, but I still could not get to sleep because I was agitated and angered by the fact that it was the night before an exam when my neighbours chose to be this inconsiderate. I did not sleep well and I felt pretty bad the next day. I was definitely under par intellectually but I did as best I could in the exam. I had 87 the same problem with the neighbours the following night, so I felt just as bad, if not worse, for the second exam. But I had nothing to worry about. I got seventy percent on one exam and eighty percent on the other. I took the four Stage 2 exams in November and passed comfortably. Through 1997, the noise from my neighbours got worse. Some evenings, while I was trying to study, their television was so loud that I could hear every word of EastEnders loudly and clearly in every room of my house. Even if I had had my television on at its normal volume, I would not have been able to hear it because of the noise from the television next door. I turned on my untuned radio, which emitted white noise, and turned up the volume to try to smother the noise from next door. But it did not; it was just an additional irritation of its own. In May 1997 I had my Stage 3 exams. The four exams were spread over two or three days in one week in May. I took the whole week off work, so that I would have time to do some final preparation. As in the previous year, the parents next door went away on holiday that week and the daughter came to stay with the son. Again they seemed to sit up most of the night talking, playing computer games, listening to the television or playing music. They were not usually loud; but given the poor sound insulation and the dead of night, it would have been enough to keep me awake, had it not been for my ear plugs. But one morning, the Monday or Tuesday, I was woken at 5.00 a.m. by a blast of loud music that lasted for a few minutes and then stopped. I could not get back to sleep and I was tired all day. Fortunately, I did not have any exams to take that day, but in that weary condition I had to do my exam preparation. Still, I passed the four exams without problem. Preparation for the Stage 4 exams in November 1997 was particularly trying. The television next door was now much louder than it used to be, making it more difficult for me to concentrate. The journey home from work was also taking me much longer on average, due to bad traffic on the roads and problems on the Central Line, so I was getting less time during the evening to study. There was also a lot of material to get through, more for Stage 4 than for any of the other stages. All of that might have made me more miserable in 1997 than I had been at the start of 1996; but it did not. The reason was that I had a purpose: I was studying accountancy in order to get a better job and a better house in a better environment. The difficulties in my current circumstances, rather than making me miserable, increased my determination to succeed. And I was succeeding. I was completing a fouryear course in less than two years. I had already passed the first three stages. I was doing this without any paid time off work to study. As I did not work in an accountancy or finance section, I lacked any support from colleagues who might have been able to help me. I was also doing it without attending 88 college: I was just teaching myself from books. I was working in a very inhospitable and stressful environment, with almost constant loud and distracting noise, regular disturbances to my sleep, and regular severe delays to my journey home after work, which robbed me of a good deal of my study time. My conspicuous success in such adverse circumstances was exhilarating. After I passed the Stage 4 exams in November, I had to complete an acceptable record of work experience in order to become a chartered management accountant. I produced one based on the management accounting work I had been doing in my job. My boss agreed to sign it, though he commented, in his usual condescending way, that there was some “gilding of the lily” involved. When CIMA accepted it in February 1998 I became an ACMA. In October 1997 I had seen an advertisement for a vacancy for a “special projects” accountant at a county council, a medium-sized organisation, in the English midlands, where housing was much cheaper than in London. The job involved the provision of technical support, particularly of a numerical, financial and analytical nature, for organisational reviews. I said to a colleague, “I have just seen my new job.” I was interviewed in November, just after I finished my Stage 4 exams. I was offered the job in December and I agreed to begin at the start of February 1998. Nicer job + more money + better boss + peaceful detached house + predictable commute = happiness. But could it last? Me (centre), Roy Bond in the hat, Roy’s dad and two others, 1996. 89 29. HAPPINESS In 1996 I was miserable. I was living in a semi-detached house in London, besieged by the noise from my neighbours; and I had a nightmarish commute to and from work, where I was subordinate to a deranged manager. I taught myself accountancy from books and completed CIMA’s four-year course in less than two years, becoming a chartered management accountant, and I started a new job as an accountant at a midlands county council in February 1998. For the first six months I rented a large three-bedroom detached house with a conservatory while I looked for a suitable house to buy. The rented house was peaceful. During the evenings and throughout the weekends I could sit and read without disturbance. I could do what I wanted, when I wanted. I never had to give up reading, and tidy the house instead, because of noise from next door. I did not have to fit my plans around someone else’s noise-making. My main wish had been fulfilled. Peace at last! The house was on the edge of the city and a half-hour walk from work. My commute was therefore predictable and reasonably short. It took me past fields, rolling hills and meadows, cows and the occasional tractor chugging along the road. I felt very pleased to be living in this new rural environment. After six months I left the rented house to move into a house that I bought, which was a large four-bedroom detached house, with large rooms and an enormous back garden. It was outside of the city but just a short bus ride from the city centre; and, apart from Sundays, the bus service was reasonably good. My journey to work was just a five-minute walk: there was no traffic, no delays and no fares. As a consequence, I got home early, my evenings were noticeably longer, so I had a lot more leisure time. I enjoyed my new job. Compared to my previous job, it involved a lot more responsibility and it was often more fun. The job was high profile and I was given the freedom to do the sorts of tasks that I wanted to do, like discounted-cash-flow option appraisals, comparative analyses and ad hoc costing exercises. I also had to explain issues to councillors at review panels and I participated, as a trainer, in the council’s in-house ‘management foundation’ training. The organisational culture was amicable and affable: by and large, if I asked someone in another department to do a job, they did it. Many of the senior people with whom I worked appeared, from their comments, to be impressed by my initiative, knowledge, cleverness and independence. My new manager, unlike my old boss, was not a bullying psychopath. In addition, the new job paid me more money than the old one; and money bought more in the midlands than it did in London. 90 One weekend, my brother John, his wife Sharon, my sister Joy and my mum came to visit me. On the Saturday morning we went into town and we had lunch there before getting a taxi back to my place. As we sat in the taxi I said, truly, that in August 1988 I was virtually penniless, with very few possessions, often wearing second-hand clothes, and living with my mum. I did not go on to say it, but I then thought that I now have a large detached house, a huge garden, a small mortgage, savings, and more disposable monthly income than I know what to do with; and I had done it all in just ten years. I thought I had achieved something. I felt well off; and it felt good. In the autumn of 1999, when I walked out of County Hall at the end of each working day, I had a feeling of elation come over me. I felt like singing and dancing my way home. In part I was elated at the prospect of going home. My house was a haven in which I could read and think in peace. But in part I was elated because of my general good circumstances. I had never been happier. In December 1999 I started to worry. Surely, I thought, this good fortune cannot last: something just has to go wrong. I began to worry about redundancy. I enjoyed my job and I thought I was good at it. However, having been in the job for nearly two years, it was apparent that the outcomes of the various review projects on which I was engaged were unlikely to be significant. The decisions to which my work contributed were taken by councillors with an eye on their electoral prospects. They were thus the result of political negotiation, compromises and kowtowing to vested interests and parochial concerns. My rational arguments, considerations and calculations were welcomed only when they could be used to defend a decision arrived at on other grounds. All that could ever happen, it seemed, would be incremental change; and change that would rarely be a step in the right direction. Even if my position was assured because it played a necessary role in the process, the lack of substantive positive change as a result of my work left me feeling impotent. That would not have been so troubling if I had had other activities through which I obtained a sense of purpose. From 1991 to 1997 I had got that from writing articles for the Libertarian Alliance, including for their ‘Free Life’ magazine. When I started work for the county council, that writing had to stop, as my new job was ‘politically restricted,’ meaning that I was contractually debarred from publicly advocating any partisan political position. For the first two years of my new employment I had a substitute purpose of bringing about substantial efficiency gains at the county council; but, when that substitute proved illusory, I was left purposeless. I was still studying philosophy, politics and economics but, as I was no longer 91 contributing to anything, my studying seemed to lack point or meaning. I was just learning in order to forget. In an attempt to give my existence some sort of point I began to make substantial contributions to charity. However, I had no direct contact with the charities and the money was deducted from my salary automatically without me having to think about it. Whatever good I was doing, I was not involved in. Such ‘action at a distance’ was unsatisfying. And something did go wrong. On Christmas Day 1999 I was sitting in my armchair in my living room, reading Robert Nozick’s Philosophical Explanations, when I heard the rumble of music. It was coming from the house next door, where two teenage girls resided. It went on for two hours. Later that day it resumed. On Boxing Day the same sort of thing happened; and it happened again every day through my Christmas leave. One or both of the girls, then aged between thirteen and sixteen, had been given a CD player for Christmas. Over the following weeks and months the noise got worse. The peace that was so important to me, and that I had worked so hard to get, had been snatched away. I felt grief. I became absorbed in the question of the meaning of life, given the felt lack of meaning in my own life. From a conventional point of view it would have seemed obvious that what I was missing was a female partner, a steady girlfriend, something I had not had for twenty-one years by late 1999. I made the mistake of adopting that conventional point of view. There were plenty of attractive women at County Hall. One of them, whom I had met a couple of times on a business matter, I saw in the corridor one day in January 2000 and she gave me a lovely big smile, which she maintained despite my puzzled look and my apprehensive half-smile back. A couple of weeks later, in the middle of February, I saw her again. We looked each other in the eye for a few seconds, then we smiled at each other. Over the next three weeks I gave it some thought, then I telephoned her and asked her out. She sounded pleased, excited even. She agreed to lunch but said that she needed to sort out her timetable before she could say which day. Later that day she sent me an email saying that she did not think that a social meeting would be such a good idea. I telephoned her. One of her colleagues picked up her ’phone and told me that she had just left for home. That was a puzzling incident and one which anyone might have found mildly upsetting. But I was devastated. I knew it made no sense to be devastated; but I was; and I could not understand why, despite many attempts at analysis. It was like doing a calculation that did not result in the right figure: puzzled, I had to keep doing it over again. That failure with the woman had left me miserable, confused and in a state of severe anxiety; and the longer I failed to understand why, the worse it got. My condition was 92 exacerbated by the worsening noise from next door, which became more frequent, longer lasting, and louder, leaving me to despair of being able to live my life as I wanted. In June I complained, with the usual effect: for a week it was quiet, then it started up again, quietly and infrequently at first, but within a fortnight getting back to its previous frequency, and often to its previous volume. On one Tuesday in August, when I had the day off work, the music went on all day, so I spent the whole of my day’s leave doing household chores. On one day the temperature outside was more than eighty degrees Fahrenheit, but I sat indoors almost suffocating with all the doors and windows shut, in an attempt to abate the noise. My short commute had given me long evenings at home, but I now often stayed late at work to avoid going home. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that, consequent upon the failure with the woman, aggravated by the noise from my neighbours, I became stark, staring mad for two-and-a-half years. After then, I was depressed and anxious for another four-and-a-bit years. I had resigned from my job (when I turned fifty-one) and gone to live on the Isle of Wight before I got over it. It was not until 2008 or 2009 that I finally understood my extreme reaction – but that is another story (and a long one). My home in the midlands, August 1998 – November 2006. 93 30. BEER FESTIVALS I discovered ‘real ale’ in my last year as an undergraduate at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1976-77. Incidentally, ‘real ale’ is a misnomer: traditionally, ale was distinguished from beer in being unhopped. All the so-called real ale is actually beer. In September 1977 I went with my friends, Will and Steve, to the first Great British Beer Festival (GBBF) at Alexandra Palace, which was organised by the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA). We attended on several nights and all day Saturday. We bought our souvenir pint glasses every day, which must have cost fifty pence each in those days, but we usually managed to drop them on the way home. The Festival itself consisted of a great hall with makeshift bars in the centre and loads of beer barrels from which the beer was poured. The beer was cheap, compared with London pub prices, but I do not think there was much, if any, food available, there were very few seats, and the toilets were few and with long queues. On the Friday night it was packed and, as Steve and I made our way to the toilets, we came across a gap in the crowd, where no one was standing, but which was filled with the most pungent smell of flatulence. We looked at each other and laughed as we came out the other side of it. The GBBF became an annual event. I went again in 1978, 1979 and 1980, all held at Alexandra Palace, though in 1980 the festival was held in tents because the Palace had burnt down. From the later part of 1980 until the later part of 1988 I saw little of my ex-LSE friends, and the non-LSE people I had met via them, normally drinking instead with the local boys in Notting Hill and Shepherd’s Bush, where there was very little real beer to be had. But after then I reconnected with my old buddies and got back into drinking real beer and going to CAMRA beer festivals, which were held all over the country. The GBBF, by then held in August, was easily the best. I attended it from 1989 to 2001. From 1993 to 2001 I took a week off work to attend the GBBF every day it was on, from Tuesday to Saturday. Roy Bond attended from Thursday to Saturday until 1997; from 1998 he was a pub governor, so he attended the trade session on Tuesday afternoons, and he got me into that as a guest, and then he came back for the Saturdays. Roy’s wife, Pat, sometimes accompanied him. Nick Turner attended on Fridays and Saturdays. Richard Stanley, an old friend from the LSE whom I had not seen for more than ten years, turned up in 1996. My sister, Joy, and her boyfriend came along on the Tuesday evening in 1997. In 2000 my mum, her sister, my two sisters and their boyfriends and friends came along on the Wednesday evening. 94 From 1992, I was in the habit of ticking off in the programme booklet the beers that I had drunk. But when I was drunk in the later part of the evening, I often forgot to do that; so the ticks give only a partial record. Each tick represented a pint. Really, it would have made sense to drink half-pints at a beer festival, so that one could taste a larger number of different beers; but macho men like us could not be seen holding half-pints. Roy, Nick and I often participated in the games of tombola at the festival. As a consequence I often took home lots of prizes, which were things such as glasses, beer mats, bar towels and beer guides. I lost count of how many Peterborough Beer Guides I won over the years. I had given up boozing before the 2002 GBBF. I always said that I enjoyed the beer festivals. I did look forward to them, but I doubt that I really enjoyed them that much. The Tuesday and Wednesday nights, when I was normally on my own, were pretty boring for me. Indeed, I was often quite bored when in company. Roy knew a lot of people there and when they joined us the conversation would be about either railways, where most of them worked, or football, in neither of which I had any interest. I often drank my beer for something to do. When Roy and I spoke to each other it was usually about beer, music or sex, in the earlier parts of the day; but in the later parts of the day, once we had drunk a few pints, it was often about politics. Those political conversations usually got very heated. The drinking itself, despite the enjoyable pints, became a test of endurance. Often, toward the later part of the evening, I became sated and could drink no more; but I normally stayed there with my friends until closing time, or until we all left, hardly drinking and feeling poorly. Usually, I got up in the morning wanting to do anything but drink beer. But I got myself ready, cooked breakfast for my friends and for myself, if I could face it, then went off to the festival feeling and looking unhealthy, and I struggled to get the first pint down. The same applied to all my binges that lasted several days, not just to the festivals. Here are brief details and some curious incidents from the GBBFs I attended from 1989 to 2001. 1989 Leeds. I went with Roy on Friday night and Saturday. On the Sunday lunchtime, we did a pub-crawl in the city before leaving for home. We got to the first pub just after opening time at noon and it was almost empty. We got ourselves a pint each, walked away from the bar and got involved in a conversation. After about ten minutes we looked around the pub and noticed that it had got quite crowded. That was not the only thing we noticed. Most of the men looked gay. It was not just the moustaches; it was also the mannerisms, and perhaps other things. Roy and I looked back at each other. One of us said to the other: “Do you realise what sort of pub we are in?” We both laughed. Roy then said: “Did you notice that bloke standing 95 at the bar when we walked in?” I said, “Yes.” Then I looked over at the man again, looked back at Roy and we both laughed. The man was wearing a pink suit with a pink cowboy hat, but that had obviously not registered with either of us when we came in. 1990 Brighton. I took the Friday off work. Roy and I got a train down to Brighton. We drank at the festival all day until it closed, then we rushed to the station to get the train back to London. Being drunk, we fell asleep on the train. We woke up as the train was coming into Luton station, a good way past London. We got off at Luton and hung around on the opposite platform. Roy found out that there was a train going to London, but there was a bit of a wait for it. Although it was August, it was freezing on the platform at 12.30 a.m. We found a room used by a station official that was empty and the door was open. We went inside and sat in front of an electric fire while we waited for the train. Roy’s wife Pat was not pleased by our late arrival home (I was staying at Roy’s in Tottenham that night). The following day, Pat came to the festival with us, so we got home all right that time. 1991 Docklands, London. That was a poor venue, poorly served by public transport; in fact, it was the worst GBBF I have attended. On the Saturday, late afternoon, Roy and I were standing amongst the crowds, drinking our beer, when Roy, glancing over my shoulder, said: “Is that the bloke from Uriah Heep?” Uriah Heep were a second-rung heavy rock band in the early 1970s who were still going. I owned one of their albums and I had heard several others. My childhood friend David Driver had been a fan of them in their heyday. I turned around to take a look and I saw straight away that the man Roy was talking about was Mick Box, the lead guitarist. I tapped him on the shoulder and said: “Excuse me, are you Mick Box?” He confirmed that he was. Roy and I then had a chat with him about Very ’Eavy, Very ’Umble and other things. He was a very nice, friendly and down-to-earth fellow. It was a pleasure to speak to him. 1992 Olympia, London. Easily the best venue. There is a massive hall, lots of good quality toilets, air conditioning, several stages for bands and good public transport. Also, at that venue there was always lots of good quality food on offer, including German and other sausages, pasties and pies, different types of cheese, spuds, chillies, and so on. I met Roy at the festival on the Thursday lunchtime. His wife, Pat, joined us for Friday evening and Saturday afternoon. I ticked off thirty-eight beers in my programme booklet. This was the year in which breweries up and down the country revived traditional English porter, a thick, black, strong drink that I loved. Some porters tasted like chocolate, some tasted burnt, but all the good ones had a beautiful rich flavour. Porter is similar to stout; and there were some lovely stouts at the festival too. The only trouble is that porters and stouts tend to be 96 quite strong, at around five percent alcohol by volume. My favourites were Whitbread Porter, Young’s Porter, West Coast Guiltless Stout, Hop Back Entire Stout and Mauldon’s Black Adder. 1993 Olympia. I ticked off fifty-six pints of beer. That was a lot less, in terms of pints per hour, than the previous year, so I never got completely legless, though I was drunk most days. The most outstanding beer of the festival was Malton’s Pickwick Porter, one of the best pints of beer I have ever had. Other notables were Orkney Raven Ale, Whitbread Porter and Malton’s Double Chance Bitter. 1994 Olympia. My best pint was Bateman’s Salem Porter. Other great ones were Hog’s Back Mild, Nethergate’s Old Growler, and Murray’s Summer Pale Ale. 1995 Olympia. My favourite beers of the festival were Tomintoul Caillie, Burton Bridge Summer Ale and, especially, the burnt-tasting Hanby’s Shropshire Stout. The big disappointment was that there was no Malton’s Pickwick Porter. 1996 Olympia. Being more drunk than usual on the Friday night, I left my carrier bag on the train coming home. As well as my pint glass and bundles of prizes won on the tombola, including, no doubt, at least one Peterborough Beer Guide, the bag also contained my programme booklet and my ‘season ticket’ for the festival. That meant that I had to pay again to get in on the Saturday. 1997 Olympia. I ticked off forty-five pints. My favourites were Malton’s Pickwick Porter, Cropton’s Scoresby Stout, which had a wonderfully burnt taste, Hanby’s Shropshire Stout, Bateman’s Salem Porter, Buffy’s Polly’s Folly, and Oakham’s Jeffrey Hudson Bitter. I insisted that my sister Joy and her boyfriend try the Pickwick Porter, which I had tasted earlier that evening and which I thought wonderful; but they struggled to drink much of it. It was clearly too much to expect that people who normally drank lager would love a thick, rich, heavy, burnt-tasting beer. On the Thursday lunchtime, when I was standing in the festival on my own, with my glass resting on one of the makeshift shelves that had been installed around each of the big pillars around the hall, a couple of middle-aged men approached, seeing a space on the shelf where they could put their glasses. They greeted me in antipodean accents, so I smiled and nodded. One of them asked me what I was drinking. I told him it was the Scoresby Stout. He asked what it was like. I said that it was fantastic. But as the man was antipodean I thought he must be used to drinking insipid lager, so I went on to explain that it was a thick and heavy beer with a burnt taste. To my surprise, he said that was just the sort of beer he liked. I told him where to find it. But it was the other side of the great hall, so he asked if there was anything similar that was a bit closer to hand. 97 There was: I pointed out the Shropshire Stout. His friend went away and then came back with two half-pints of Shropshire Stout. The first man took a sip, then his eyes beamed as he exclaimed, “Cor! What a recommendation! Cheers!” He then smiled and saluted me with his glass. I think I made his day. I advised him not to leave the festival without trying the Scoresby Stout and the Pickwick Porter. 1998 Olympia. The beers that stood out were all unusual ones. Passageway’s Rauch was a smoked beer that tasted just like a sausage. The first few sips were great; but it was so rich that, after about half a pint, it became a struggle to finish it. The Belgian beers were lovely, particularly the sour Cantillon gueurze and also Hansen’s gueurze, which was beautifully fragrant and flavoursome. I was drinking the Belgian beer on the Tuesday afternoon. I was with Roy and John Paine, both of whom have noticeable paunches. Also with us were two or three other friends of Roy who were obvious beer drinkers because of their sizeable stomachs. As it was the first day of the festival, the television cameras were there. I saw a camera approaching me. The camera crew must, I thought, be impressed by my slim but muscular figure in tight jeans and clinging T-shirt. But they asked me to move aside as they focussed on the four or five beer bellies being carried by my comrades. The beer festival actually attracts a very diverse crowd, including a large number of women, many of them very attractive. But the media have a stereotypical idea of what they expect to see at a beer festival and they seek out whatever conforms to it, thereby perpetuating and disseminating their narrow and misleading view. 1999 Olympia. I ticked off fifty-three pints. The best beers at the festival were Cropton’s Scoresby Stout, Okells Mild, Branscombe Vale Branoc, which was a very bitter bitter, and Salopian Choir Porter. 2000 Olympia. I ticked off fifty-three pints: ten on Tuesday, twelve on Wednesday, eleven on Thursday, twelve on Friday and eight on Saturday, when the festival closed at 7.00 p.m. I was disappointed that there were very few stouts and porters. The best beers I had were Bateman’s Dark Mild, Bridge of Allan Stirling Dark Mild, Lees GB Mild, Tomos Watkins Cwrw Haf, Harviestoun Natural Blonde, Coach House Summer Pale Ale and Badger Best Bitter. 2001 Olympia. I attended only from Tuesday to Thursday. I had intended to attend on Friday and Saturday (I had, a usual, bought my ‘season ticket’) and I had been looking forward to seeing Dr. Feelgood there on the Friday night. But come Friday morning I could not carry on. A failed attempt to ask out a woman in March 2000 plus intolerable noise from my neighbours since Christmas 1999 had resulted in me suffering an extreme personal crisis, involving anxiety and depression, from which I seemed unable to recover. 98 Further, I was staying for the duration of the GBBF at my mum’s place and my mum was in a state of alcoholic dementia which was difficult for me to bear. I decided to go back home to the midlands. From the left, Roy Bond, Nick Turner and me at the Great British Beer Festival, probably 1999. 99 31. POLITICS AND IDEOLOGY Politics and ideology seem to go together. Indeed, ‘ideology’ seems often to be used as a synonym for ‘political theory.’ I propose, however, that the term ‘ideology’ and its cognates should be reserved for a particular kind of theory and a particular way of holding a theory. The particular kind of theory in question is what we may dub a ‘fairy tale theory’ because it has the same structure as many traditional children’s stories. Such a theory divides a society into oppressors, oppressed, and rescuers. The social world is described in terms of the intentional actions of these collectives. The result is what is known as ‘a conspiracy theory.’ Every fairy tale theory is false of modern, large and complex societies. Such societies are structured by intricate social relations that provide variegated incentives and constraints to which people respond in ways that seem to them appropriate; but the complexity of the social arrangements means that actions often have unintended consequences that ramify through the society; and that dooms any attempted large-scale conspiracy to failure. But it is possible that a small tribal society may truly be described by a fairy tale theory. Thus, a fairy tale theory is an ideology only when it concerns a complex modern society. Any theory may be held critically or uncritically. It is the uncritical way of holding a theory that is the ideological way. When one holds a theory critically, one holds it tentatively, in that one is alert to potential criticisms of the theory and one is prepared to give up the theory if criticism shows it to be faulty. When one holds a theory uncritically, one tries to avoid potential criticisms of the theory and, if confronted with them, dismisses them or explains them away in an intellectually unsatisfactory manner. A theory held ideologically by one person may be held critically by another. The point of using the same word, ‘ideology,’ in these two different ways is that there seems to be a connection between them. People who are attracted to ideologies (fairy tale theories about modern societies) are inclined to hold their accepted theories ideologically (uncritically). The two things may be manifestations of the same psychological dysfunction. Ideologies are connected with an ‘us and them’ mentality. They represent society in terms of persecutors, victims, and rescuers; and the people who adopt such theories usually see themselves as being among the rescuers or, at least, as being assistants to, or supporters of, the rescuers They thereby encourage the base natural human tendencies to hatred and hostility. Even supposedly ‘inclusive’ and egalitarian ideologies do that. Their proponents distinguish between friends and enemies, those who support and those who 100 oppose, those who are for us and those who are against us. In fact, some of the people who are most full of hatred and hostility are actually adherents of egalitarian ideologies. They espouse a love of mankind, but they show an intense hatred of most people. Ideological adherence to a theory is also connected with an ‘us and them’ mentality. A person who is unwilling to countenance criticism will tend to see any critic as an enemy. And the dismissal or perfunctory consideration of criticism, rather than attempts to rebut it rationally, leads to the belittling or demonisation of the critics, characterising them as stupid or ignorant or racist or fascist or ‘deplorable.’ Marxist theory can be, but need not be, construed as an ideology. Marx and Engels sometimes emphasised that social change was brought about by impersonal ‘social forces’ and ‘historical laws’ which determined the actions of human beings. But they also often spoke, or at least were interpreted to speak, in terms of evil oppressors acting intentionally (from memory, that was probably more pronounced in Lenin). Certainly many Marxists – activists more so than academics – interpreted Marxism as an ideological theory (sometimes labelled ‘vulgar Marxism’). Marxists, whichever version of the theory they hold, are also notoriously inclined to hold their theory ideologically (Karl Popper complained about Marxists being pseudoscientific). I became a Marxist in my last year at Christopher Wren Comprehensive School, then I later ceased to be one, in my second year at the London School of Economics (LSE). When I became a Marxist I had been comparing Marxism with some anarchist theories; and when I adopted Marxism it was somewhat tentatively. It was the non-ideological version of the theory that I adopted (not the ‘vulgar’ version). Although I identified myself as a Marxist, I was sensitive to criticisms made of the theory and to how they might be rebutted. I was not as critical as I should have been. For instance, I welcomed Lenin’s theory of imperialism as an explanation for why the workers in the leading ‘capitalist’ societies were getting richer (rather than poorer, as Marx’s theory had predicted), despite its being ad hoc. But, at school, I was young and quite poorly educated, so I had not mastered the techniques of criticism and counter-criticism. Accordingly my evaluations of a theory’s critical adequacy were inclined to be poor. When I got to the LSE and started studying philosophy, it was clear to me that, if Karl Popper was right in his philosophy of science and his associated theory of mind, then Marxist epistemology and metaphysics, and thus the presuppositions of Marxist social and political theory, were false. In other words: Popper’s epistemological arguments amounted to a criticism of Marxism. Accordingly I spent much of my first year trying to show how 101 Popper’s arguments failed. When I eventually accepted that Popper was right, I tried to amend Marxist philosophy to take account of them. When I gave up on that enterprise, in my second year at LSE, at Easter 1976, I ceased to be a Marxist. All of that can be seen as a rational process of adopting a conjecture but holding it open to criticism and then rejecting it when it fails to stand up to criticism. I held the non-ideological version of Marxist theory in a non-ideological way. When I gave up Marxism, I lost interest in politics, so I did not review my socialistic political leanings. But in the 1980s I was disturbed by left-wing feminist campaigns against pornography. Previously, pornography had been seen as part of sexual liberation and the left wing were generally opposed to censorship of it. In the 1980s, under the influence of the ‘radical’ feminists, the left had become puritanical and prudish. There was no way that I was going to go along with that. I felt increasingly alienated from the political movement with which I had previously identified. But still I undertook no fundamental review of my political position. In 1991 I came across a reference, in a pornographic magazine, to the Libertarian Alliance, which was said to be ‘fighting for our liberties.’ I wrote to them. They responded by sending me some slim pamphlets that they had produced on a range of topics, not just matters of sexual freedom. They pushed a thoroughgoing free-market agenda. I had a good deal of sympathy with some of it, but other parts appalled me. However, the more I understood the principles behind the parts that I liked, the easier I could see that it was the same or similar principles being applied in the other areas. I was soon persuaded to that way of thinking in general. I took out an annual subscription to the Libertarian Alliance and, before the end of 1991, I had written a pamphlet on sexual freedom for them. I had turned my back on academe three years before, so the pamphlet was not intended as an academic work. It was more journalistic, though not consciously so, as I was trying to do something different, some novel form of writing, though without a clear idea of what that form would be. I wrote numerous other pamphlets for the Libertarian Alliance over the next six years; but the more I wrote, the more academic my writings became. In part that will be because I was reading a lot of the libertarian literature, including the academic literature; and in part it was because my experiment with a proposed novel kind of writing failed. All that sounds more or less intellectually respectable. But there was also something else going on. Between 1993 and 1995, I got close to accepting the type of libertarian theory propounded by Murray Rothbard according to which there are some fundamental propositions about people’s rights that can be known a priori and from which the legitimacy of free-market anarchism 102 can be deduced. I knew enough of logic and philosophy to be able to point out the untenability of that sort of position; yet I went along with it, from time to time, perhaps because it made it easier to get to the sorts of conclusions I found appealing, or perhaps because I still occasionally saw myself as someone who had turned his back on academe. In any case, the fact was that my acceptance of a kind of Rothbardian libertarian theory had become uncritical. The theory itself was not an ideological one; it was not an oppressor-oppressed-rescuer fairy tale (though it was possible to misconstrue it in that way). But I adhered to the theory ideologically. At beer festivals in the mid-1990s, I frequently became engaged in very heated political conversations with my friend, Roy Bond, who was (and probably still is) an ideological, unreconstructed old socialist. Those sessions were not really discussions. They were more like a quarrel, with Roy asserting emphatically some far-left position, and me asserting, no less emphatically, some freemarket position, and neither of us really listening to the other. We heard what each other said; but we never fairly or open-mindedly considered the other’s views; which is fairly typical of political ‘debate’ in general. Fortunately, my reading of Ronald Coase and of Friedrich Hayek extricated me from the Rothbard-style position, reacquainted me with my critical faculty, and enabled me to take a more balanced and pragmatic view. Nowadays I regard myself as a classical liberal rather than a libertarian. I advocate individual freedom so far as optimal, but I try to keep an open mind as to how far is optimal. Me, 1989, age thirty-three. 103 32. FOUR WOMEN AND SOME EXCREMENT From the age of forty-two, I spent nine years working as a management accountant for a county council (a medium-sized organisation) in the English midlands. I was involved in performance management and organisational reviews. I was in the Treasurer’s department but I had to work with people in all the other departments of the organisation. On one review I had to work closely with a young woman, Kelly. She was about five-feet-and-five-inches tall, with short ginger hair and a somewhat podgy figure. Her teeth were a little yellow. Her butch appearance suggested that she was a lesbian, but I later discovered that she had a male partner. Kelly had a role in her department similar to my role in mine, so there was a danger that our working relationship would be spoiled by rivalry. However, we managed to avoid that and we worked together as a team. We got on well at a personal level too, which involved the usual innocent flirting. When Kelly came to see me a few weeks before her wedding, she was behaving very oddly. In response to something I said she danced in a swirling motion on the spot, like an excited little girl. We then went to the photocopier and, as she stood beside me, I could see her looking out of the corner of her eye at me, in a way that suggested that she wanted or expected me to make some sort of move on her. Perhaps she wanted me to embrace her and kiss her impulsively. Why was she coming on to me like this when she was soon to be married? It made me feel awkward. I tried to behave purely professionally. In a different department there was Nikita, with whom I worked intermittently on performance management. She was a young, slim, attractive blond. I worked well with her because she was intelligent, competent and very pleasant. After I had known her for about a year she began to demonstrate an interest in me, staring at me in an alluring way, stopping to smile at me and to raise her eyebrows when she walked past me to exit a room. She was soon to be married. Once she got married, the enticing behaviour stopped. But she was still friendly and we still worked well together. One summer I started to get attention from a smallish blond girl who worked in my department. She was new. In fact she was temporary and she was to leave after a few months. She was quite attractive, though she was not my type. I heard one of the men in my office refer to her as ‘Bubbles,’ which seemed to be a nickname she had either acquired or brought with her. Whenever I went into her office, to see someone else, Bubbles eyed me up. The first day that I noticed her she was staring right at my crotch. One day I 104 saw her in the corridor. Our eyes met and I said “hello.” But she immediately looked away, pointedly ignoring me. I suppose she thought that she would attract me by doing that. In fact, I thought it was childish and rude and I lost interest in her completely. A month or two later, shortly before she left the organisation, she was standing in the open-plan office where I sat. She was talking to another man but recurrently glancing over at me. I was sitting at my desk and her interlocutor was standing some way behind me while she was about eight feet to my left. Although she was facing her interlocutor, she was standing so that one foot pointed out to her side, aiming in my direction, which is the body-language of attraction, so we are told. She was telling the other man about her imminent marriage. My boss had told me that I was due for a substantial pay rise. Months went by, perhaps a year. I then got the news that the review of my position had concluded that my salary should remain unchanged. My boss insisted that this was an interim result and that a pay rise would be forthcoming. I was dismayed by the news, which I thought was an insult, a humiliation and a betrayal. In the previous couple of years I had been keeping an eye on the market, which suggested that I could earn more elsewhere. “I’m looking for another job,” I told my boss. “No, please don’t do that, Danny. The expected pay rise will come through.” “Well, I look forward to hearing the final result, but in the meantime I am looking elsewhere.” That day, at lunchtime, I telephoned four estate agents and asked them to visit me at home to value my house with a view to selling. I intended to move to another part of the country. Ten days later I had to give a presentation to managers from all departments of the organisation and also from the council’s ‘partner’ organisations such as the police, the health authority, the fire service. My boss was present, so was his boss (the Treasurer), and so was the Assistant Chief Executive and many senior managers. My presentation was on risk management. As I was now looking for another job, I decided to take a risk with the presentation. My example of a risk to be managed was that of the shit hitting the fan, which I developed in detail with some graphic but humorous turns of phrase. I was a little worried that some people might take offence. But, apart from one man from the police service, who throughout kept a straight face, everyone found the presentation amusing and my delivery met with hoots of laughter around the room, which was packed, with people sitting behind me as well as in front and to the sides. Almost directly behind me was a middle-aged woman with a loud and raucous laugh who found it all very funny. She was in fits when I mentioned that “you will also need a contingency plan to be brought into effect the next time you get 105 covered in it.” My boss and the Treasurer, though smiling occasionally, were rather more reserved. It may be that they half-recognised my uncharacteristic crudity for the British two-fingered salute that it was. A few days later the Treasurer accosted me and told me that my pay rise had been agreed. I took my house off the market. When I gave that shit-and-fan presentation, there was a particularly attractive blond in the audience. Penny was in her early twenties, with long curly hair and a pretty face. She was just taller than my five-feet-and-seveninches, with a slim, shapely body and large breasts. I noticed her straight away. A few days after the presentation I began work with an interdepartmental group to which Penny provided administrative support, so I came into contact with her quite regularly over the following year. She turned out to be intelligent and amiable. I went to visit her in her office one day, to pass on a piece of information. She did not seem to want me to leave. As I started to walk away, she raised a query. I answered it then I started to walk away again, but then she thought of something else. A week or two later, I met her in the corridor, just outside my office, and we spoke for a while about some work that she was doing. Our conversation had finished and I was about to go into my office, but she was standing around looking at me, as though she did not want me to leave, or as though she wanted me to say something. I gave her a smile and said “See ya later.” She smiled sweetly then left. Many times when I saw Penny to sort out some work problem, she looked me in the eye wistfully, almost questioningly. As she sat with me one day, she gave me one of her longing looks and I smiled at her before turning away. As I was turning away, I noticed her startled response, which showed umbrage. I realised that she thought I was mocking her, so I turned back to her and smiled again, looking her in the eye. I suppose my friendly intention must have been evident because she smiled back and seemed to relax again. I understood that she was attracted to me; but by this time I also knew that she had a boyfriend with whom she was about to set up home. Four women, each about to get married, and each indicating that she wanted a sexual relationship with me. Presumably, if I had not been there, each would have picked someone else. Did they each want a final fling before committing themselves? Were they worried about whether they had made the right choice of partner? Or were they led, by fear of their impending bonds, into wishful thinking that they were still free, a wishful thinking with which they wanted me to conspire? 106 33. WHEN I WENT MAD In the autumn of 1999 I was very happy. A few months later I was in despair and getting progressively worse. The change started with my feeling that my life lacked purpose accompanied by the thought that my happiness could not last, that something had to go wrong. Then, on Christmas day 1999, I began to be tormented by loud music from next door, thus being deprived of the peace and quiet that was the main condition of my happiness. Groping for a purpose, my thoughts turned to charity. But making financial donations, which was the only form of charity that appealed to me, was unsatisfying. My next thought was that what I was missing was a long-term female partner, something I had done without for twenty-one years. With remarkable timing, an attractive woman at work gave me a big smile, on two occasions. After some considered thought, I telephoned her at work one day in March 2000 and asked her out. She seemed very pleased to accept my invitation; but later that day, just before she left work, she sent me an email saying that she thought it would not be a good idea. I was not only puzzled, I was devastated; and I was also puzzled about why I was devastated, since it seemed a trivial setback. My knowledge that other people at work would be aware of my failure made me also feel ashamed. Then things got worse. April 2000 was the start of a very busy year at work. That was made more challenging by the tardiness of many people in some departments getting to me the information I needed to do my job (they were too busy with other things). Then there was an IT glitch which meant that I repeatedly lost work that I had done. The glitch was not resolved for months. Previously, such workplace challenges would have inspired me to find solutions or workarounds and, if necessary, to discuss with my boss which tasks I could delegate to others and which should be abandoned. But given my state of depression, anger, fear and anxiety, the workplace pressures and problems caused me stress, intensifying my sadness and anger, adding fear of failure and thereby intensifying my worry about possible redundancy. An attitude of ‘can do’ had been supplanted by one of ‘cannot really do but will plod on and suffer.’ I tried to get everything done without calling for help. I felt as if I were under siege, fighting a losing battle with no assistance, constantly disappointed and angry. I began to clench my jaws together tightly while I was concentrating hard to get my work done as quickly as possible. Everything that went wrong caused me to increase the pressure with which I clenched my jaws, as I battled against the clock to get my tasks completed. On several evenings, when I returned home, my head was spinning and it seemed as though there was a loud high-pitched whistle blowing somewhere 107 inside my skull. I cooked and ate, but I still felt the same way afterwards. I could not read. I could not even watch television. I just went to bed, drained. When one is exposed to stress, psychologists recommend removing oneself to a safe haven, away from the stress-inducing circumstances. Normally, in the case of workplace stress, that would be home. My home was no longer a safe haven. For months prior to the work pressure, home had been a far more stressful environment than work. I was under siege at home from the music blasted at me by my next-door neighbours. That made me constantly tense, with a butterfly in my stomach. I was clenching my jaws when I was trying to read angrily through the noise of the music or fearfully in anticipation of the music starting. By January 2001 several of my top teeth, including the front two, felt loose. I knew by then that I was clenching my jaw or grinding my teeth whilst asleep, because I was waking up with a sore mouth, and my teeth felt more loose in the morning and seemed to strengthen during the day. A search on the internet revealed that unconscious teeth grinding, called ‘bruxism,’ is caused by stress or anxiety and causes chipping and fracturing of teeth and fillings, wearing away of tooth enamel with consequent sensitivity of teeth, receding gums, shortening of the face, as upper and lower teeth shorten and recede, jowls, sore facial muscles, headache, ear-ache, neck pain, loss of hearing, and damage to the joint that connects lower and upper jaw. There is no known cure for it. The bruxism got worse. During the evenings, if I placed my jaws together gently, my teeth would chatter. Every night, shortly before bedtime, I felt as if my teeth were dancing in my gums. When I went to bed, I got a cramp across the roof of my mouth, my jaws moved together tightly and the muscles in my face and lips became very taut, putting additional pressure on my teeth. By April 2001, this involuntary bruxism had started to spill over into my waking hours. I woke with lockjaw in the morning. Intermittently, during the course of the day, I felt my jaws tightening and moving together of their own accord. I had to keep my jaws apart because, if I let them get too close together, they clamped down with great force, apparently outside of my control, though I did have the power to part them again. Sporadically through the day, my lower jaw jerked forward or snapped my mouth shut quite outside of my control. That sometimes happened when I was talking to people, which attracted a few puzzled stares. In addition, my jaws no longer fitted together properly. I could not close my mouth in a relaxed position any more. It felt as though my teeth had all been twisted out of line. I was getting headaches in addition to aching jaws. 108 Through the rest of 2001 and 2002, my gums receded substantially and my teeth felt very loose every day, all day. I could not eat an apple. I could not bite a chocolate bar with my front teeth. When I ate my food, I chewed very gently even with my back teeth, for fear of knocking them out. I could not smile properly. Perhaps that was because when we smile we expose our teeth, and as my teeth felt so vulnerable I wanted to keep them covered. I had trouble shaving above my top lip because to do that properly I have to stretch the skin across my front teeth. But I could not do that because it puts pressure on my teeth; and it felt as though my teeth would fall out. Although it was anxiety, perhaps exacerbated by depression, that brought on the bruxism, it was now the bruxism and its effects that were the main cause of my anxiety and depression. But it was by no means the only cause. My significant stock market investments lost much of their value when the technology bubble burst toward the end of 2000 and again when my non-technology investments lost value through the course of 2001 and 2002. Then I was told that the pay rise I had been promised would not be forthcoming. My charitable giving, which seemed to be my one tenuous claim to a meaningful existence, was increasingly undermined from early 2001 by numerous reports, in the news and in documentaries, of charities wasting much of the money they receive, often doing more harm than good. Almost every charity to which I contributed was exposed by one investigation or another. It seemed that I was being mocked. I was still pursuing my philosophical studies. But it seemed entirely pointless to be sitting alone, clarifying my mind about a lot of things, developing my thoughts and learning about various subjects when, at the end of it all, I would be dead. Without integrating this learning, insight and writing with some form of social interaction it just did not seem worthwhile. I was also suffering intermittently from all kinds of slight physical ailments, including acne, a blocked nose, pain in the neck, periodic stiff necks, pain in my eye or eyelid, and stiffness of joints, amongst other things. All or most of those were psychosomatic, many of them brought on by tension in my body. When I woke I had stiffness in my right hand, which felt like rheumatism or arthritis; but the doctors could find nothing wrong. I think I was clenching my hands while I slept. One morning in my friend Roy’s pub, in September 2001, as I stood over the sink in the bathroom to wash, I noticed that my right foot was twisted inward. Without realising it, I had been twisting my foot in that fashion as a result of the tension in my body. It resulted in almost constant pain in the sole of my right foot. Some months later, while sitting in my armchair in my living room, reading a book, I noticed that my left arm was very stiff and that, despite trying, I could not relax it fully. I was also aware, as I walked home from work in the evenings, 109 that my body was rigid, my walk was jerky, my left shoulder was raised up and my left arm ossified. Later still, I often noticed that my tongue was pressing hard against the roof of my mouth, particularly above my front two teeth, which was putting additional pressure on those teeth. Although I could move my tongue away from the roof of my mouth, I had to concentrate to do it; and as soon as my mind became occupied with something else, my tongue would return to its former position. Boozing aggravated my bruxism. On a Belgium binge with Roy, Nick and others, in April 2001, I felt as though I could almost spit my teeth out. I had to be careful eating, as I was frightened of dislodging them. Through 2001 I was also aware that I was developing jowls. The bruxism had caused a great band of flesh to appear between my jaw and my neck, which might have been a mixture of inflammation and increased muscle, which made me look like a bulldog, and which pushed forward the skin on my face to make a ripple on either side. Those soon became prominent swellings, fleshy, sagging pouches. It looked as if I had a marble between my lower teeth and my cheek on each side of my face. I was becoming ugly. The problem was magnified by a very aggressive bout of acne, since the pimples appeared on the left side of my face, right along the line of the jowl, increasing its prominence. My face now looked like a battered old football. My attendance at the Great British Beer Festival at Olympia in 2000 and 2001 brought me face to face with another calamity. I stayed at my mum’s place and thereby became intimately acquainted with my mum’s descent into alcoholic dementia. It was so bad and so upsetting that, in 2001, I attended the festival only from Tuesday to Thursday, thereby missing the two best days, including the performance on the Friday evening of Dr. Feelgood, to which I had been looking forward. Back in the midlands, I was overcome with anguish about my mum’s condition. That is the feeling that things are terribly wrong, and that one must do something about it, combined with the belief that there is nothing that one can do. I was extremely agitated: I could not think, I could not concentrate and I could not relax. I wanted to cry, I wanted to scream; I needed help, but I knew that there was none. This anguish prevented me, for some hours, from going to sleep that night, as I was writhing and contorting in bed in apparent agony. It often took me a while to get off to sleep and I often woke in the early hours, unable to sleep. When I did sleep I often had nightmares. I often woke in the night because one of my arms had gone dead. Ironically, although I had difficulty sleeping through most of the night, I was often unable to wake when it was time to get up. I worked flexi-time and I did not normally have to get into work until 9.30. Work was only a five-minute walk away. But I 110 sometimes struggled to get in for 9.30, even if I skipped my usual morning coffee. In April or May 2002 the world seemed to turn grey. That puzzled me because everything looked grey even though I could still distinguish the green of the leaves from the blue of the sky. The real colours of things were still there; but they all looked different. It was as though they had all somehow been washed in grey. It was about a year later when I discovered the explanation of that phenomenon. Our emotions form a part of, or a background to, our perceptions. In depression our emotions are dramatically changed. As a consequence, everything that we perceive looks different even though all its features look the same. I was thinking about committing suicide. If this was all that life had to offer me, was it worth continuing? If I did kill myself, who would know about it? They would miss me at work and, after a couple of days, they would probably telephone me at home. Getting no answer they might tell the police. If the police broke down my door and entered my house, they would then discover my corpse. They would report that back to my employer who would then contact my family. But I had given my mum as my next of kin. If they telephoned her and told her the news, what would she do? She would use it as another pretext to get drunk. She would also promptly forget the news, as she had no memory left. I went into the personnel section at work, to change my next-of-kin contacts. What rescued me from suicide was the following quite simple thought. Death will be here soon enough. And once it is here, it is here for eternity. What is the sense in bringing that forward? In the meantime, I have a few years in which to try some other options. It would be silly to skip those and opt for death early. From March 2000 until September 2003 I became increasingly mad, wallowing in the depths of misery, fear, anger and anxiety. Life seemed meaningless, empty and futile and the world seemed unreal, or unworthy of reality. One thing that is striking is the contrast between my robustness in 1996-97, when I was studying accountancy successfully, in double-quick time, despite very trying circumstances, and my fragility in 2000, when relatively trivial setbacks overwhelmed me. It is difficult to believe that it was the same person; but it was. Perhaps the explanatory difference is that in the earlier period I was a man of purpose, whereas in the later period I lacked purpose. It might seem that I had bipolar disorder (manic depression), since sometimes I was on top of everything, while other times everything was on top of me. However, bipolar disorder does not seem to fit my case. That is a damning judgement because, like psychotherapeutic theories generally, the account of bipolar disorder is stated so loosely that it can be stretched to 111 cover a wide range of very different conditions. Here, briefly, is why it seems not to apply to my case. First, in 1996-97 I was not so much manic as in control: whatever adverse circumstance arose, I could, and did, cope with it, managing to achieve my goals in spite of it. I think that, at that time, I exemplified rationality, in the ancient sense of being in control of myself and of my responses to unwelcome situations. To describe me or my behaviour then as ‘manic’ seems entirely inappropriate. Second, the bipolar person switches between manic and depressive states quite quickly. But I exemplified rational control at least from the start of 1996 to the end of 1999 (four years), and then fell into depression/anxiety for seven years. Each of those dispositions was, I think, too settled to count as an episode of manic depression. Me, management accountant, 2001. 112 34. TRYING TO REGAIN SANITY 1: INITIAL RESPONSES An irrational fear, a sensed lack of meaning or purpose, and the loss of the peace and quiet that I valued so much and for which I had worked so hard, had put me into an uneasy mental state. I then mistakenly thought that the solution to my problems would be to obtain a steady girlfriend, which was something I had previously avoided for two decades. A failed attempt to ask out a woman then propelled me into an agitated state of despair. Pressure at work, the deteriorating mental health of my mother, and several more minor irritants afflicted me with numerous ailments the most destructive of which was bruxism (involuntary, including nocturnal, jaw clenching or teethgrinding), which was damaging my teeth and gums, and making me ugly. I knew I was going seriously wrong but I did not now how to rectify things. The obvious recourse seemed to be analysis. From March 2000, when I was rebuffed by the woman, I was obsessively concerned to try to understand what had gone wrong, both with regard to the woman and my response to the rebuff, and also with regard to my life in general. I spent ages trying to analyse myself and my circumstances but I could make no sense of why something so trivial as that woman’s rebuff could affect me so adversely. I speculated that what I needed was perhaps not a steady girlfriend but a circle of friends whom I would see regularly. My old friends were scattered about the country and I saw them more or less irregularly. I had no regular crowd of friends in my new location. In the hope of meeting like-minded people, I signed up with the local Literary and Philosophical Society; but their next meting was not until October, and I did not pay my first visit until January 2001 because none of the earlier meetings was on a topic that much interested me. I went to a few meetings but all were quite dull. The average age of the audience was about sixty (I was forty-five at the time but I looked thirty or younger). They were all smartly and apparently expensively dressed. I was the only person in the hall wearing jeans and leather jacket. The talk finished at about 8.30 p.m. Coffee was then served in an adjoining room where people mingled until 9.20. I left at 8.30 as I thought I would not have much in common with these old, posh people. I thought I would spare myself the embarrassment of being ignored by them. However, my reason for joining this group was to develop a social life, so skipping the social gatherings made my attendance pointless. From 2001, my most immediate problem was to cure myself of bruxism. My first attempt at remedial action, in February, was to see my dentist. He agreed that I was grinding my teeth together while I slept. He also pointed 113 out that I had lost some chips off my teeth under the pressure of grinding. I then mentioned that I had been clenching my jaws while under pressure at work too. He said that he could take the pressure off the loose teeth by shaving a little off the end of them. I refused that treatment, as it would be dealing with the symptoms rather than solving the problem. He then suggested that I wear a specially made mouth-guard or splint, like a gum shield, that fits over the lower set of teeth and supposedly prevents the two sets of teeth from grinding against each other. I was unsure of that. It again seemed to be mitigating the effects rather than dealing with the cause. But the dentist assured me that the gum shield would solve the problem. I did not want to damage or lose my teeth, so I agreed to go ahead with it. The gum shield cost me over £50 (equivalent to about £100 in 2020, according to RPIX). It was ready in a week. When I collected it, the dentist made sure it fit. He said I should wear it when I went to bed and that I should also pop it in at work whenever I started to clench my jaws in response to work pressure. I nodded; but there was no way I was going to put it in my mouth at work. I could not admit to my colleagues that I had a stress-related problem caused by work pressure, failure with a woman and noisy neighbours. The dentist said that, if I wore the gum shield regularly, it would take about a month for my teeth to firm up again. Unfortunately, the gum shield did not work. It seemed to make things worse and it prevented me from getting a good night’s sleep. When the shield was in, my mouth felt uncomfortable. And the discomfort seemed to encourage the clenching to such an extent that it would wake me up. Part-way through the night I had to take the thing out of my mouth. I tried it again on a couple of other occasions but with the same result. I searched the internet for information on anxiety, to see if I could eliminate the causes of my bruxism. I discovered a lot of advice on ways to combat stress, which I decided to follow. I began to listen to relaxing music before going to bed at night. That meant Santana’s Abraxas, since that was the only mellow album I owned. I set aside time to practise deep breathing. I began taking leisurely walks around the neighbourhood, though only at weekends or when I was at home on leave. Exercise is recommended too; but I exercised regularly in any case. None of these activities seemed to have any impact on the bruxism. Over many months I saw several doctors who were based at my local surgery. I always saw them about some other ailment, since I seemed to be getting one thing after another, but I mentioned the bruxism while I was there to see if they had any advice to offer. None of them had any idea. Although the bruxism was getting worse and I was languishing in psychological turmoil, in emails to friends I said recurrently “I am out of 114 depression now.” I believed that my general progress was upwards, despite the occasional retrogressions. But that was no more than wishful thinking, as I sometimes suspected. At night when I went to bed and the tension spread across my face, jaws and gums, I knew I was in for another night of bruxism leading to more damage to teeth, gums and face. I would cry out for God to help me. However, I was not a believer. I was not an atheist either. I was agnostic. There had been times over the years when I had veered toward quite strong religious belief, though it was philosophical rather than allied to any of the churches. And I had been intending to study theism in more depth. I thought that a consideration of ethics might give an argument for the existence of God, somewhat along the lines of the philosopher, Immanuel Kant. However, although I knew that religious belief could help some people from falling into, or help them out of, depression and anxiety, I decided not to consider religious questions until I had resolved those problems. It seemed to me that opting into religion as a potential way out of a personal problem was a wrong reason for being religious and a spurious solution to the problem. I thought I had to defer thinking about the existence of God until I could do so without prejudice. Me, in Ypres, Belgium, May 2000 (early days of the downfall). 115 35. TRYING TO REGAIN SANITY 2: HYPNOSIS From my internet searches it seemed as though hypnosis might be my only hope of curing the bruxism. I suspected that hypnotherapists would be expensive, so I tried self-hypnosis. I found on the internet quite a lot of information about techniques for doing it. I also bought a book on the subject. Through May and June 2001, I spent an hour at it every night before I went to bed. I began with deep breathing with my eyes closed followed by tensing and then relaxing every set of muscles in my body. Then I talked to myself in my mind. First I imagined that I was descending in a lift, going down about ten floors, telling myself that I was going deeper and deeper. Then I recited, still in my mind, a prepared talk. That involved a lot of repetition of phrases like “I will not grind my teeth,” “I will not clamp my jaws,” and also phrases like “things are going to get better,” “I am going to be happy,” and even “I will be good.” Then I imagined coming up in the lift and coming out of the trance. I then opened my eyes and went off to bed. Surprisingly, this seemed to have a positive impact within days. Within a few weeks I was able to close my jaws without experiencing lockjaw; and the nocturnal bruxism did not seem to be as bad as it had been, as measured by the degree of soreness of my mouth and the felt looseness of my teeth in the mornings. But although the problem had been noticeably alleviated, it was still severe. In June, following the advice in the book, I bought a microphone for my hi-fi so that I could make a tape-recorded message to which I could listen, rather than having to recite my speech in my mind. I changed the speech too, in line with the advice in the book, so that I would be imagining myself in a pleasant garden by a stream. I could not get the tape recording quite right: I always went through the message too quickly, presumably through the boredom of reciting it, and my voice did not sound deep or soothing enough. This method was less effective than the procedure I had developed myself from the advice on the internet. I went to see my doctor but she had no idea how to help. It seemed as if she had never heard of bruxism. She suggested I see my dentist. I mentioned that from my searches on the internet it seemed that hypnotherapy offered the only hope. I asked if she could refer me to a hypnotherapist. She said she was not able to do that. I asked if she could recommend one. She said she was not able to do that either. She suggested I look in the Yellow Pages and look for qualifications and accreditations. I found several hypnotherapists in the telephone book and I gave a few of them a call. A couple of them offered a free assessment or initial “consultation,” so I decided to see one of those. The one I picked was the 116 one I could most easily get to by public transport. I went after work one warm June evening in 2001 and I was covered in sweat by the time I arrived. The venue was a terraced house. We sat in the front room, where we could hear the noise of cars in the busy street outside as well as the sound of the therapist’s female partner cooking and cleaning, quite noisily, in the adjoining kitchen. The hypnotist was a middle-aged man, quite tall, quite thin, with darkish hair. The assessment consisted of me giving answers to a standard set of questions followed by the therapist totting up my score and reading off my condition from some standard score-chart. He informed me that I was highly prone to stress. He then described what he would do if I went ahead with the therapy. He described an idyllic scene that he would ask me to imagine being in while he hypnotised me. “Does that sound nice?” he asked. I nodded unexcitedly and sighed. He said that he would help me to discover my inner child so that I could heal that child through love and succour. That, he said, would help me to overcome the stress that I felt and to achieve mental well-being. I thought it sounded like humbug. I explained that I had a specific problem, bruxism, to which I wanted a solution and that the problem was recent; so a holistic approach to mental well-being seemed like taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut. One of the other hypnotherapists to whom I had spoken on the telephone sounded more promising. When I explained my problem, she said: “Do you fear failure?” I said “yes” immediately: I thought that she had some insight into my problem. But, of course, who does not fear failure? She also mentioned that she lectured one or two afternoons a week, so her time was limited. That sounded impressive, though it might have been a lie. She did not offer a free assessment: each sixty-to-ninety-minute session with her would cost me £55 (equivalent to almost £100 in 2020, according to RPIX). That was why I had previously decided not to see her; but it did give her more credibility. She was only about a thirty-minute walk away and I needed help, so I now decided to give her a try. There was a logistical problem. She said that I would need between five and seven sessions to resolve my problem. But, like most hypnotherapists, she worked office hours; so visiting her would mean me taking time off work. I booked two half-days flexi-leave, just over a week apart, for my first two appointments. After those I would decide whether to continue the treatment and use up some of my annual leave. My first session with Susan was uneventful. Her ‘consulting room’ was the smallest bedroom of a three-bedroom semi. There was not room for a couch: I sat in an armchair with Susan sitting on an office chair diagonally opposite me. She was probably about forty, with bleach-blond hair, about five-feet-and-five-inches tall, reasonably turned out with a made-up face. 117 She told me a little about the psychoanalytical model of the mind, though no more than I had already picked up by reading about hypnosis on the internet. She asked me a bit about my upbringing and about what led up to my current problem. I was cagey in my answers: I explained that I did not want to get into ‘depth psychology’ or family or relationship problems. I just wanted to be hypnotically cured of my bruxism. She said that she had an approach that bypassed the personal history, though she thought that it was not as beneficial as the fuller treatment. We agreed to go ahead with the abridged therapy and we arranged to meet again eight days later. There were a number of things about this first meeting that gave me cause for concern. For one thing, Susan’s toenails were painted blue. Also, she said that she believed in spirituality, though she was not at all religious. That suggested that she was into some kind of New Age mysticism. For another thing, after some of her remarks, she checked my response intensely, which suggested that she was unsure of herself or even in fear of being exposed as a fraud. For example, when I was describing my feelings of depression and anxiety, she blurted out “feeling worthless.” That was actually accurate, but I did not confirm it because I was taken aback by her anxious response to her own remark. I also suspected that she was telling me lies in order to establish a bond by providing fabricated support for what I was saying. For example, when I was speaking of the periodic pressures of my job, she said that she had a brother and a sister-in-law, both of whom were public-sector accountants and both of whom suffered from bruxism. That seemed an incredible coincidence; and it hardly inspired confidence that she could help me, if she had been unable to help them. In spite of those ample warnings, I went back to her for a second session, at which she tried to hypnotise me. She began with a talk explaining what she was going to do. During this she said that a state of hypnosis was not that special: it was just a relaxed state into which people could slip in the ordinary course of affairs. I guess that was her way of lowering my expectations and making it less easy for me, later, to spot that she had failed. She connected me to some piece of electrical equipment by means of pads on wires placed at several places on my body. When the equipment was turned on, a small electrical pulse was sent through me, so she said. She then spoke to me in a soothing voice about falling into a state of relaxation. She said that soon my eyes would close; but they did not. Eventually, she closed them by running a couple of fingers down my eyelids. I kept them closed; after all, I wanted this to work. I was now supposed to be hypnotised. She started to ask me questions, in response to which I was supposed to give answers that would identify my problem and enable a resolution. But I found the questions unanswerable. For example, she said that something was troubling 118 me and she wanted me to tell her in which part of my body the trouble could be found. I remained silent. My problem, it seemed to me, was mental or emotional, not physical. Curiously, it did not occur to me mention my jaw, which is where the bruxism was located, presumably because I regarded the bruxism as merely an effect of a psychological problem. When she suggested different parts of the body, I did not know what to say. She never suggested the jaw or the teeth, which was odd given our previous conversation in which I had discussed the bruxism. She tried a number of different approaches to get me to tell her what my problem was, but nothing succeeded. She then seemed to give up and just left me sitting there with my eyes closed and with the electrical pulse (if there was one) running through me. When she asked me to open my eyes, I was surprised that almost ninety minutes had elapsed: it had not seemed anywhere near that long. The session seemed to have been a waste of time. She probably realised that I had come to that conclusion. She gave me a CD which, she said, normally sold for £12.99. I am not sure whether that was compensation or an enticement to come again. The CD contained a recording of some rhythmic music, “a brain wave” she said, overlaid with her voice, which I could use to relax and hypnotise myself. I did not arrange a third meeting: I said I would have to see my boss about taking the necessary time off work. It is a measure of how desperate I felt that I had not yet resolved to write her off. It took me a few days finally to make that decision. When I got home, I decided to play the CD on a few successive evenings, despite the failure of the live session. I could not take it seriously. Her talk was like an astrologer’s forecast: vague and ambiguous enough to be interpreted just about any way by anybody. It was also full of mystical mumbo jumbo, for example, about “energy and light coming down to you” from somewhere outside of the solar system. I tried to pay attention to the music only, to see if I could derive any stress-relieving benefit from the “brain wave.” But that was useless too. It did not help that the noise of traffic, and in particular a motorbike, could be heard in the background, at regular intervals, on the recording. From my searches on the internet it had seemed that hypnosis offered the only possible solution to my problem. But it did not seem to work for me. I had wasted £110 (almost £200 at 2020 values) and several hours on Susan. It seemed that there was no hope. I thought that perhaps in Harley Street there might be a genuine hypnotist who could save me. But that would cost a fortune; and he or she might turn out to be as big a quack as Susan was. It was bad enough suffering from my uncontrollable and self-destructive habit without having every swindler making a mug of me too; bad enough that no 119 one could help me, without having leeches take advantage of my desperation. However, my self-hypnosis sessions had produced some benefits. In selfhypnosis you do two things. First you tell yourself to sort out the problem. So I was telling myself to stop clenching and grinding my teeth. Second, you try to focus on a happier future and you tell yourself that things are going to go well. I think it was that second part that was important. Setting aside some time to think calmly about how things can be better and telling yourself that you will be and feel better, has the effect of raising the spirits, if only slightly. Anything that raises the spirits will combat depression and anxiety, which were the causes of my bruxism. It now seemed pretty clear to me that all I needed to overcome my problem was something to cheer me up. Somewhat strangely, I did not continue with the positive self-talk which had seemed to be beneficial. Instead I wanted a real change that would make things better. But I could find nothing to do that. Me with Roy Bond in Boston, USA, October 2000. Depressed and anxious. The bruxism was relatively mild at that time but, already, incipient jowls are just visible. 120 36. TRYING TO REGAIN SANITY 3: MEDS AND EXERCISE In August 2001, one of the doctors at my GP surgery gave me a prescription for anti-depressants. I never used the prescription because the anti-depressants had nasty side-effects, including sickness, loss of appetite, constipation, drowsiness, dizziness, headaches and impotence. Impotence would be enough to make one depressed if one were not already so. One could not drink alcohol while taking the pills either. In the later part of October 2001, I bought a packet of St. John’s Wort pills for £10 (equivalent to almost £18 in 2020, according to RPIX). I had found out about this traditional remedy on the internet. According to some research, the pills achieve similar benefits to anti-depressants but without the awful sideeffects. I took two pills a day for two-and-a-half weeks. By the time the packet was consumed I felt better. I emailed friends telling them (once more) that I was free of depression. But the bruxism continued. I concluded that the cause of my bruxism was not depression but anxiety. I had begun reading books on psychology, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in an attempt to identify the causes of my problems and possible solutions. But there was a lot to learn and it appeared that the remedies, whatever they turned out to be, would involve a lot of painstaking analysis and re-building of the self. I thought I needed something to help me in the meantime. I did some research, using the internet, into drugs that are used to control or alleviate anxiety. I came up with Valium. On the fourth of December, 2001, I went to see the doctor to get some, as well as some oxytetracycline to take away my acne. The doctor was remarkably obliging: I asked for Valium; he gave me it. But he started me off on a low dose of two milligrams, three times a day. The effect was immediate. During the daytime I stopped clenching my jaw and I lost the tendency to lockjaw. In the evenings before bedtime, I no longer suffered the tension across the roof of my mouth and in the muscles of my face. While I slept, the bruxism still occurred. But from the diminished soreness of my mouth and looseness of my teeth when I woke up, it seemed that the nocturnal bruxism had been reduced. As a consequence, my teeth were feeling firmer. There were also some pleasant side effects. I felt a lot more at ease and I seemed more outgoing and chatty. At work, at meetings, I was speaking more fluently and confidently, without the usual jitters. I was sleeping a little better too. On the downside, I found it difficult to get up in the mornings and I tended to yawn during the day. I think I also found it a little more difficult to concentrate. However, after a week the bruxism started to worsen again. On the twelfth of December, I went back to the doctor and I asked for a stronger 121 dose. The request was granted. I was then taking five milligrams of Valium three times a day. Once again, the effect was immediate. I was soon able to shave above my top lip almost normally. But after a week or so the effect was starting to wear off again. If I kept to the stated dose, the pills would run out on Friday the twenty-eighth of December. I would not be able to see the doctor again until Wednesday the second of January because of the holidays. That seemed rather a long time to be without pills, so in the run up to the twenty-eighth of December I reduced my daytime dose to leave me enough pills to take before bedtime on the twenty-ninth and the thirtieth of December. That meant I would have only two days with no pills. On New Year’s Eve, I went into work. As I worked away, I started to get a tension in my jaw and facial muscles. Immediately, I stopped to ask myself what the problem was. It was easy to identify. I was working on a job that would take several days to complete and that had a large number of component tasks. I was trying to carry around this list of tasks in my head while I did the job, which was a strain. So I made a list of the tasks so that I could tick them off as I did them. The tension went away. However, as I went to go to bed that evening, I became very anxious and tense. I had no Valium left. I did not sleep well that night. When I got up the next morning, my jaws ached badly and my teeth felt looser than they had ever been. On the night of the first of January 2002 I also found it difficult to sleep, partly, I think, out of fear of what would happen if I did. The state of my teeth and mouth the next morning, and the ugliness of my face, told me that the bruxism had returned to the pre-Valium level. My anxiety was heightened too, rendering me into a state of panic. That morning I went back to the doctor demanding more Valium and a stronger dose. The doctor I saw that day was one whom I had not seen before. He was young but confident. He was reluctant to prescribe more Valium because it was addictive and because he thought I should be trying other ways to resolve my problems. In fact, he told me off. He suggested that I run for an hour, two or three times a week, or that I join a gym. He said that regular exercise would cause the body to release endorphins, which can help to combat the damaging chemicals that stress produces. I was incoherent and panicky in my responses. “What’s happened to you?” he said. “What’s made you like this?” He spoke in a demanding tone. He said that he could refer me to a counsellor; but I rejected that proposal. I said that I could read for myself all the books that a counsellor would read, so I had no need of such expertise. I insisted that I needed more Valium. Eventually he gave in. We agreed on seven milligrams once a day before bedtime. Although I had asked him for a supply for three months, he gave me only enough for two weeks. 122 I was much calmer the following day, having had my dose of Valium the night before. I decided that I would gradually wean myself off the Valium, start doing some running and take up the doctor’s offer of a referral to a counsellor. I went back to see the same doctor on Friday the fourth of January and I told him the good news. He then told me the bad news that there was a waiting list to see a counsellor. He said I would have a wait of several months. The following evening I did my first and only run. I decided I would run on the roads that form a large square around the County Hall, because they are flanked mostly by fields, so there would be few people to see me. I went out at about 8.30 p.m. when it was dark, to make it even less likely that anyone would recognise me. I felt very self-conscious about running. I thought the route I had chosen would probably take an hour or more. I also thought the running would be easy because I thought I was fit, having been exercising with weights regularly for more than sixteen years. So I started off running at quite a pace, even though the start of my route was uphill. After fifteen minutes I had got to the top of the hill, but I was exhausted and I had to stop. I nearly fell down. I plodded on at a slow walking pace for seven minutes, to get my breath back. Then I resumed at a jogging pace for about ten minutes before reverting to a walk for the rest of the way home, which took only another ten minutes. When I got in, my legs were aching and the muscles felt very tense. I had an early night; but I took my seven milligrams of Valium first. The running did not appear to alleviate the nocturnal bruxism, which worsened, despite the seven milligrams of Valium. I took another seven milligrams the next night, five milligrams the night after, three milligrams a night for the two nights after that, and two milligrams on Thursday the tenth of January. The following day I took none. I was not in the extremely agitated condition I had been in the last time I stopped, presumably because I had let myself down gently. But I was still anxious and still suffering from nocturnal bruxism. The next day, Saturday, my neighbours played loud music for an hour. That put me on edge and made me angry. I had a terrible night’s sleep, with nightmares and severe jaw clenching. The following morning, my face was badly swollen and it felt like my front teeth were going to fall out. That seemed to confirm what I had suspected for a while, namely, that anger was a significant part of my problem. Some psychiatrists recommend safe venting of anger as a way of getting rid of it to prevent it causing problems. For a week I spent some time every day punching, kicking and swearing at some pillows until I felt drained of my anger. But as that did not seem to be effective, I went into town to buy a punch-bag and punching mittens. 123 On Tuesday the fifteenth of January 2002, I had a stressful day at work. That evening I felt my jaw clamping and facial muscles tensing. I was obviously in for a bad night, so I took two milligrams of Valium before going to bed. As a consequence, the bruxism was not so bad that night. Since then I have taken no more Valium. My verdict on the Valium was that it helped while I was taking it, and so long as I kept increasing the dose; but after I had stopped taking it, I was more or less back to where I was before I had started taking it. I spent several months venting my anger on the punch-bag. A punching session would not last very long. The first few lasted only about ten minutes each, after which I collapsed on to the bed exhausted. With more practice and a less frantic attack I was soon able to last about twenty minutes. It seemed to be quite an effective form of exercise, as my heart would be pounding and I would be panting even after these short sessions. While I was doing it I thought that it felt great. Very often, when the music from next door started, I went out into the garage and punched until I was ready to collapse. But it did not seem to be helping with the bruxism. In particular, the bruxism was still noticeably worse on evenings when I heard the music, despite my efforts to vent my anger. I eventually came to the conclusion that the punching was not releasing my anger at all. In fact, it seemed to be increasing it. I was angry because of the music. But punching the bag while thinking about the inconsiderate teenagers only made me more irate: it was working me up into a frenzy. It seemed to be making the bruxism worse. I stopped using the punch-bag. Me, with odd haircut, at the wedding of Roy and Pat Bond, January 1990. 124 37. TRYING TO REGAIN SANITY 4: PSYCHOTHERAPY I searched the internet for local mental health support groups. When I was younger I had a history of compulsive behaviour. Bruxism appeared to be a form of compulsion too. I thought that a group for sufferers of obsessivecompulsive disorder might meet my need more closely than the other few groups that were available. I went to a meeting in town on the evening of Wednesday the sixth of February 2002. The group was quite unstructured. Everyone sat in a circle and people just talked about their problem. There were two budding psychologists present, from the local health authority. They seemed convinced that cognitivebehavioural therapy was the best approach to alleviating the problem. That involves exposing yourself to the things that cause anxiety, to get used to them, while refraining from engaging in the compulsion, and reinforcing this by punishing yourself when you act out a compulsion and rewarding yourself when you refrain. Such an approach seemed irrelevant to me because it concerned ways of influencing conscious, or at least awake, behaviour. My bruxism was happening in my sleep. It was also clear to me that my problem was of quite a different sort to those experienced by the other members of the group, all of whom seemed to be checking and re-checking things unnecessarily. I did not speak at the meeting and I decided I would not attend again. But before I left I spoke to one of the psychologists to explain my problem and to ask if he could suggest anything that might help me. He had no idea. I think that, perhaps, he had so far only learned about cognitivebehavioural therapy. From my own reading of the psychology books I was familiar with cognitive-behavioural therapy and I had been using it myself. But what I found more useful was rational-emotive behaviour therapy. That attempts to tackle anxiety and depression by exposing and undermining the irrational ideas, presumptions and attitudes that lead to them. I was attempting to master my fears by subjecting them to rational analysis. I found it very useful to identify each of my fears and then, one after another, assess how serious it was, work out how best to handle it and identify the worst that could happen if the fear were realised. I was quite surprised to find that, when rationally appraised, the fears were quite minor and manageable. It seemed ridiculous that they had been causing me so much trouble. But that did not in itself dispel my irrational worry about them. I had to read through the analysis many times during several weeks before the message sunk in. But that did seem to be a real help in starting to overcome the anxiety. 125 In addition I was using “stress inoculation” and “re-framing” to help me to cope with the noise from my neighbours. Re-framing was a technique I had used before in connection with my last set of noisy neighbours in London. It involved telling myself that the people next door also had a right to enjoy their property and that the noise from them was not unreasonable. I would also remind myself that, once the noise started, I could do things other than read; and that, if the noise became unreasonable, I could always make a complaint. The inoculation involved telling myself all this whenever the music started. I was also trying to dismantle the mistaken beliefs and attitudes that had led me into depression. That was more difficult to do on my own because I did not know which of my beliefs and attitudes were reasonable and which should be challenged. One of the things that led me into depression and acute anxiety was that I could no longer make sense of the world. What made this even more difficult to bear was that it seemed as though everyone else knew how things worked. But I just did not know how to proceed to obtain the things I wanted; and I no longer knew which things I did want. The theory that most helped me to make sense of people, myself included, and of what had gone wrong in my life, was transactional analysis. Although I later rejected a lot of what transactional analysis says, the theory gave me an interpretative frame which was an essential stepping stone toward regaining a stable grip on the world. I worked out a timetable for my evenings. After cooking, eating, and drinking a coffee I would spend thirty minutes practising relaxation techniques, which involved deep breathing and meditation. I would then spend fifteen minutes reviewing the day. First I would identify the good things that had happened and the extent of my responsibility for them, so that I could think well of myself; then I would identify the bad things, the extent of my responsibility and the lessons to be learned, so that I could improve myself. I then set aside ninety minutes for fun, which could be watching a film, listening to music, or reading a rock magazine. That would be followed by half an hour thinking about my strong points and making plans for the future. At 10.00 p.m. I would vent my anger on the punch-bag. Then I would clean my teeth and go to bed. I did not stick to that timetable. I found I got very little, if any, benefit from the relaxation techniques. Thinking about my good points and making plans for the future did not get me very far; and after the first one or two attempts, I had very little to add to what I had done already. A lot of the time that I set aside for fun and relaxation I actually used for reading psychology or working out my thoughts. I eventually gave up punching the punch-bag because it was increasing, not releasing, my anger. But I found the review of the day very helpful in gaining a more balanced and less pessimistic view of 126 myself and of my future. I carried it out almost every day from the fourteenth of January to the fifth of April 2002. My worsening appearance was now making me very sad. It was probably contributing to my anxiety too. The bruxism was continuing apparently unstoppably, making me ever more ugly. Although my application of rational-emotive behaviour therapy had alleviated the irrational fears, and although my study of transactional analysis had helped me to feel that I had some hope of understanding the world, I was still depressed and anxious. After I appeared to have dealt with all the specific irrational anxieties, there seemed to be a non-specific anxiety that remained. But a non-specific anxiety, a state of anxiety that is not an anxiety about something, did not seem to make sense. Mental states like fear or anger are supposed to have an object, something that one is fearful of or angry about. I concluded that my apparent non-specific anxiety, worry, fear or anger, must be a specific one that was subconscious. I was studying “depth psychology” and family therapy to try to uncover it. But despite a few insights, I was not getting very far and the problems remained unresolved. Early in May 2002 I began seeing the counsellor to whom my doctor had referred me. I met her for five sessions, each lasting about forty-five minutes, during the course of May and June. During those sessions I related the story of my life so far. The counsellor listened, asked a few questions and made a few observations, some of which were trite, but one of which was helpful. When I described my life as a sot in 1980-1981, she turned to me and looked me in the eye. We continued looking at each other for a few seconds. Her eyes appeared tearful as she said to me: “I am just thinking about one so young wasting his life like that.” That seemed to be a cue for me to burst into tears. I did not. But I did say, “It’s pretty depressing” because some sort of response like that seemed to be demanded. Our time was then up. She said she was sorry to leave me at that low point in my life. She asked me if I was going back to work. When I said, “Yes,” she asked if I was okay to go back to work. I said I was. At the end of the final session I put three questions to the counsellor. As we had been talking in confidence over some weeks about my life and emotional problems, she must have learned something about me. She was also trained in psychology and counselling. Putting the two together, I thought she might be able to spot some weaknesses or faults about which I was either ignorant or self-deceptive. I asked her: “What is there about me that I can’t see?” She was taken aback by the question. After a short silence she started talking, but she made no attempt to answer the question. It seemed to me, from her reaction, that I had invited her to do something which her professional code prohibited; but perhaps she just had no idea how 127 to answer. I cannot now remember the other two questions; but I do remember that she could not answer them either. I found the counselling sessions to be very largely a waste of time. The idea seems to be that you tell your story to a sympathetic person who encourages you to have a good cry at the worst points; and then you are supposed to be all right. That may work for some people or for some problems; but it was not what I needed. Perhaps I needed something stronger. I had been wondering for some months whether I should submit to electric shocks to the brain. I had read that it helped some people with depression. Perhaps it could take away my anxiety and bruxism too? However, I had also read that electric shock treatment achieved only temporary benefits, so it had to be repeated at intervals; and that, as one would expect, it caused some impairment to cognitive functions. I never asked my doctors for the treatment; but even if I had done, they would probably not have agreed to it. It seemed that no one could help me. The dentist could not help me; the doctors could not help me; the hypnotherapists could not help me; the psychotherapists and counsellors could not help me; drugs could not help me; exercise and catharsis could not help me; and I could not help myself. I was destroying myself. I was chewing away my own mouth and uglifying my face. It was getting worse and I could not stop it. No one could stop it. It was as though someone had put an evil curse upon me, against which I was powerless. There was nothing I could do but suffer and destroy myself. So it went on. Me in the 1990s, around age forty. 128 38. TRYING TO REGAIN SANITY 5: AUTOBIOGRAPHY The period from the start of 2001 to early September 2002 was by far the unhappiest time of my life so far. As well as depression and acute anxiety, I was also in the grip of a severe, uncontrollable and apparently ineluctable habit of clenching my jaws and grinding my teeth. The serious dental damage paled beside the ravages to my face. But dentists, doctors, hypnotherapists, counsellors, support groups, friends, family and even pills all seemed unable to help. I was harassed by work-based pressure, noise from my neighbours, stock market losses and my mum’s descent into apparently irretrievable alcoholic dementia. I was plagued by irrational fears, nightmares, insomnia and acne as well as by aches and pains brought on by persistent muscle tension. I suffered from a succession of minor maladies. I was still perplexed about why that woman had rebuffed me and why it affected me so badly. I had become difficult to work with. My attendances at the Literary and Philosophical Society proved to be a failure. In addition, my expected pay rise did not seem likely to happen. I now resolved, for the umpteenth time, to start thinking more positively. I decided, once again, that I needed a radical review of my situation and prospects, possibly leading to a big change. I began by trying to analyse how I had got into my current turmoil. That involved reviewing the process that led to my downfall, including events and my responses to them; and I tried to identify what the rational responses would have been. It also involved analysing my situation, identifying the good things, listing all the bad things and considering what could be done to change them, identifying what is missing from my life and what options there may be for plugging the gaps. On that basis I would draw up plans for the future. I had attempted such an exercise several times since March 2000 and it would be an exercise I would attempt again and again over the next year. I suppose I expected the analysis to resolve the anxiety; and when it did not, I thought I must have done something wrong. My difficulties with understanding the past and the present were matched with perplexity about what the future might hold. For whenever I thought about what I should do with the rest of my life, I was unable to come up with an answer. The biggest problem seemed to be that there was nothing that I wanted to do. The only things I could think of were the sorts of things I already did, like reading a few good books. In fact, I quite often thought that I would be glad when it was all over. The counselling had not helped me; but it did have one indirect benefit. Talking in some detail about my life history to a stranger had given me an 129 inclination to write my autobiography, not for publication, but to help me to analyse my life so far and attempt to work out where I went next. I had read in the self-help books that this was a way of combating depression and anxiety, but I had not previously been inclined to attempt it. I took a week’s leave from work in the second week in September 2002, when I started to write it. Within a few weeks of commencing the autobiography, the depression lifted significantly. By December I had told my friend Nick Turner that the depression had gone. The anxiety, expressed in the nocturnal jaw clenching, remained; but it was gradually abating as the work of reevaluating my life progressed. I think there were a number of reasons why writing an autobiography might have had a positive effect. The first is that it provides an absorbing project. One of the ways in which people aggravate their depression and anxiety is by dwelling on them. An absorbing project is a distraction from that. It also gives the author a sense of purpose; and it is often a loss of purpose that creates a proneness to depression and anxiety. The second reason is, I think, that it is like having someone to talk to about all the things that concern you most. It allows you to get things off your chest. It enables you to tell your story in all its intimate detail. And you know you are telling it to someone (yourself) who is listening and who cares. It seems to provide an escape from the loneliness that is often, if not always, a part of depression and anxiety. It may be an illusion of companionship; but it is certainly a comforting illusion. Perhaps keeping a diary would be a prophylactic. I think there is a third reason why writing an autobiography can be beneficial, but it only applies to some autobiographies. I wanted to get a better understanding of myself. I thought that by understanding who I was, I would be able to answer the question of what I should do with my life. The autobiography was intended, therefore, to be an analysis of my life that would reveal the true me and enable me to draw up a plan for my future life and happiness. For that to work, I had to ensure that I was as truthful as I could be about what I had done and about what had happened to me. That is difficult to achieve, because our natural tendency is to justify what we have done, to conceal the things we think shameful, and to blame others or circumstances for our failures. So many autobiographies read like vindications. But the attempt at assiduous honesty can help you to strip away the lies you have been living. The illumination can be satisfying, the confession can be calming, and the truer view of yourself and the world (if achieved) can make life easier to live and it can give future plans more chance of success. September 2002 was also when the disturbances from next door largely stopped. The last record I made of being disturbed by the neighbours was on 130 the second of September. That disturbance lasted for just ten minutes and it was the first disturbance since the twentieth of July. The disturbances did not stop entirely; but from September 2002, they were very occasional, of relatively short duration and not usually very loud. I cannot be sure of the extent to which it was that rather than writing autobiographical reflections that was responsible for my recovery. Throughout all the worst months of my depression and anxiety, I had not taken any time off work. In fact I had not had any time off sick since starting my job in the midlands, or for my last two years in London. But in September 2002 I caught a cold. On the twenty-sixth I was in work, but I felt so bad that I decided to go home at lunchtime. That single half-day was the only sick leave I had in nine years at my job in the midlands. One consequence of analysing my life and motivations was that, before the end of 2002, I resolved to avoid drunkenness in future. I had made such resolutions before, back in the mid-1980s, but they had never lasted more than a few months. The main reason I kept going back on the drink in those days was that I had no social life without it. I had still not developed a social life, and specifically a non-alcoholic social life, but I was able to keep to my resolution because writing the autobiographical reflections was sufficiently absorbing to keep me preoccupied during my leisure hours. By the summer of 2003, I was feeling a lot better. The suicidal thoughts were now behind me. Although I was still clenching my jaws whilst asleep, it was nowhere near as bad as it had been a year or two before. As a consequence, I was looking a lot better. Although I still had a double chin and droopy jowls, they were not nearly as pronounced as they had been. I had substantially lost interest in my job in mid-2002, when it seemed that my promised pay rise would not materialise. My attitude to the work did not change after my pay rise had been agreed, a couple of months later. Yet, by late 2003, I was working better with everyone with whom I had to work because my focus had moved from the task to the team. I was trying to help people, as a colleague and potential friend, to support and engage with people as human beings with their own concerns, weaknesses and merits. This change of attitude had a number of causes. First, I was very conscious of human weakness, which made me more disposed to take a balanced and pragmatic view of organisational problems and their potential solutions. Second, my struggles to understand depression, anxiety and human nature in general had made me more focused on the immediate problems of ordinary life, including ordinary working life, rather than on the big issues of economics, politics, society and even metaphysics. Third, I had come to see my job as just another absurdity amid the madness of life. It was not just my job that I saw that way, but the jobs of most people who made their living by 131 means of words and numbers. It all seemed just a load of talk that was ultimately hollow. In view of that I asked my boss if I could work half-time. He was not keen but he said he would consider it if I could explain how it would work. In February 2004, I came up with plans for working a two-and-a-half-day week, a three-day week and a four-day week. The first option did not seem realistic, the second seemed just about possible. In May, my boss suggested I work four days a week from the start of July and that after a year we could review how things had worked and make a decision about going down to three days a week, coming back to five days or staying at four. I agreed. By December 2003, my face was starting to regain its shape. The floppy, pouchy jowls had receded. In fact, so long as I did not look down, they seemed to have disappeared almost entirely. When I kept my head up, I looked a lot like me again. But I still had the swelling under the back of my jaws, which gave me a double chin and which, when I looked down, pushed the skin forward on my face to produce the jowl effect. I was hopeful that the swelling would go when the jaw clenching finally stopped, as I now felt confident that it would. In fact, I thought that the jaw clenching might stop when I finished writing my autobiographical analysis, since it was that exercise to which I attributed my improvement. However, another possibility is that I was just healing naturally. Some studies of people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, to which my problem seemed (weakly) analogous, indicate that recovery typically takes about three years with treatment and about five-and-a-half years without treatment, although about a third of sufferers never recover. By the end of 2003, I was nearly four years into it and not fully recovered. That seems to indicate that my recovery from the disorder was running its natural course and that all my attempted remedies had been feckless. A consequence of the abatement of the jaw clenching and my improved appearance was that I was feeling a lot brighter. That will in turn have helped to reduce the jaw clenching. Some people at work commented that I was looking better, but they put it down to my eschewal of drunkenness. I had not confessed to anyone at work that I was suffering mental health problems. I had not felt or looked so good for more than two years. But I still had a way to go. Ironically, I seemed to be ambivalent about my recovery. When I looked in the mirror in the morning and saw my much-improved face, I contemplated the disappearing jowls with a sense of loss. I was starting to worry about my more cheerful disposition. It was as if my depression and anxiety had assumed the role of imaginary friends who comforted me in my loneliness. I was now fearful of losing them. I was fearful that I was no longer special. But it was a fact that they were going. In April 2004 I noticed 132 that I was now singing again first thing in the morning. I had a spring in my step. When I mowed the lawn in May, for the first time in 2004, I was surprised at how easy it was. The previous few summers I had had to drag my body around as well as the lawn mower; but now I had so much more energy. On the twentieth of May 2004 I stopped taking the oxytetracycline that I had been taking for two-and-a-half years. On the couple of earlier occasions when I had tried to give it up, I was afflicted with very aggressive bouts of acne within a week or two. This time my skin remained clear, apart from the occasional pimple or two that I could control with a topical cream alone. But it did not last: the aggressive acne returned after a few months and I was back on the oxytetracycline. Me and niece, Rosie, 2004, two years into the slow recovery. The jowls had substantially reduced in size but were still visible. 133 39. TRYING TO REGAIN SANITY 6: ACUPUNCTURE In September 2004 I had finished writing my autobiography and, although I was definitely much improved with regard to depression and anxiety, I was still suffering. In particular, I had still not got rid of the bruxism, though its severity had been much reduced. I visited an acupuncturist. I was in two minds about it, as my recovery seemed to be steady and I was hopeful that I would be free of the bruxism entirely within a year, just through a natural healing process. But it would be better to recover sooner rather than later, so I decided to see whether acupuncture could give my recovery a fillip. I searched the internet for information about acupuncture and its practitioners. It turned out that there was a national association of accredited acupuncturists allied to the National Health Service. There were two who were not too far from me and who had email addresses, so I contacted them, described my problem and asked if they thought they could help. Only one of them responded to me. Luckily, he was the one who was the easiest to get to; but he was not that easy to get to. Going by buses would have taken the best part of an hour. I estimated that it would only take about an hour to walk it, so I decided to travel on foot. It took me an hour and five minutes to get there and an hour and ten minutes to get back, so he must have been at a slightly lower altitude than I was. We arranged to meet on a Friday, my day off. At the first session, we began with a discussion about my problem. He then pulled out a needle which he stuck into my feet, the base of my hands, my shoulders and my jaws. The needle was in me at each place only for a second or two. Some of the pricks were quite painful. I agreed to see him the same time the following week, as he said we would need a minimum of three sessions to see any lasting effect. That night when I went to bed I felt very relaxed and I slept well. When I woke to the sound of my hi-fi alarm the next morning, I was lying on my left-hand side, with my left ear pressed to the pillow. Nevertheless, I could hear the music clearly through my right ear. That seemed to be a substantial improvement in my hearing in that ear, which had been impaired seventeen years before when I had my skull fractured. I was feeling bright and relaxed. But all of this might have been psychological, a placebo effect. It was a nice sunny day, so I sat in my garden with a book. It was peaceful until my next-door neighbours’ grandson arrived (the neighbours on the other side of my house, not the teenage girls). The boy was kicking a football around their garden, probably playing a game with his granddad. I tried to 134 ignore the commotion and concentrate on my reading, though it was difficult. Then the football came over the fence and hit me right on the ear, the right ear. I put the football on top of the fence so that they could retrieve it. But I was now agitated rather than relaxed. I also seemed to have gone deaf in the right ear, though it was only temporary. But all the good of the previous day’s acupuncture was now undone. The following day, I was again in the garden enjoying the peace until I was disturbed by loud music coming from one of the houses about half-way down my street. I went indoors, but I could still hear it. In fact, I could hear it in every room in my house. The following day, Monday, I was at home, as I was on a week’s leave. The weather was warm but overcast, so I decided to sit indoors, but with all the windows open. A little after 9.00 a.m. one of the girls next door started playing loud music while she had her bedroom window open. I heard it loud and clear. I shut all the windows in my house but I could still hear it clearly. The music stopped after forty minutes, when the girl went off to work. But the damage had been done, as my anxiety level had been raised. The bruxism appeared to worsen this week. When I went to bed, the muscles in my face tensed, I had pain in my gums and across the roof of my mouth and my jaws seemed twisted out of shape. When I woke up in the morning, my teeth felt looser and the ridges of skin inside my cheeks, where my teeth had been grinding, were more pronounced than usual. Perplexingly, my face seemed to be getting better regardless. On the Thursday evening, the girl played music for ninety minutes, ending at 10.30. I could have escaped that by going into my kitchen, so it was not as loud as it had been on Monday. But it went on much longer and it did not end until close to my bedtime. There was very little time for me to wind down before going to bed, which meant another night of aggravated bruxism. The following day I went back for more acupuncture. I explained to the acupuncturist that I had suffered a stressful week, so my condition had deteriorated. This time, in addition to sticking the needle in my jaws, feet, hands and shoulders, he gave me extra pricks in the jaws and in the left shoulder and he also stuck half-a-dozen pins in my scalp, on the top of my head. The latter was supposed to calm me down. But it felt odd having pins stuck in my head, which he left there for a few minutes, and I felt strange, and depressed, for the next couple of days. My condition did not improve or deteriorate the following week. But after quite a busy but successful time at work, on the Friday, the seventeenth of September, I felt good. On the long walk to the acupuncturist, the sky was cloudy, the air was damp and it rained intermittently. But several times on this walk I thought to myself that it was a lovely day and I enjoyed the walk. In view of my aversion to having pins stuck in my head, the acupuncturist 135 this time stuck a needle in two points of my neck, at the base of my skull. He also pricked me in both feet, at the base of each hand, between the thumb and forefinger of each hand and at several places in my shoulders. I paid him £40, taking my total payments to him to £140 (equivalent to almost £250 at 2020 values, according to RPIX), which included £20 for the initial consultation. I did not arrange another appointment as I said that I wanted to see if my condition improved at all. I was not feeling particularly relaxed when I went to bed that night, but I did get off to sleep quite quickly. However, I was soon woken up by music. When I woke, the music was only just audible; in fact it was probably the vibration of the bass that woke me rather than the sound. I do not know how long it went on for, but I could not get to sleep for hours, and when I did get off to sleep, I kept waking up again. I assumed the music came from the students down the road. I slept very poorly the next two nights as, with it being the weekend, I anticipated more music, so I went to bed apprehensive, though it turned out to be peaceful. On Monday night I went to bed early, feeling very tired. I was just going to sleep when a car engine woke me. That made me fearful of further noise and I found it difficult to get back to sleep. A while later I again heard and felt the bass notes of someone’s music. I got up and opened the window to try to locate its source. To my surprise, it was peaceful in the street. I then went to the back of my house and opened a window there. It was clear that the noise was coming from somewhere at the back of my house, probably quite far away. So I did not even know whom to complain to or about. I was unable to sleep well for the rest of the week, in anticipation of further disturbances, of which there were a few. Despite a sudden onset of noisy neighbours, the jaw clenching did not worsen, except temporarily. My spirits did not sap either, except temporarily. I was feeling much more resilient and able to cope with minor adversities. My recovery, though gradual, seemed relentless. I concluded that the acupuncture was having a negligible effect, if any; and that any positive effect might be due to the exercise of walking for two-and-a-quarter hours rather than to the treatment. 136 40. TRYING TO REGAIN SANITY 7: NEW ENVIRONMENT In the summer of 2005 I checked my finances, did some calculations and concluded that I had enough money to retire, even though I did not expect to start drawing a pension, either from work or from the state, until I was sixtyfive, in August 2020. I had little idea of what I would do with myself if I did retire, so I did not pursue the idea. I was no longer engaged in technical accounting work, so I resigned from my accounting body to avoid paying the annual fee. My boss did not object. At the start of July 2006, I handed in my three months’ notice. I was considering going back to academe to do a Ph.D., at either Manchester or Kent, and I had to resign then if I was going to be available at the start of the course. I also wanted to leave work before mid-September when the office would start being cold. I had saved up a couple of weeks’ annual leave, so my last day at work would be the thirteenth of September. I decided that, if I did not go back to university, I would go to live on the Isle of Wight, to see if I liked it. I heard in August that, while both Manchester and Kent universities were happy to have me as a Ph.D. student, neither would offer me a scholarship. I did not accept either place, not because I needed the grant, but because I would have felt like a second-rate student if I had to pay my own way while others had been given awards. So I left my job with no other career to pursue. I had turned fifty-one three weeks before. A pleasant surprise was the news that my local-government pension would be payable from age sixty rather than sixty-five. I had put my house on the market when I resigned. After one buyer pulled out, I accepted quite a low offer for my house to speed things up. We completed the sale on the twenty-seventh of November and I moved into a rented three-bedroom detached house on the side of a cliff, overlooking the sea, in Ventnor, on the Isle of Wight. A couple of days after moving in, I was on the seafront, standing on the great stone steps that jut out into the sea, looking at the waves and breathing in the sea air. I turned to look behind me at the huge cliff, and at the houses and trees clinging to the side of it, taking in the distinctive architecture of the place. I looked across at the white cliffs in the bay being battered by the waves and, as I walked back to the esplanade, pondering the beauty and the wonder of it all, I felt elated. There was a male-female couple walking along the esplanade and I had to restrain myself from approaching them and saying “I live here!” I took regular walks along the coast, usually up to and including Shanklin, sometimes going as far as Sandown, and once getting right up to the White Cliff at the northern-most tip of Sandown, where I discovered a nudist beach. 137 I sometimes walked in the other direction, one day getting as far as Blackgang Chine. I also walked over the downs and enjoyed the spectacular scenery. I spent most of the rest of my time reading novels and studying works on philosophy and economics. Within a few months it seemed that the depression had finally left me. After about eighteen months, I stopped taking oxytetracycline, and my face remained free of spots. I have not used oxytetracycline since then. I stayed in Ventnor for almost three years and for most of that time I was happy. The bruxism also abated, my teeth firmed up, the jowls almost entirely disappeared, and my face looked its old familiar self, apart from some bagginess around the eyes and a few more wrinkles. I counted myself free of depression and anxiety in 2007. The bruxism had not entirely left me, but it was no longer much of a problem. I think the recovery was just a natural process that would have occurred anyway. It may have been facilitated by me writing my autobiography but it would have happened, perhaps a little more slowly, even if I had not engaged in that work, given the absence of stressors. My reason for saying that is that despite my sincere attempt at scrupulous honesty, the autobiography was flawed because it was insufficiently critical. I was prone to dismissing views that I found disturbing, or defending views that I found comforting, in ways that were too easy. I employed what Karl Popper called “ad hoc stratagems” to avoid moving too far outside of my comfort zone. Of course, I did not realise that I was doing that. I was able to discover it and to revise my conclusions after rediscovering the critical rationalism of Popper, in 2008, and putting it into practice in reflection upon my own life and self. I think that, if I had applied Popper’s critical rationalist approach in March 2000, when I was trying to understand why I was devastated by an apparent rebuff by a woman, I would have been able to resolve my puzzlement then. I might thereby have avoided falling into the anxiety and depression, with accompanying bruxism, that blighted my life for seven years. I cannot repeat here, as a Danecdote, the analysis of myself and my problems to which I was led by my rediscovery of Popper. For one thing, it would be too long. For another it would involve a great amount of intimate personal detail about myself. And for another it would also require me to disclose some intimate details about particular friends and lovers that I am not entitled to publicise. For a brief account of the general Popperian approach and some references to works where more detail can be found, see Danecdote 43 WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP? (pp. 145-150). Within a few months of living on the Isle of Wight, my academic study began to consume more of my time than did the reading of novels. It was not long before I began writing articles with a view to publication in academic 138 journals or books. I had my first article published in November 2009. Five more were published in 2010, another five in 2011, one in 2012, eight in 2013, five in 2014, five in 2015, six in 2016, one in 2017, four in 2019, and three articles plus two books in 2020. I had discovered a new purpose in life as an independent academic. As a consequence, when I got the news in 2013 that I had bowel cancer, I suffered only a short period of shock and panic before accepting the situation and responding to it in a rational and constructive manner. I responded similarly when in January 2020 I learned that my cancer was terminal. If I had received such news in 2000, when I felt bereft of purpose, I guess I would have fallen into an abject condition of depression and anxiety. Instead of trying to make the best of my remaining time I would probably have wasted it, wallowing in self-pity. From the left: bother John, his daughter Rosie, and me, on the Isle of Wight, 2007. 139 41. WAR AND PEACE, AND MANAGEMENT Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace includes the following account of a battle between the Russians and the French. Part of the Russian army is in Austria, fighting the French. The general in charge of the Russian action is Prince Bagration. He receives, with impassive face, a report from an officer, Prince Andrew, detailing the start of the battle; then he nods and says “Very good!” as if Prince Andrew’s report was exactly what he was expecting. He makes his way slowly (on horseback) to the Russian cannons. One of his entourage, a Cossack on horseback, gets smashed by a French cannonball. Bagration looks around, sees what has happened, but looks away with indifference. When he reaches the cannons, which are firing loudly, he exchanges a few empty greetings with an artilleryman and looks thoughtful. He then finds the captain in charge of the artillery, who explains that, although he was supposed to be cannonading the valley, where the French were advancing, he was instead firing incendiary balls into a nearby village. “Very good!” says Bagration, who is looking determinedly at the whole battlefield. One of his officers points out that a French column is outflanking the Russians, so Bagration orders two columns to be moved from the centre to the right flank. The officer points out that by moving these two columns, the cannons will be left without support. Bagration, with his dull eyes, looks at the officer in silence. An adjutant arrives with news that one of the regiments is being overwhelmed by the French. Bagration nods approval, moves off and then sends an adjutant with orders for the dragoons to attack the French. In half an hour the adjutant returns to say that the dragoons are already in retreat and under heavy fire. “Very good!” says Bagration. “Prince Andrew listened attentively to Bagration’s colloquies with the commanding officers and the orders he gave them, and to his surprise found that no orders were really given but that Prince Bagration tried to make it appear that everything done by necessity, by accident, or by the will of subordinate commanders, was done, if not by his direct command, at least in accord with his intentions. Prince Andrew noticed, however, that though what happened was due to chance and was independent of the commander’s will, owing to the tact Bagration showed, his presence was very valuable. Officers who approached him with disturbed countenances became calm; soldiers and officers greeted him gaily, grew more cheerful in his presence, and were evidently anxious to display their courage before him” (War and Peace, Volume 1, Book 2, Chapter 17). 140 That account recalled to me some of my experiences in my last job. One of my responsibilities was to co-ordinate the production of performance information across all the departments of the organisation and produce reports for corporate management. I was an expert in the central systems used for this purpose (I had invented them) and I also provided advice and support to people in all departments about how performance information should be produced, evaluated, reported and acted upon. But, for the most part, I knew very little about the detail of what went on within the different departments, the technicalities of their systems, the constraints under which they worked to produce and use information, and the specific objectives and contexts of their different services. Yet I would often get requests for advice about just such particulars. I never declined to help; but, perforce, my assistance was of the Bagration kind. For example, one day a young woman came to see me about a problem she had in her department. She explained what the problem was and told me what she planned to do about it. As she spoke, I interrupted her from time to time, to ask a question. But I could not get enough information from her to be able fully to understand her problem or to propose a solution to it; and it would have been presumptuous of me to think that I could. I listened as she explained her proposed solution and I asked the obvious questions, which she had in fact already asked herself and answered. When she finished I just said something like: “Yes, that seems like the best thing to do.” She was visibly pleased and uplifted, and she left my office with a lighter step. As it happens, I had confidence in my answer because I knew her to be very bright, diligent, motivated and resourceful. But when she left, I felt pretty useless. What had I actually done? This sort of thing happened probably half-a-dozen times a year; and each time it left me feeling like a fraud. But I should not have felt that. None of these people who accosted me with problems I knew very little about were seeking a solution from me. They just wanted reassurance that they were on the right track. And they wanted reassurance from the ‘main man’ in regard to performance matters, which happened to be me. The purpose of this small part of my job was precisely to give that reassurance – and nothing more. But why did they need it? The answer, I think, is complex. Here is a start. People like to think that there is someone in charge, someone who knows where things are going and how everything fits together. And they like to feel that they are part of this grand plan and that the things they are doing are contributing to it properly. Because they do not understand the ‘grand plan’ (in fact nobody does) they feel the need of reassurance that they are doing the right things. They also want the approval of the man (or woman) in the know. When that young woman left me with a spring in her step, she was not 141 just pleased that she had received confirmation that her proposal was a good one; she was also pleased to think that I knew what she was doing, and she was pleased to receive praise for it. I think these natural dispositions and desires are important, being connected with belief in the existence (and goodness) of God, the attraction people feel for working in large organisations or other hierarchies, the allure of cults, political leaders and political parties, and the belief that government can solve our problems. But they also strike me as immature (which is not to say that we can ever fully rid ourselves of them). From the left: brother John, his wife Sharon, his daughter Rosie sitting on the lap of his sister Joy, and me, June 2006 (on the mend). 142 42. TERMINAL CANCER Jun. 2013. Diagnosed with bowel cancer, one tumour T2/T3. Aug. 2013. Accepted for TREC trial treatment in London. Sept. 2013. Week-long course of radiotherapy to shrink the tumour. Nov. 2013. Removal of the tumour by micro-surgery carried out by Lord Darzi. May 2014. New bowel-cancer tumour on liver. Jul. 2014. Laparoscopic surgery to remove tumour on liver. Oct. 2014. Started adjuvant chemotherapy to reduce the risk of more tumours. Apr. 2015. Finished the course of chemotherapy, much worn out! May 2016. New tumour in rectum. Jul. 2016. Major surgery (abdomino-perineal resection) leaves me with permanent stoma. Aug. 2018. New tumour in pelvis. Nov. 2018. Radical surgery results in me having to self-catheterise to empty my bladder. Nov. 2019. CT scan shows new tumour in pelvis. Dec. 2019. MRI and PET scans show seven new tumours in pelvis, abdomen and lung. Feb. 2020. Oncologist says that surgery is not possible, the cancer is now incurable but chemotherapy can slow down its progress. She estimated that I had 1-3 years left to live. May 2020. CT scan shows that the cancer is progressing rapidly: lots of new tumours including some on the lung. Options. 1. Take chemotherapy, suffer all manner of nasty side-effects, including hair loss, zombification and poor quality of life, slow the course of the disease, including all the pains, illnesses and other medical problems that it brings along with it and, provided I can tolerate the treatment (about which there is some doubt), die some time between December 2021 and June 2022. 2. Do not take chemotherapy, avoid the nasty side-effects, maintain a better quality of life but deteriorate more quickly with cancer and all the pains, illnesses and other medical problems that it brings along with it, and die some time between December 2020 and June 2021. 143 I chose option 2, as I have been on chemo before and I know how badly it impairs one’s quality of life. I am trying to focus on doing the things that I like best (writing is one of them). I have no ‘bucket list.’ Pretty much all of the important things I wanted to do in life I have done. It would have been nice, though, to carry on doing some of them for a couple more decades. It took me a long time to discover myself; but I got there about twelve years ago. The last ten years have been the best of my life despite the fact that seven of those years have been marred by the travails of cancer treatment. I am now just trying to pass the time as pleasantly as possible, despite it all. Postscript. My tumour was T2/T3, so really a bit big for the TREC trial. All the doctors in London, including Lord Darzi, advised me to have an anterior resection. But I could not believe that I needed to be cut up like that! I knew the risk but I wanted to go for the trial. To the credit of the doctors, they respected my decision (against their better judgement) and they let me enter the trial. It looks as if I made a mistake: I chose the option that leads to early death, whereas the anterior resection might have saved me. The reason my tumour was too big for the trial was the usual one. I had had occasional bleeding from the anus since about 2007. I looked it up on the internet (as one does). The first thing to come up was cancer. No, I thought, it cannot be that. There were half a dozen other possible causes, so I assumed it was one of them. None of them were serious. So I did nothing. And the cancer tumour grew... My message to everyone is: if you have a problem that might be cancer, get it checked out right away! 144 43. WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP? The first person who asked me that question was my friend David Driver. We were standing outside the door of our house in Latimer Road. We were either pre-school age or in our first or second year at school. The incident stuck in my mind because the question shocked me. It had never occurred to me before that I would grow up. I had assumed that I would always be a child, that there were parents, who had always been adults, and children who would always be children. Dave knew better; but he was ten-and-a-half months older than I, despite us being in the same class at school. Every child is asked that question from time to time. The question highlights a fundamental fact about human existence or, rather, about what it is to be a person. Each person has to discover for himself what sort of life will suit him. Other persons can make more or less informed guesses about the kind of life that will suit Danny; and Danny may be grateful for some of the suggestions. But whether or not a suggested kind of life is actually suitable for Danny can only be settled by Danny himself, and only by experience. If Danny attempts to live a kind of life but hates it or cannot make a success of it, then that kind of life is not suitable for him. Each person faces the same fundamental problem: to discover, by experimentation, who he is. Some people, it seems, never try to solve that fundamental problem. Instead they accept a description of themselves that has been foisted on them by others. They live a kind of life that they have been told is right for them. That is especially so in ‘closed’ societies, in which everyone conforms to inherited traditions. But even in ‘open’ societies, in which persons have the option of choosing for themselves which sort of life to live, there are many people who do not take that option. Either under pressure from others or due to their own timidity, they just conform to some social expectation. “Dad is a plumber, so I’ll be a plumber.” “Working-class kids like me don’t go to university.” Experimenting with kinds of life is a rational activity. It is a way of testing answers to the question of how one should live. But tests need to be carried out intelligently: the results of an experiment need to be analysed so that appropriate lessons can be learned. I have experimented with many different kinds of life; yet my life has been largely wasted because I often failed either to draw the lessons from an experiment or to ensure that I heeded those lessons in later stages of enquiry. I’ll give an example. As a teenager I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. I was adrift and, as a result, I was troubled and unhappy (nothing really unusual 145 there). In my last year at school, one of my teachers, Mr. Toms, collared me one day and asked me what I planned to do when I left school. I told him I had no idea. He suggested that I go to university: I would get a grant, so it would not cost me or my parents anything; it would give me three years to think about what I wanted to do; and it would give me a qualification that would give me more, and better, career options. It made sense; but the idea of me, who came from the old Notting Hill slums, going to university seemed utterly bizarre. Fortunately, when I spoke to my parents about it, my dad said that I should go if I wanted to. My mum said nothing. I suspect that she found the idea too outlandish to be considered. I went to the London School of Economics (LSE), which was a strange and novel environment for me. Yet, within a short time of being there, I felt at home. I loved learning about philosophy. I discovered a passion for enquiry. The company was congenial: I had around me people with whom I could discuss intellectual, abstract, things in an intelligent way; and the students were so civilised. For the first time I thought I knew what I wanted to be, namely, an academic. I decided that I would complete my first degree, then do postgraduate work, then become a lecturer. There are few people for whom being a lecturer would by itself be a congenial kind of life. Most people need a social (including sexual) life. In my second year at the LSE my social life was minimal and my sexual life non-existent. As a consequence things were going awry and my academic progress was suffering. I eventually recognised the problem and propounded a solution: I would continue in my aim of being an academic but in addition I would also be a party animal. From the start of my third year at LSE, I spent a lot of time in the bars, coffee bars and common rooms, and I went out of my way to introduce myself to other students in my hall of residence and to others I had seen around. That was all working: it was successful problem-solving by conjecture and criticism. But something destructive had crept in under the radar. Going to bars and parties meant drinking alcohol. I did not have great tolerance for the stuff, so one problem I had was to increase it, which meant drinking more. So I was working on that and, thus, often getting drunk. Then, without me noticing it, getting drunk somehow became one of my aims. When, eventually, I did notice it, I did not question it or criticise it: I just accepted that getting drunk was one of my aims. As a consequence a great deal of my time between late 1976 and early 1982 was given over to drunkenness. So much so that, in 1979, I abandoned my aim of being an academic. In 1982 I finally addressed the question of whether getting drunk should be one of my aims. The answer was plainly ‘no.’ Drunkenness is incompatible with the enjoyment of life. It numbs all the senses, impairing 146 one’s enjoyment of food, drink and smells. It weakens the powers of discrimination through sight, hearing and touch, thereby preventing one from perceiving the full beauty of anything. It diminishes or makes impossible sexual gratification. It also debilitates the intellect, debarring us from the specifically human pleasures. It can leave one unable to grasp the plot of a film or follow a story or appreciate the subtleties of a piece of music or even see a joke. Intelligent discussion or reflection is out of bounds and one also forgets everything. Further, a drunk can be a nuisance to the people in his or her vicinity, being a stupid, inarticulate, repetitive, clumsy bore, and possibly maudlin or offensive too. People tend to become exaggerated when they are drunk and the effect seems to be greater with people who are more persistently drunk. When I was a gross piss-artist (1980-81), all my mannerisms, behaviours and ways of doing things or saying things became overblown. I became a caricature of myself. Drunkenness is a state of dementia. It is accompanied by a sense of euphoria, but it is a form of incapacity in which one is incapable of enjoying so many things and cannot afterwards even remember what, if anything, it was that one enjoyed about the drunkenness. Mostly when I was getting drunk I was bored; and I kept drinking for something to do, thereby getting more drunk and becoming more bored. I therefore resolved that I would not get drunk again. Within a few months of that resolution, I went out and got drunk. I remade the resolution and broke it again several times over the next few years. The problem was that my need for a social life impelled me to meet my friends; but as all my friends were drinkers, I ended up drinking with them and getting drunk. I did try to stay sober on a few occasions but that did not work: a drunk is a bore to a sober person and vice versa. I needed a new network of friends who were not boozers; but I did not formulate that problem or try to solve it. I thus ignored the lesson I had learned, that drunkenness is a waste of life, and I failed to address the new problem that that lesson spawned, namely, how to acquire a new set of friends who were not drunkards. As a consequence, I was binge drinking until April 2002. My failing seems to have been one of not paying attention. I would happily go for months without a drink then I would get the urge to go boozing. Then I would go to the pub or telephone my brother and ask him where he was going that evening. But there was a conundrum there that I ignored. I was convinced that drunkenness was a waste of life and I was about to go out to get drunk. Why? A little thought would have suggested that I was not going out for the sake of the drunkenness. It was something else that I wanted that was connected with the drunkenness. A little more thought should have led me to realise that what I was missing was company. That would then have raised the question: can I have company without 147 drunkenness? The answer should have been obvious: yes, if I find a different circle of friends. The next problem would then have been how to meet people who are not drunkards. And so on. But I did not take thought as I should have done. If only I had been more rational! In April 2002 I went on a long-weekend binge in Belgium with some friends, drinking all those wonderful beers for which the Belgians are deservedly famous. When I got home I took a rest from boozing, as usual. Opportunities for boozing came up but I skipped them: I was not really interested. In July, a friend called to check that I wanted him to book me into a hotel for the annual Great British Beer Festival in London in August (I used to take a week off work to attend). I confirmed. But then a few days later I called him to say that I would not be going. I just no longer wanted to do that. I mean, I really wanted NOT to do that. And that was it. I still had no social life outside of boozing - except for work. And at that time the interpersonal aspects of my job were becoming more important to me, so I suppose I had some sort of social life there. For several months after giving up drunkenness I still had the odd pint or two of beer when I met friends or family. But then I lost the taste for it. I do not think I have had any beer since late 2002. I do drink wine, though. But just a glass (a quarter of a bottle) with my evening meal, most evenings. The wine complements the food and vice versa. But I never drink enough to get light-headed. Who wants that? My career history was a mess of trial and error, experiments that did not work out. My first job after doing philosophy at LSE was as a labourer. Then I went to Lancaster to study philosophy for a postgraduate degree (MA). Then I was a barman, then a distributor. I got a research degree in philosophy (M.Phil.) studying part time. Then I became a university teacher of philosophy (KCL), after which I got into management. I had to study for a postgraduate management diploma in order to progress in my career (I got a distinction). I noticed that the accountants were earning much more than I was, so I applied to CIMA to study to be an accountant. I did not attend college: I taught myself from books. I was given no time off work to study. I did a four-year course in less than two years and I sailed through the exams. I completed a record of practical experience and they made me a Chartered Management Accountant. I got a new job as an accountant in the midlands, which I held for nine years, by which time I had enough money to maintain myself comfortably (but not extravagantly) in perpetuum. So I stopped working. I had just turned fifty-one. I was soon dabbling in philosophy again and then I was writing articles for publication. Most of my jobs I enjoyed for a while then got fed up with them. But I am not fed up with (early) retirement. 148 I was over thirty before I became ambitious. There was certainly no stimulus at home to pursue any kind of ambition. Ambition was alien to my mum: her dream was for me to take over her father's fruit-and-veg stall in Portobello Road. I was a big disappointment to her. Although he had been ambitious himself, my dad never pushed any of his children to succeed. He was a firm believer that everyone should live their own life, find their own way, so he never tried to steer us in any direction. That is true of me, anyway; but I think it is also true of my siblings. My lack of ambition can be seen in my first job after LSE: a labourer! But when I set out to do something I am like a man possessed. I have only been able to carry it off, though, because I have some natural flairs, particularly numbers and analysis. Getting the accountancy qualification in double-quick time, without any teacher (just books), no time off work to study, and under very trying circumstances, was a challenge; but one that I felt sure I could meet. However, if I had failed any exams, that might well have been the end of it. Failing anything knocks the stuffing out of me. I really respect those people of lesser ability who, with dogged determination, try and try again. Many, perhaps most, accountants fail some exams at every stage and they have to re-sit them. It takes them many years to get the qualification. I feel for them and I respect them. In contrast, when I failed my driving test, I gave up. I cannot drive. That is not very admirable. Through the early 1980s I was poor and not motivated to change it. Any money I earned was boozed away. The change came after I got my M.Phil and did some teaching at King’s. The money at King’s was good and it opened my eyes to what was possible. That's when I started looking for jobs in management. Around 2008 I ‘found myself.’ I know what I need; I know what I like; to a large extent, I know what is irrelevant to my fulfilment. I made those discoveries through trial and error, by trying out different kinds of life and seeing how I fared. But, like everyone else, I was strongly influenced by inherited theories which, in my case, turned out to be wrong. So my trials were generally errors. I also often failed to analyse what had gone wrong, and when I did analyse, my reasoning was sometimes insufficiently critical in that I would often rest satisfied with an ad hoc defence of a position or view; so I often failed to learn lessons to inform future experiments, meaning it took me a long time to get where I needed to be. And then I got cancer... I say a lot more about discovering oneself through conjecture and criticism (trial and error) in two articles and in chapter 4 of one of my books: 149 ‘Voluntary Slavery’ https://www.academia.edu/4555466/Voluntary_Slavery ‘Freedom: Positive, Negative, Expressive’ https://www.academia.edu/20435616/Freedom_Positive_Negative_Expressi ve Freedom, Indeterminism, and Fallibilism https://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9783030486365?fbclid=IwAR0b9ZUEQdpXS3ZTUn47SOA1K17Rc2keoVEPoawL7rIcYPaDevaSlb55ds The book provides the most mature statement of the view and corrects some things that were said in the articles; but the two articles expound the view in more detail. Me (left) with earliest friend, David Driver, ages about ten or eleven. 150 44. THE END According to my oncologist, I will die some time between December 2020 and June 2021. My main concerns now are to tie up loose ends and to try to ensure that I make the most of the time that I have left. Writing another book is out of the question: it takes a year to write a book plus all the time required to sort out the publishing. I might manage another article; but even that will be difficult because cancer does not only subtract from one’s time, it also fills one’s remaining time with all sorts of coping activities. Thanks to cancer, pain is now my almost constant companion. I am consuming painkillers on an industrial scale (okay, I exaggerate a little). As a consequence, I am often sleepy and therefore unfit for much. Further, cancer leaves one more vulnerable to all sorts of other ailments. Since late August 2020 I have been laid up with deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism. I inject blood-thinner into my abdomen twice a day and I must spend as much time as possible with my legs horizontal. The two radical operations that I have had mean that sitting with legs horizontal is extremely uncomfortable and usually painful; so I have to lie down in bed. There is not much that one can do if one is lying in bed most of the day. I have a lap-top (as well as my desk-top), so I can go online. I can also read. But being sleepy, due to the painkillers, and lying in bed means that I often drop off to sleep. Further, the pain makes it difficult to concentrate, so even reading a novel is difficult. Part of the pain comes from lying in bed. The major operations I have had mean that it is painful for me to lie on my back, so I have to lie on one side or the other. But lying on my sides most of the day causes pain in my hips. Today I decided to read a Dickens. I am not keen on Dickens because of his cloying sentimentality and his simplistic conception of the moral universe. His moral world consists of good people, who are thoroughly wholesome, and bad people, who are scoundrels. In the real world every person is some or other shade of grey. Still, Dickens writes well and his stories are interesting and often funny. Since contemporary novels are, with relatively few exceptions, unmitigated rubbish, and since I have read most of the classics apart from Dickens, whom I usually avoid, reading a Dickens seemed to be the least worst choice. It was tolerable too. But as I finished the first chapter, I was attacked by a severe pain in my hip. I tried different positions but the pain would not go away. I got up and walked about; but that did not get rid of it. So I was back on the liquid morphine. After a while, the pain abated but it is now back. I cannot take any more morphine for a couple of hours but I can take some more paracetamol in about an hour’s time, not 151 that the paracetamol make much difference. But I will try to find a comfortable position and get back to Dickens... Four siblings. From the left: sister Maxine, brother John, sister Joy, and me, January 1980. 152 Appendix. My Popper: Finding Oneself by Trial and Error* In my final year at Christopher Wren Comprehensive School in Shepherd’s Bush, London, I became a Marxist. I studied numerous works by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and their commentators and critics. When I decided to go to university, I picked the London School of Economics (LSE) because it had the reputation at that time of being the most radical of the British colleges. In October 1974, I started at LSE in the politics (‘Government’) department. However, the Marxist works in which I had taken most interest were those on philosophy, written by Engels, Lenin and numerous commentators. As a consequence, I had developed a general interest in philosophical questions. After a few weeks at LSE I switched to the philosophy department. There I was introduced to works on logic and philosophy of science, including those of the philosopher Karl Popper. Popper’s philosophical views were in stark contrast to the epistemological and metaphysical views of the Marxists. For the latter, people are products of their circumstances, people’s ideas and theories are reflections or products of the material world, and scientific knowledge is derived in a passive way from observation, which is in turn regarded as a passive reception of data. In contrast, Popper insists that the mind is active and creative. We do not derive theories from observations, we use our imaginations to invent them; then, if we are scientific, we test our theories by looking for things that are inconsistent with them. That looking is not simply observation; it is often a matter of thinking up experimental tests. Also, when we observe the result of a test we are not observing passively, we are interpreting what is happening in the light of a theory we hold, possibly, but not necessarily, the very theory we are testing. Further, there is no such thing as induction, no way of confirming a theory: even the most successful theory may be refuted the next time we test it; but we do have ways of rating one theory as currently better than another, depending on how well it has stood up to criticism and testing so far. At first that sounded mad to me. I spent the whole of my first year trying to find fault with Popper’s ideas and arguments. But it was a losing battle. Bit by bit I came to acknowledge that Popper was right. A week or so into in my second year I read Appendix *x of Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery and that brought the process to an end: I rejected Marxist * This paper was first published on the blogsite, How Karl Popper Has Made a difference in Our Lives, https://ourkarlpopper.net/ on 6 October 2020. It is reproduced here with permission. 153 ‘dialectical materialism’ and I became a Popperian ‘critical rationalist.’ Despite that, I was still a Marxist in political matters. But, as a consequence of my critical engagement with Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Conjectures and Refutations and Objective Knowledge, I was steadily revising or eschewing the remaining parts of my Marxist outlook. At Easter of my second year at LSE I gave up Marxism. It is notable that at that time I had not read either The Open Society and its Enemies or The Poverty of Historicism. I read those a little while after leaving LSE and they provided further reasons for eschewing Marxism. The philosophy department at LSE was an intellectually stimulating environment. Students were encouraged to find their own path. Unorthodox views were open to consideration. But one had to be prepared to defend one’s views with argument. And critical arguments were supplied abundantly by the staff and other students. Open minds were fostered. There were, however, two problems. First, the department had a narrow focus. The main interests of the staff were in logic and the philosophy of science. Topics from the history of philosophy and from metaphysics were covered; but only sufficiently to give the student an overview of the traditional problems. In my third year, I had a girlfriend who was studying philosophy at Bedford College (in Regent’s Park). She was reading material on the theory of action, modal metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and functionalist theories of mind, all of which I found very interesting, but at LSE no attention was given to such topics. Second, the general view among the staff at the LSE philosophy department was that Popper’s work in the philosophy of science had been superseded by that of Imre Lakatos. As I had not read Popper’s Open Society while at the LSE, I viewed Popper as a philosopher of science; and as Popper’s Postscript was still unpublished (until the 1980s), the claim that Lakatos had superseded Popper in the philosophy of science had at least some plausibility. Consequently, I left LSE and went on to postgraduate study holding the view that I had no more to learn from Popper. In 1979, a personal crisis led eventually to me abandoning my postgraduate studies, returning to London and working as a barman in the public house of which my dad had recently become the manager. But philosophy would not leave me alone. From 1981, I gradually got back into academic study. I obtained an M. Phil. from Birkbeck and I got a job teaching philosophy at King’s College London in 1987. It had been my ambition to be a university teacher since shortly after I started at the LSE. But having obtained it, I no longer wanted it. One problem was that I did not much enjoy teaching. What I did enjoy was researching and writing. A more serious problem was that I had become disillusioned with the subject. The range of philosophical topics studied in most universities was much greater 154 than that studied at the LSE, but the way in which the topics were studied was very restrictive. There was an orthodoxy that went unchallenged that was an amalgam of positivism and ordinary language philosophy, both of which are jejune. Attempts to think outside of those limits were at least frowned upon and usually scorned. And efforts to think inside them required the patience to deal in trivia and the willingness to address spurious problems that were merely artefacts of the theories that constituted the orthodoxy. I found the activity stultifyingly soul-destroying. I turned my back on academic philosophy and pursued a career in management and accounting. After eighteen years in management consultancy and accountancy, having just turned fifty-one, I had made enough money to stop working. I went to live on the Isle of Wight to spend my time reading novels and taking walks along the beaches or over the downs. But philosophy would not leave me alone. I was soon buying and reading philosophy books, then writing down my thoughts, and then writing articles for publication. I began by working on the types of problem with which I had been concerned at the time when I abandoned the subject in 1988. However, when I learned that Popper’s Postscript had been published, in three volumes back in the 1980s, I bought a copy. That revitalised me. The interesting discussion, early in Realism and the Aim of Science, in which William Bartley is mentioned, prompted me to buy The Retreat to Commitment and to understand for the first time the full scope of Popper’s critical rationalism. It is not just a theory of science, it is applicable across the full range of enquiry. One enquiry in which I had been somewhat unsuccessfully engaged for almost forty years was that of understanding myself. I seemed always to have been, in some way or another, at odds with the world, or at odds with myself. I suffered a succession of personal crises after each of which I made substantial changes, sometimes very radical ones, to my mode of life. But, while a new mode of life was always started with hope, and while it often seemed that, this time, it would be successful, things had always eventually turned sour, causing me great dissatisfaction and sometimes another personal crisis. The kinds of life that I tried, but which failed to fulfil me, included: revolutionary, party animal, drunkard, husband (common law), barman, hermit, unskilled manual worker, tough guy, university teacher, administrator, binge drinker, management consultant, management accountant. In light of my reconnection with Popper’s critical rationalism, from around 2008, I could see in my personal history a pattern of conjecture and refutation. Each time I tried a new mode of life, I was making a conjecture about the kind of life that would fulfil me and I was testing that conjecture by trying to live that kind of life. Every conjecture I had made had until then 155 been refuted (by a personal crisis or a less destructive level of dissatisfaction). After each refutation I tried out another conjecture. Unfortunately, because I had not been explicitly aware that I had been engaged in conjecture and refutation, I had not analysed the refutations to try to discover why the particular mode of life in question did not fulfil me. Had I done that, I may have made discoveries about my nature that would have guided me in selecting future conjectures for trial. I might then have discovered myself more quickly and achieved a fulfilling life much sooner. As it was, it was only by undertaking a review of my life, after my rediscovery of Popper, trying to understand the successes and failures of my successive modes of life that, at the age of fifty-five, I finally came to understand who I am and what sort of life I need for fulfilment. I say a lot more about discovering oneself through conjecture and criticism (trial and error) in my book, Freedom, Indeterminism, and Fallibilism (Cham: Springer, Palgrave Macmillan). My home in Lincolnshire, 2011-2018. 156 157

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