I sat on the sofa with my dad and watched the Queen’s speech and a James Bond film I must have seen a dozen times before. He kept dozing off, although he wouldn’t admit it, and I wondered if there was anything else on. I had caught the train home to the bosom of my family on Friday night, the day before Christmas Eve, wedged in among the already drunk and soon-to-be drunk. I had to stand the whole way, and kept tutting to myself about various inconveniences. I didn’t know how people could do this journey every day. An hour and a half each way, just so your kids can resent you because they’ve grown up in some town where there’s nothing to do. Spending three hours a day on the train, five days a week, for fifty weeks a year. Was living in London really so bad that these people would go through all that just to avoid it? We were always a functional family. The dys- was never our style; we didn’t go in for crises, we just got on with things, got them over and done with as quickly and painlessly as possible. At Christmas our sense of familial duty would bring us around the dinner table. We sat there, waiting for it to end, pulling crackers and putting on party hats, because that was what you did at Christmas. Other people would have got drunk and had a blazing row, but we just did what we had to do. We sat there in near-silence, passing the salt and waiting for Tuesday, when the trains would start running again. Tuesday, when I could get away to a place where I wasn’t confronted with the horrible combination of what I used to be and what I was destined to become, to a place where I wouldn’t feel twelve years old, and could carry on being young. Once my brother and I had finished doing the dishes in the semi-silence of people who know each other well enough to have developed a certain mutual mistrust, I went for a walk. I needed to get out of the house for a while, and I needed a cigarette. I had forgotten what it was like to see the stars. There are a few reasons for living in a small town, after all. The sunset had been stunning, too; glorious swathes of orange and purple smeared across the sky, the undersides of clouds glowing gold like a painting of heaven. I sat on a hill at the edge of town and watched as the glow gradually disappeared behind the horizon. It was cold, but bearable. Once it got dark, I was shocked to be able to pick out whole constellations, to see the dome of the cosmos spread out above me. Living in London you sometimes forget about nature. On Boxing Day I endured the tortuous marathon of a dinner with Christine and Mike, who seemed to be my parents’ only friends. They would go round to each other’s houses once a month or so, to eat a big meal, have minor disagreements about who was going to drive home and how much they were allowed to drink, get tipsy and find incredibly dull things highly amusing. Halfway through the main course, I found myself wishing that my parents were dead. It wasn’t a brief instant of anger, but a cold thought that kept coming back to me, in spite of my efforts to smother it, to drown it under a wave of trivia. Horrified at my own callousness, it occurred to me that all of my problems would be solved at once if my parents were to meet with some unfortunate accident. I could move out of London and live in a nice big house with a nice big telly, and I’d have a car and a reasonably big chunk of money. I wouldn’t have to endure the weekly phone call where I tried to think of something to tell them about my week that didn’t involve drink or drugs, and they tried not to say how disappointed they were at the fact that I wasn’t a lawyer or a doctor. I’d no longer be on the receiving end of my mum’s nagging, and I wouldn’t have to sit and listen while my dad wittered on about some tedious inconsequentiality. I stopped myself. That was a terrible thing to think. Was I some kind of monster? This was my parents, my flesh and blood. The people who loved me. I didn’t want to think those thoughts. They made me afraid of myself. I didn’t want to probe too deeply into my own mind, but I couldn’t help it. I was insulated from the conversation, and had only my own mind to occupy me. We had already been through the customary discussion of my career progress, or lack of it, and now I had no further part to play in the conversation, not knowing anything about council tax banding or the local historical society. I had thought that as I got older, I would become closer to my parents, have more in common with them, but I was just beginning to realise the full horror of how boring they really were. Mum was burbling on to her tedious friend about some incident at Sainsbury’s car park, and Dad and Mike were discussing power tools. Suddenly, I felt unspeakably distant from the scene, as if I was set back a long way inside myself; as if I was some tiny creature inhabiting a human frame over which I occasionally had some degree of control. I felt the sudden need to go and get drunk. Properly drunk, like I used to when I was sixteen. Drunk enough that I wouldn’t have to face up to the fact that I would eventually turn into them. After dessert, I invented a phone call from a friend, and slipped out to the pub. Between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, I’d been down there pretty much every Friday and Saturday night. I must have spent hundreds, thousands of hours and pounds in there. I knew that it would be full of all the people I knew from school, all in the same position as me, all back at home, all unable to sit through any more low quality time with their families. As I approached it through the wind and rain, I could see the warm, welcoming lights shining like a beacon. I quickened my pace, and entered, waiting to be hailed like a returning hero. The same old faces were there. Everyone from school, from college, in the same little groups they’d always been in. By the time I’d got to the bar I’d said smiling hellos to five people, exchanged five potted histories of the past year in each of our lives. With each rendition, the history became more potted, the smile weaker. And then, as I stood on the edge of the crush at the bar, I realised I didn’t actually like any of these people. I had thought that some of them, at least, were my friends, but I realised now that they were just people who had been there at the time. Once I’d repeated the story of what I’d been doing for the last year a few times, I realised that I’d had exactly the same conversation, with exactly the same people, in exactly the same place, a year earlier. The only difference was that the plans were getting less ambitious as the responsibilities began to take hold. We were checking in, punching the clock. If we’d wanted to, we could have kept in touch. Even allowing for the number of times we’d all moved houses while we were students, it wouldn’t have been that difficult to stay in contact, but we hadn’t bothered. They were people I used to know. They weren’t part of my life any more. I had to get out of there.
Why is man alone subject to becoming an imbecile?
On the Origin of Inequality