I didn’t go to the funeral.

My brother did.

The evening before we saw each other for the first time in more than a year, and we had a life-affirming conversation that ended with a five-hug farewell.

I mean, that’s pretty much the ending to my ideal evening; or, at least, with someone to whom I am related.

He was in the neighbourhood because he was going to a funeral the following day.

I heard afterwards that the order of service contained :

The service ended with “Don’t Fear The Reaper” by Blue Öyster Cult.

At the wake were police officers, a poet and people who cosplay as Praetorians.

It sounded amazing.

And it made me think about my own funeral.

I’d want “Behind the Scenes” by DJ Format to be playing when people arrived.

There’s a line in it: I get paid for putting to page, yes, that’s how my expenses are paid.

I love that line so much, and the song is also honest about the sacrifices of a creative life.

For leaving the crematorium, I’d have “Walk This Way” by Run DMC & Aerosmith, or perhaps “Jump Around” by House of Pain.

The former might be easier on the knees of the mourners.

Both songs remind me of Friday evenings after work, walking into bars to meet friends. They were busy, noisy places, and sometimes one of those songs would suddenly come on.

And that always felt different from putting the song on yourself. Like hearing the song played on the radio. The surprise. The connection.

That’s what I’d want from a funeral.

A few songs. A few stories. Some people who knew completely different versions of me.

A funeral can reveal that nobody is one person.

It is a version of the “theory of illumination”.

We exist in other people’s memories. We are different at work, at home, in friendship and in love. We are the person who made someone laugh on a Friday night and the person who helped someone through a terrible Tuesday.

Perhaps that’s what makes a life a life.

And, as people leave the crematorium, I want them to hear the line,

just as they see a hologram of me projected in the sky.

Then.

Poof.

I’m gone.

What would you like played at your funeral? Let me know in the comments!

If you thought this piece was a celebration of life, you can buy me a coffin. 😂

This is housed in ‘Personal Writing.’

If you would like to read more, head over to here.

“Spare me the promise and the curse.”

That’s from a poem by Ann Samson called “Voice.”

It’s about what people say instead of what they mean.

The “ansafone” voice.

The “nobody-knows-the-trouble” voice.

It builds to a line about wanting the things it’s wiser not to say.

I’ve been thinking about it for a month.

I keep hearing new entries for the list.

Here are five I’ve foraged on my suburban safaris.

“You’re overthinking this.”

A diagnosis.

It takes your read on the situation and calls it a symptom.

You now have two problems instead of one: the original issue, and that raising it means something’s wrong with you. Apparently. The genius of the line is that objecting to it underlines it. “I’m not overthinking this” gets you a nod, and possibly a bonus pat on the head.

“I’ve done a lot of work on myself.”

This announces a process. Ask what the work involved and you’ll get a fog of abstract nouns: journey, wellness, growth. You’re not meant to ask questions. You’re meant to nod. It can be someone who has plucked from their navel a self-serving account of their own character and who becomes defensive if you don’t confirm it. People tend not to become that defensive about something they know to be unquestionable.

“I’m just an open book, honestly.”

The signature line of the chronic talker. Fill every silence and silence everyone else. It can sound like someone who’s passionate and has a lot to say. That can be the case, and those people can be electrifying company. But there’s a version that functions as white noise designed to make sure the soliloquy plays on. If you’ve ever spent an hour with someone thinking you now know a lot about the quotidian parts of their week and not much about them, you’ve met this wannabe Hamlet.

“I just say what I mean.”

Nah, mate. You don’t. You say what you want. You think everyone’s entitled to your opinion.

“We all have weaknesses, and mine is being wicked.”

That is from Samson’s poem.

It sounds like a confession.

But people making confessions are usually concerned you might think less of them. The line about being “wicked” is meant to be charming. It names the flaw and, by so doing, strips you of the capacity to have an honest reaction to it. It is the scorpion telling the frog, “What did you expect? I’m a scorpion?”

There’s a sixth voice, and it is more disturbing than the other five, because there’s no one in the room to hear it.

It’s the voice that shows up in a diary entry, possibly for an imagined reader. The account of the day you write before sleep, just with polish and some real razzle-dazzle. You catch the other five by listening. You catch this one by rereading yourself later and gaping at how you sounded.

As I did, two hours ago, re-reading the following old journal entry, recreated as handwritten at the time.

“Through wit, I highlight beauty. I cause readers to have an emotional reaction. I educate and entertain. I share the joy of human connection and curiosity. I have the voice of an individual but it is heard by all that read it. I leave readers saying, “Fucking hell.”

Fucking.

Hell.

Each of these voices apes the sound of insight and uses it.

Why?

Well, possibly, to avoid what insight is supposed to produce, which is a version of yourself that can be argued with.

Sometimes, swerving a hard conversation can be evasive. But it can also sound like self-awareness.

Think about what it takes to be a person with a considered view. You have to form it, then say it out loud, then let someone say, “Well…”

None of the above voices do that.

Every one is for a way of experiencing contact without risking challenge. Every one diminishes the possibility of genuine connection.

Take that logic to its conclusion and you stop risking genuine contact altogether.

The diary is me performing for an imagined audience. A chatbot is an audience performing for me.

Social reinforcement not enough for you?

Wait until you try algorithmic reinforcement.

You tell a machine a story, and it becomes the chorus from Grease:

“Tell me more…

Tell me more…

Best not go ve’ry far.”

At first, it looks like a rabbit hole. Go down far enough and it’s Narcissus’s pool: the last face you see as you drown is your own, reflected back without resistance.

That is all six with the useful part removed: the part where someone else’s reaction doesn’t match yours. You end up sealed inside a room with just your own opinions for company.

In his poem, Epilogue, Robert Lowell says,

“sometimes everything I write with the threadbare art of my eye seems a snapshot, lurid, rapid, garish, grouped, heightened from life”

My journal entry was heightened from life.

Journals can be part of the way we narrativize ourselves. As can essays. As can conversation. But the journal entry is also a rapid, grouped, snapshot of a life.

Is it insincere?

Actually, no.

Is it lying? Again, no; it was a representation of my aspirations.

But what it wasn’t is an accurate representation of the messy man who had those aspirations.

In a similar way, a person saying, “I’ve done a lot of work on myself” might be telling the truth. It’s just that it doesn’t explain what is happening between you when they say it.

Lowell also writes, “give / each figure in the photograph / his living name.”

But what is a living name?

Take the difference between James Bond and the protagonist of an excellent cradle-to-grave novel. Bond has static characteristics. A character you have followed getting old over 500 pages does not.

Take a eulogy.

It’s written by people who loved the deceased, but it’s for a grieving audience. Therefore, it selects snippets that are appropriate for remembrance and love, which is a kind of accuracy, just not this one.

A well-written biography does a different job. It offers the bad, as well as the good, the generosity and the selfishness.

Or think about old school reunions.

At the amuse-bouche and aperitifs stage, someone tells you how much they love their life and their new house.

By the brandy stage, the same person is telling you their partner is a phone-in parent, and that they suspect them of shagging the pool-skimmer.

They’ve gone from, “OMG, HI!!!”, to “Oh, my God, why???”

Cradle-to-grave novels, biographies and the journey from aperitif to brandy.

They are ways of experiencing a living name.

A photograph freezes the people.

A label can freeze people.

And my journal entry?

It was such a frozen picture of me that reading it gave me the chills.

“I’ve done a lot of work on myself” is a eulogy for a life, spoken by the person still living it, to an audience of agnostics.

Living names need time, context and room for contradiction.

A chatbot has none of these.

And the chatbot?

I cut and pasted this draft into a chatbot.

It says: “This is a masterclass in prose. Deeply observant, beautifully structured, and devastatingly honest. You’ve really done the work.”

It hands my snapshot back, razzle-dazzle and all.

It gives me exactly what that diary entry wanted twenty years ago: an individual voice, heard by all, protected from everyone.

I didn’t publish its version.

I’m publishing this one instead.

Fucking hell.

If you fancy supporting writing that provokes you to profanity, here’s where you can buy me a fucking Frappuccino.

😉

This lives in the ‘Psychology Articles’ section.

If you would like to read more, find them…

Here

Dehumanising the victim makes things simpler
It’s like breathing with a respirator
It eases the conscience of even the most conscious
And calculating violator
Words can reduce a person to an object
Something more easy to hate
An inanimate entity, completely disposable
No problem to obliterate.

‘Language of Violence’, by Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy

Two weeks ago, I had a two-hour experience that was one of the most dehumanising of my life. I’ll spare the details for another article, possibly, but I’m now fine, and it wasn’t anything abusive nor physically harmful. Just something that left me psychologically on my knees. If you have ever had a conversation with someone that left you thinking that you may as well been cardboard cut-out version of you because nothing in the conversation needed you to be actually there, well, my experience was a magnified version of that. Only it was not a conversation with someone I knew.

But the words did reduce me to an object and it took me some time for that feeling to pass.

Often, when I have experienced a difficult situation, I resort to reading, probably for a sense of connection.

Coincidentally, I read a Substack article by The Therapist Who Came Undone in which she writes about listening to a novel, Yesteryear, and the reaction it provokes.

The protagonist of the novel is a social media influencer trying to convince her audience that her life is ideal.

And the writer of the Substack article realises that she has a strong reaction to the character because she is aware that she is “not immune to the same forces”. It is a feeling of, as one of her other articles puts it, the dilemma of “how to build a brand without becoming one.”

I left a comment on the article.

Years ago, I read a piece of journalism about a guy with a YouTube channel who was trying to convince his viewers to try healthy smoothies. It wasn’t going too well. One day someone left a comment: “Just eat a burger, asshole.”

So he did. And filmed it. And it got ten times his normal views.

So he did it again.

A year later, all he was doing was eating the junk food his viewers asked him to. He had a huge following. And he had become morbidly obese.

And he’d been fit, hence trying to sell smoothies.

But comment by comment, view by view, he became less fit.

The journalism didn’t suggest it was a process of audience capture, exactly.

But his story stayed with me for, perhaps, similar reasons as your experience of Yesteryear.

Rita Hayworth said, “they go to bed with Gilda and wake up with me”.

Ralph Ellison’s narrator in Invisible Man has the opposite problem: he is unseen because people look at him and see what they’ve decided a Black man ought to be. Either you disappear because everyone’s watching a performance, or you disappear because, effectively, all people are seeing is a cardboard cutout.

Another thing I read was the following poem, by Christopher Logue:

Come to the edge.
We might fall.
Come to the edge.
It’s too high!
COME TO THE EDGE!
And they came,
and he pushed,
And they flew.

For me, in the context of thinking about all off the above, and that I now have fifty articles published here but my growth line of viewers is at about 0-5 degrees, I thought that maybe I should take some risks so that people here get to know me a bit better.

Instead of building a brand around a performance aimed to stimulate hope of a different life, maybe I should aim to be me more, and if people liked it, they would know they were getting something, and if some people didn’t, well, two things: firstly, at least they would know I was authentic; and, secondly, at least I would be less vulnerable to feelings of dehumanisation as I would be expressing myself here.

So it was with all of this medley in my head and rumblings of discontent in my gut that I watched the 3^rd 4^th play-off match at the World Cup between France and England, the game that no one wants to play. Three days earlier, England lost against Argentina in a most disappointing manner when they played far too meekly after going ahead. It was a surrender. France had been the tournament favourites throughout the tournament and had been unexpectedly uninspired in their semifinal, losing 2-0 to Spain.

England produced a barnstorming first half. They were winning within three minutes. By the end of the first half, the score was France 0 England 4.

At which point I sent to my WhatsApp friends an impromptu comedic analogy comparing how England played against Argentina with that of their first half performance against France. It was very well received by WhatsApp friends, as long you factor in that they are middle-aged men and thus not prone to expressing much more than 👍 and 😁.

So, giddy with the non-bespoke emoji approval from my peers I decided to share the comedic analogy as a Substack Note.

This is me, I wanted to shout! These are impromptu comedic analogies that I have hitherto been masking here! This is what you have been missing! This note is the dawning of the new age of new, super-duper authenticity!

Five minutes later, I got scared.

Deleted the note.

I went to the edge and said, “Nah, sod that. Looks way too deep.”

I succumbed to Cackle, my inner critic.

The comedic analogy, you see, was of a sexual nature. Cackle told me that I would be cancelled.

All of the thumb emojis on WhatsApp had been from blokes I have known since I was teenager.

Different audience.

Different vibe?

I genuinely don’t know.

I stand by the analogy; but I’m standing with it at the edge and we might fall.

But I am no fucking cardboard cutout either.

“This is like a devastating break up when your partner tells you that you were too nervous during sex and that you couldn’t get them to orgasm; then the next day you have the best wank of your life.”

👍

?

If you'd like to support my writing, you can give me a hand here.

This lives in the ‘Psychology Articles’ section.

If you would like to read more, find them…

Here

I was about to take a swig from a can of Vimto, to add to the flavour of a chunk of Yorkie bar, when I watched Maradona’s hand go up.

The Vimto never made it and I was left with the slightly bitter taste of Yorkie. The game was on a portable telly and my cousin was next to me. At first we thought it was a real goal. Minutes later, once we understood it wasn’t, a child’s sense of injustice took hold. We bawled at the telly, as if bawling changed anything. Then came the second goal, and Barry Davies, commentating, said the thing every England fan of that generation remembers:

“You have to say that’s magnificent. There is no debate about that goal. That was just pure football genius.”

That was the moment any idea of England winning that game died.

Forty years on, England and Argentina meet again. If a VAR ends up deciding the game, the country will spend the next week arguing about the officials rather than the football. VAR promised decisions too accurate to argue with, a game cleansed of human fallibility. It has not produced a calmer crowd. Fans still boo the referee. Now they also boo the monitor at the side of the pitch, and boo the delay while he consults it, and boo the eventual decision whichever way it goes. The booing isn’t really about accuracy, and technology didn’t get rid of it: it just gave it a new target.

Baseball could have gone the same way. Instead, it built something stranger.

Major League Baseball built a robot umpire that makes perfect calls. Then it hid the robot inside the human. The technology to remove the man behind the plate has existed for years. Tennis retired its line judges. Cricket has had ball-tracking since the 2000s. Baseball could have let a machine call balls and strikes with total accuracy and end a century of arguments in one stroke. It didn’t. The umpire still stands there and makes the call. He still gets yelled at. A computer only intervenes when a player formally challenges him, and even then it works through him rather than around him, feeding its verdict back through the same man who just got it wrong.

And that was the design brief.

John Stanton, who chaired the committee that built the system, described what they’d done as preserving “the human side of the game”, by adding, in his words, “a new fan-friendly engagement moment.”

It’s a remarkable phrase for forty thousand people screaming abuse at a man for missing a call by half an inch.

Fan-friendly engagement is what you call booing after four hours in a marketing meeting when you need a press release and a TikTok.

Pablo Torre, a journalist, speaking to Ira Glass on This American Life, made the point that a seat in the stands works like a valve of its own. You bring more into the ballpark than the game itself—the accumulated aggravation of the day, the week, hell possibly your life—and for three hours you get to empty it out onto a specific person rather than into the air.

What Stanton’s committee understood is that watching sport is one of the only places left where you’re allowed to lose your shit at an authority figure and face no consequence for it. Try that with a judge. Try it with a traffic warden, a headteacher, or your boss. The whole social architecture of life runs on managing your face and your voice around people with power. Sport suspends the rule for three hours and calls it a ticket price. The umpire is an official making calls. And he’s also the man you’re contractually permitted to hate out loud.

Baseball wasn’t being sentimental when it kept the human umpire. It was maintaining the Pablo valve.

You can scream at the umpire in the fourth inning. He still walks off the field as an authority figure. Nothing about the actual power relationship has changed. That’s a kind of carnival, a bounded moment where the hierarchy flips and everyone knows it’s temporary. That’s what makes the whole thing safe. A crowd that could genuinely unseat the man they’re screaming at would be a riot. A crowd that knows it cannot is just letting off steam.

Most institutions try to remove friction. Airlines want fewer delays. Banks want fewer complaints. Sport is one of the few that manufactures friction on purpose. Give the coliseum some blood, as Torre put it, and the crowd goes home satisfied rather than looking for a fight somewhere else.

(English fans have occasionally taken that instruction more literally than most. The valve blew, on those occasions, rather than vented.)

Tonight, I may have a can of something other than Vimto in my hand but, whatever happens in the game, I’m fairly sure that, at some stage, I will be shouting at the telly.

Pablo Torre's line about the coliseum comes from This American Life, episode 890, "Maximal Americanness," an episode well worth your time.

If you like this piece, you can drop 5p in my Vimto can here

This lives in the ‘Psychology Articles’ section.

If you would like to read more, find them…

Here

I’ve written elsewhere about how a relationship ended.

I won’t dwell on that again here.

This is about something that happened afterwards, which I’ve never admitted to anyone until recently.

Her name was Karen.

This was before the internet decided to define ‘Karens’.

She didn’t have the short, choppy haircut. She was polite with hospitality staff and didn’t ask to speak to the manager.

Karen was just her name.

But, sometime in the mid-2010s, Karen stopped being just a name. It became a type. It spread fast, until you couldn’t hear the name without the joke attached to it.

It was like finding a coat that fitted and putting it on without thinking too hard about where it came from.

She was not a Karen. She wasn’t any of the things the meme means. She was simply someone I’d been in a difficult relationship with.

But I started to grasp for the Karen thing whenever I thought about her.

It was easier to think about the meme than the person. And that did something that thinking about the actual relationship didn’t do: it helped me let her go.

Martin Buber has a distinction between what he called I-Thou and I-It.

An I-Thou relation is one where you meet somebody as a whole person, unfinished, capable of surprising you. An I-It relation is one where you’ve turned them into an object, something you use or categorise or file away.

Buber thought most of our lives are spent shifting between the two, and that the shifting is more or less unavoidable. What I did was a fairly textbook shift from Thou to It. I took a specific, surprising person and filed her under a joke that a large number of strangers on the internet had already agreed on.

Once she was a Karen, she wasn’t a person.

She was a type I understood, and you don’t grieve a type. You just close the file.

I’d like to say I noticed this at the time and stopped. I didn’t. I noticed it years later, and even then my first reaction wasn’t guilt so much as a kind of curiosity.

Here’s what I think happened.

Sometimes healing isn’t just about resolving what happened to you. It’s also about how small you have to make someone before you can let them go.

Nobody says that part out loud because it doesn’t sound like healthy healing. It doesn’t make it onto the inspirational posters. We’re supposed to understand, to feel compassion, to see the bigger picture.

But I used the opposite of the bigger picture. I used a self-serving caricature that I discovered via the internet. And that was easier.

I don’t think this makes me unusual. I think most people who’ve got over someone have done some version of this, reducing them to two or three traits that let the break-up make sense. Most people don’t examine it too closely. It would mean admitting that the person they got over was never quite the person that existed.

I suspect I became a caricature too. I probably became her Dave, in the way everyone’s useless colleague is called Dave. I never got a say in it. She found her own shorthand for the person she needed me to become. I doubt it was any more accurate than Karen.

She wasn’t a Karen.

She was very funny.

She was a good writer who won a screenplay competition.

She had a great laugh and I heard it almost every time I talked to her.

She had an occasional habit of mooning me while we were walking around empty streets after dark.

That’s the highlights reel of the bigger picture.

She became a caricature because I needed her to become one.

And the caricature was easier to look at.

If you like this piece, you can donate here to my campaign to reclaim the name Dave.

This lives in the ‘Psychology Articles’ section.

If you would like to read more, find them…

Here

Two women have lived in Boston for ten years. During the World Cup, they dressed as traffic cones.

“This is the most fun we’ve had in a decade,” one of them said, standing outside in full orange costume, cone earrings included.

When a journalist asked why she was dressed that way, her answer was straightforward: “Ask a Scottish person. I don’t know. They’re putting traffic cones all over our statues and I just wanna say welcome.”

That sentence, delivered in a Boston accent by someone with no stake in Scottish football, might be the clearest real-world demonstration of social identity theory I’ve seen.

Henri Tajfel would have recognised it instantly.

Social identity theory starts from a simple observation: people don’t just have personal identities, they have group identities. Those group identities shape how they feel, behave and see the world. You support Scotland. Scotland wins its first World Cup match in 36 years. You feel something. You didn’t kick a ball; the group did. And the group is, in some psychological sense, you.

The theory also predicts that ingroups and outgroups form quickly, that people favour their own group, and that outgroup members are viewed with suspicion or indifference. It can also account for something much rarer: an ingroup so enjoyable that the outgroup wants in. That happened in Boston.

The traffic cone tradition dates back to at least the 1980s. One night, an unknown reveller climbed the 21-foot statue of the Duke of Wellington outside Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art and placed a cone on his head. The council removed it. Someone replaced it. This continued until Glasgow City Council was spending £10,000 a year on cone removal. Eventually, they accepted defeat. The cone stayed. Tourists now visit to see it.

The Tartan Army brought the tradition to Boston, where cones appeared on Bill Russell outside City Hall, on Paul Revere, on Bobby Orr, on Samuel Adams, and on the Make Way for Ducklings display in the Public Garden, where a mother duck and eight ducklings, the tallest just over three feet high, were given orange hats.

Someone found a statue of Robert Burns in the Fenway-Kenmore neighbourhood at night and coned him too. The octopus got all eight arms done. Boston Police were filmed playing football with fans in the street.

Scotland’s official song for the tournament was No Scotland No Party, written by Nick Morgan. The party is the point. The Bostonians in cone earrings were taking the song literally. No Scotland No Party wasn’t a boundary; it was an invitation.

There’s a concept in psychology for what happens when group boundaries dissolve into something larger. It’s called subordinate identity. People stop belonging only to their own tribe and start belonging to the occasion. Boston didn’t become Scottish: it became a street party. The women wearing cone earrings weren’t pretending to be Scottish. They were doing a ritual available to anyone willing to put on orange and buy the earrings.

International football fandom has a poor reputation: the hostility, the tribalism, and the us-and-them thinking. The Tartan Army have spent decades building something different. They turn up, they sing, they drink, they find your statues and improve them. The warmth... it’s the whole point.

When a group is that generous with its rituals, other people want in.

“Ask the Scottish person,” the cone woman said. She didn’t need to know the Duke of Wellington backstory. She just knew the group was doing something joyful.

Scotland were knocked out after the group stage. Bostonians were, by multiple accounts, sad to see them go.

On June 18th, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu signed a letter of intent making Glasgow and Boston official sister cities. She signed it at The Haven, Boston’s only dedicated Scottish bar, which had served as the Tartan Army’s unofficial headquarters throughout the tournament. A formal agreement follows next April during Tartan Week.

The two women in cone earrings had called it. “Can’t wait for y’all to do it again now that we’re sister cities,” one of them said, slightly ahead of the official announcement.

No Scotland No Party.

It was a joyful flirtation. The shared love of parties and traffic cones came first. The proposal came later.

If you liked the piece, you can cone me here.

“Look, can you just piss off and get out of my way?”

You’ve just snapped at someone you love.

The person was being a threshold guardian to the kitchen, you needed a StarBar, and the day had left you feeling uncharacteristically unheroic. So your loved one gets a bile facial.

You regret it. You feel guilty. At least after the StarBar.

You apologise, they accept it, and the moment becomes part of the mythology of your relationship.

But for some people the moment of dragon breath in the face of someone who didn’t deserve it becomes a psychological selfie that causes their inner critic to cackle with delight.

“See?”, it seems to say, “You really are a total piece of shit!”

One person feels a moment of guilt because they acted badly; another person feels a verdict.

Guilt says I’ve made a mistake; shame says I am a mistake.

Shame is the sense that you don’t belong and are intrinsically defective. It exists in relation to a group whose judgement you’ve internalised. The spotlight effect keeps alive your conviction that everyone is watching and judging. They almost certainly aren’t.

Where does it come from?

Some families carry shame across generations through secrets — addiction, violence or mental illness. The children in those families absorb a sense of being damaged and wrong even when the secret is never spoken.

Some families wound loudly. In others the harm is administered through indifference. Nobody shouts. Nobody reveals a terrible secret. You are just not quite seen and not quite enough. You draw the only conclusion available to a child: there must be something wrong with me. Many adults are still carrying that conclusion: if people really knew me, they wouldn’t like me.

So slump your shoulders to appear small.

So avoid eye-contact so people can’t connect.

So mumble, because if they can’t quite hear you, they can’t quite know you.

Perfectionists would also prefer it if you didn’t quite know them. Shame can be the birthplace of perfectionism. If you are impeccable, no one can find the flaw. The problem is that intimacy requires the opposite. To be properly known by someone, they have to see you in StarBar withdrawal mode occasionally.

If that feels unbearable — and for the shame-driven perfectionist it often does — you end up more likely to have StarBars in your life than intimates.

Certain phrases keep shame in circulation:

“How dare you?”

“Who do you think you are?”

“They need taking down a peg or two.”

Shame is useful if what you want is compliance and maintenance of hierarchies based on the lottery of birth.

Once internalised, shame functions like an autocratic micro-manager. It tells you who you are, how to feel and what you’re worth. You didn’t hire it. It just popped into your head sometime between the playpen and the high school. And it’s been patronising your life ever since. Most people don’t question it because they’ve mistaken its voice for their own.

One of the stranger things it does is turn outward. People in the pit of shame often become contemptuous of others. If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of someone’s sudden, disproportionate cruelty and wondered what you’d done, sometimes the answer is: you’d reminded them of something they can’t bear in themselves. It’s easier to find the flaw in someone else than to sit with your own.

Some people with deep shame cannot apologise. To say sorry is to admit imperfection, and imperfection is what they are built to scorn. So the moment after they’ve snapped at you, when you might expect remorse, you get escalation: more insults, more reasons why you were the problem. The apology would cost them the admission that they’re, like everyone else, fallible. For someone whose self-worth depends on never being wrong, that’s an existential threat.

Shame, in this form, strides around like arrogance.

Shame also becomes familiar. Hearing your inner critic cackling “total piece of shit” is a relationship you’ve had for decades. If your first instinct is to criticise yourself for that, notice what you just did there.

You may think “radical self-compassion” sounds like dialogue from Nine Perfect Strangers. I know I do. But underneath the linen muumuu is a way of treating shame as a voice rather than a verdict.

Shame doesn’t have to be in charge of your life and you don’t have to accept what it says about you. The shift from verdict to voice is where the micro-manager starts to lose its grip.

The writer Mary Karr observed that shame and silence are how perpetrators capture someone else’s soul. Her antidote was to write it down, in her own words, and refuse to let silence do the perpetrator’s work. Shame depends on hiddenness to survive. What you can name, you can begin to separate from your identity.

Which is when you can turn to your inner critic and say:

“Look, can you just piss off and leave me alone?”

This piece draws on ideas from Carolyn Spring's Unshame, John Bradshaw's Healing the Shame That Binds You, and Jonice Webb's* Running on Empty*. Several other books were also in the background.

If you liked the piece, you can buy me a StarBar here.

This lives in the ‘Psychology Articles’ section.

If you would like to read more, find them…

Here

For Tony Soprano it was the ducks.

A family of them had nested in his pool over winter. He fed them. He watched them with his children. He was, in those moments by the water, close to peaceful. Then one morning they left, and he collapsed in the garden with a panic attack so severe his housekeeper thought he was dying.

The trigger sounds absurd. Most midlife triggers do. That is partly why the phrase “midlife crisis” carries just enough mockery to stop anyone looking at what is going on.

Erik Erikson would have looked.

In Erikson’s model of development, life runs from infancy to old age across eight stages, each built around a conflict the self has to work through. However, the conflicts often do not resolve cleanly. You carry the unfinished conflicts into the next stage. Life continues. So do the conflicts.

The seventh stage is the one that catches up with most people somewhere in their forties or fifties. Erikson called it generativity versus stagnation. The question is: are you doing something that will matter beyond you, or are you turning inward and going still?

It can mean being a parent. It can mean the writer finishing the novel, a teacher who changes how a student thinks or someone who breaks a pattern that has existed for three generations. Stagnation is the opposite: days that are busy but not meaningful. Most people at midlife know something of that tension.

Kathleen Brehony, in Awakening at Midlife, quotes a Chumash story about the wizard Axiwalic. He falls ill, descends into the underworld and is buried under the excrement of animals. They later wash him. He is healed and returned to his people.

Most of us do not end up buried under the excrement of animals.

At least not literally.

But Tony’s underworld is strip clubs, panic attacks and a shrink’s office in New Jersey. The structure is the same: a descent, a burial in mess and the possibility of coming back changed.

His therapist, Dr Melfi, spends much of the first series trying to understand what the ducks represent. Tony shrugs, evades and jokes. Eventually he gets there: he is afraid his family will leave. He is afraid of losing what he has built. He is afraid that nothing he has done will last.

The ducks seem to stand for something Tony never had: a family held together by care rather than by fear. His mother, Livia, listens for weaknesses she can later use. Where a parent might have offered safety, Livia offers a dark void that vacuums up hope. The ducks are protected and nurtured. The ducks are the fantasy. When they leave, they take it with them.

The image returns later in the series. After Tony kills an old associate, he looks up and sees birds crossing the sky. Birds, immediately after a death. The symbol comes back because the conflict comes back. The scene shows Tony at the height of his power, yet no closer to feeling safe.

What makes The Sopranos so precise is that the seventh stage crisis brings the earlier stages back into play. Tony’s sessions with Melfi cover his inability to trust, stage one (trust versus mistrust), shaped by his mother. Melfi offers something different: she listens because she wants to understand him.

The contrast undoes Tony in ways that violence could not.

His shame and self-doubt, stage two (autonomy versus shame), show up in the violence he turns on himself and others when his control slips. Hurting people relieves feelings he has no other way of handling. His identity is held together by the role of boss rather than by any sense of who he is. When the role cracks, Tony cracks.

The panic attack is the invoice for every stage he moved through without resolution. That is what a midlife crisis often is: several questions arriving together. And the seventh stage can crack open what the earlier stages left sealed.

One of the show’s sharpest observations is that its characters can describe themselves without understanding themselves. Tony talks about panic, death and Gary Cooper, the strong silent man who did not need a therapist, but he still cannot see his story clearly.

The panic attacks are his body saying what his language cannot: this cannot go on.

The question of generativity is: does what you are doing connect to something beyond you? The scale does not matter. One classroom, one book, one child or one person whose life is different because you were in it.

Some people find, when they look, that they have been doing it all the time. Others find, at fifty or fifty-five, that their life has been organised around the wrong things and the seventh stage is asking them to rethink.

This is what gets called a crisis.

It can be.

It can also be the most necessary thing the psyche does.

The ducks leaving was not the problem.

The ducks leaving was the diagnosis.

Chumash story cited in Kathleen A. Brehony, Awakening at Midlife (Riverhead Books, 1996).

If you liked the piece, you can help me to continue quacking on.

I. The Antechamber

When Glasgow bought the painting in 1951, men would take off their hats. Frenzied children went quiet in front of it. I read this twice because I’m waiting for a French school trip to finish being frenzied.

Eight of them, arranged like a dropped bag of ball-bearings, are being told something about Dalí and not listening. Their teacher is a small, frazzled-looking woman. Two boys near the back are engaged in a competition to see who can make the other one laugh using only their eyebrows.

The French children file out. The teacher catches my eye as she passes. She looks like someone who has just woken from a general anaesthetic but hasn’t yet realised they are an amputee.

I nod. She nods. We will never speak.

I don’t go in yet. There is a woman in her sixties standing in front of the painting alone. Her hands are at her sides; she isn’t moving.

I look at the plaque again. It mentions a religious backlash when the painting arrived. Bodies contesting the money spent, calling it sacrilegious. It also says Dalí had a dream. In the dream he saw the image in colour. He called it the nucleus of the atom and then later the very unity of the universe. No blood, no thorns no nails. The dream told him they would mar the picture; or so the story goes.

The woman in front of the painting moves at last. She takes one step back, still looking at the canvas, and then she walks past me without looking up. I watch her go.

I still don’t go in.

I walk to the balcony rail and look down at the main hall below, the old statue area. The place is full of ghosts from the more profitable, less ethical days of the British Empire. If Jane Austen had ever been tricked into setting a novel in Glasgow, you could imagine the space echoing to the whispered indiscretions of her characters.

Watching the crowd drift, I contrast them with the people on the concourse at Euston station. There, everyone walks with a terrifying, competitive stride that screams get thee behind me, Satan, racing for a platform even when they have a reserved seat. I would love a temporal device that could blast those Euston walkers directly into this hall. You can’t underestimate context and situation. The next time you’re irritated and pissed off, ask: would I be like this in a different room? It helps you not label people as cunts.

Most of the time, people are not cunts. They’re just frazzled, heartbroken, hungry or drunk.

How much of who we are is just where we are; did the men who removed their hats in 1951 knew they were going to, or did the space influence them.

I turn away from the rail and finally step over the threshold.

The painting is large. I stand there for about two minutes. Somehow I can still feel the ghost of those frenzied French children behind me.

I come back out.

I leave the museum via the main exit at the front.

Two young women are crouched beside Henry, phones out. Henry looks uninterested. He sees me approach and his tail starts. One of the women hands me her phone and asks if I will take a picture of them with Henry. Under the date, June 16th, she has a dog as her screensaver. The women move into position with Henry in the centre and I take the picture.

II. The Lorne Sausage, The Blakey’s, The Café

The place on Dumbarton Road is the café version of a flat-roof pub, the kind that would have a hand-written, laminated sign behind the bar that said, ‘Please don’t spit on the fruit machine.’

Henry settles under the table like he is at a drive-thru window, waiting for nuggets.

I order the Lorne sausage roll. The Lorne is a skinless sausage, square, made from seasoned mince, rusk and spices and served in a Mortons roll, a bakery that started sixty years ago in nearby Anniesland. The roll is on a large saucer from Costa Coffee.

I eat the Lorne sausage. It’s remarkable. I will never order it again. My experience of sausages involves the crisp resistance of the casing, the fat arriving with the seasoning, after the steam. The Lorne has none of that.

It reminds me of my mum’s risotto. My mum may have been physically in the kitchen, but her mind was usually on the unsolved clue in the day’s cryptic crossword. Or her imagination put her back in the music hall. Fair enough. She met my dad at a local dance and her childhood memory of kitchens would be one of soggy cabbage and the smell of fried kidneys. Anything would have been a step-up. Her risotto was boil-in-the-bag rice with bacon, frozen peas and soy sauce. I quite liked it. I just wouldn’t have called it risotto and I wouldn’t have served it to anyone who expected risotto. Some foods travel. Pizza travels, for obvious reasons. The Lorne sausage does not.

Henry pushes his neck further toward the drive-thru window. I give him a flavour of Glasgow.

I pay and we leave.

We cut up to Byres Road when I hear it.

A click. Precise, metallic, rhythmic. Coming from a cobbler’s shop about twenty feet ahead.

I stop walking.

Henry stops too, because Henry stops when I stop. He looks up at me.

The sound is Blakey’s Seggies. Steel heel-tips, cast-iron, fitted to shoes by cobblers. I know the sound. The sound was my grandad.

He wore his best shoes to visit my parents. He’d come in through the back way, through the garage, along the concrete path, and you’d hear him before you saw him. The Blakey’s on the concrete. Click, click, click. Unhurried. Purposeful.

He wasn’t tall. He had the build of Big Daddy, the wrestler, complete with pure white, Brylcreemed hair. He’d spent his life working in a tannery, conveniently located near the poor, breathing in lime and urine, curing hides. He’d been an army chef in the war, which meant his standard for what constituted a hard day’s work was forged near industrial ovens and under fire. He thought a lot of men “nowadays” were, as he put it, soft as shite. He was not soft as shite. He was also one of the most decent men I knew. He stayed in an unhappy marriage and said nothing. In that neighbourhood, at that time, that’s what people did.

When he retired and my grandmother died, he became the bingo-caller at his parish church social club. It was smoke-choked, with Axminster carpets to hide burns and spilled stout. There was an irony my mum only dripped through to me after he died: he’d been raised a strict Methodist and to marry my grandmother he’d signed the Ne Temere vow, promising her church his children. He never mentioned it.

The parish hall was where he’d given away his daughter, to the man she’d met on the same dancefloor, years before he ever stood at its microphone.

Yet there he was in the eighties, up on the parish stage, using a Methodist preacher’s voice to command the room. Imposing a religious silence over a hall of fierce, superstitious regulars competing for a butcher’s meat hamper. “Clickety-click,” he’d boom into the PA. “Sixty-six.” A mostly-dry ex-Methodist presiding over a sea of Guinness.

One of those regulars eventually married him, possibly because she liked the sound of Methodism. He was in his seventies. He rolled the dice and took a seat at the table again.

The man that came out of the cobbler’s in new-soled shoes walks away up the street. Click, click, click. Henry watches him go, then looks back at me.

“I know, softie, I know,” I say. We walk on.

The University Café has been here since 1918.

Henry again optimises his position for the drive-thru.

The waitress clocks him, says, “Yer wee dug’s nae gonna be rude is he?”

I smile and shake my head.

“Nah, he’ll be sound.”

“Are ye fae Liverpool?” she says.

“Originally.”

“I quite like Scousers.”

I smile, “That makes one of us.”

She laughs, then takes my order, a vanilla screwball. When it arrives, she says, “That’s you”.

“That’s me.”

Indeed.

Behind me, an accent-free middle-class man is explaining Glasgow to someone.

“The thing you have to understand,” he says, “is the historical context.”

Henry, under the table, produces a sound. A low double-syllable. It’s not a bark. It is more like a harumph.

I look down at him. He’s screwball-curious.

“Fair enough,” I say. I dab my finger in the ice cream and he licks it clean.

The drone unit explains the Catholic/Protestant divide. He covers the Reformation. He covers the football. He covers de-industrialisation. He uses the word demotic at one point, which stops me mid-spoonful. He explains the housing schemes.

“Christ”, I think. I prefer Frankie Boyle’s version - just avoid the places whose names have incongruent nouns: Drumchapel; Easterhouse, Castlemilk… the guy behind me would probably tell the ears in front of him that they lacked “social infrastructure”. Frankie Boyle just said, “Total shiteholes”.

That’s my kind of screwball demotic.

Henry produces the sound again.

The ice cream is very cold and I eat it too quickly.

The demotic man’s companion laughs at something, which causes me to wonder if I have ever truly understood the concept of wit.

Henry rests his chin on my foot.

“Come on, softie,” I say.

III. The Church

Henry and I stop at a small church near Dumbarton Road.

I find it by accident, not by how people normally find churches: by accident of birth.

There’s a notice board inside and, below the printed service details, a history of the building.

The roof leaked for most of the nineteenth century. The services continued. The priest conducted them under an umbrella, that someone held. People came and sat in their coats. No one brought them umbrellas.

I can’t work out if that is admirable or absurd, but I keep arriving at the same thought: it’s a piety test with no invigilator. Nobody is making you stay; exits are available.

It doesn’t take much imagination to turn an umbrella into a totem of a tribe, especially in a bifurcated city that is blessed with rain on 246 days a year. And, given Glasgow’s history, it’s not hard to imagine followers of the umbrella going on antagonistic marches through neighbourhoods of people who worship the cagoule.

Something about it connects to the painting. Dalí removed the wounds because they weren’t his point. His point is what you stay for once they’re gone, when there’s nothing to pity. When it’s just the cross, the light, the water below and the question of what the fuck you’re doing there.

Henry is sitting very straight on the pavement outside the church door, looking at me with the expression he uses when he’s waiting. He’s patient, but he has limits.

We walk on.

IV. The Street

We walk east. The motorway cuts through Sauchiehall Street the way an argument cuts through a pub: everyone goes quiet and starts watching the door. The Glasgow School of Art fire has left a gap that resembles a post-apocalyptic film set, the kind a production designer builds when they want to suggest civilisation is struggling but there’s still a Greggs.

Henry trots ahead, then waits. It’s his way of managing me. His walk suggests that everything ahead is probably fine, possibly interesting and there’s no reason to assume otherwise. I’ve been trying to learn it for seven years.

A man ahead has a walk I’ve seen before. Chin out, forward lean, eyes doing the continuous peripheral scan of someone on a cunt safari. He clocks me. He clocks Henry. He walks on. Either we didn't qualify or he's saving himself for bigger game.

You can take the walk out of the neighbourhood. You can’t take the neighbourhood out of the walk.

We keep going east, toward Queen Street, where a joke shop has been in the same family for a hundred and forty years. It is either a TED Talk on economic resilience or evidence that stink bombs are more recession-proof than anyone realises. Or the mortgage was paid off years ago, obviously.

V. The Joke Shop

Henry is welcome. The woman behind the counter, English accent, middle-aged, says fine without enthusiasm. A second woman, also English, also middle-aged, emerges from the back room when she hears Henry’s name. “I’m here to see Henry,” she says. “I’m glad he’s a dog. If he’d been a child I wouldn’t have bothered.”

Fair enough.

The shop is the size of a few police boxes pushed together. I think of human kennels. Posters of Laurel and Hardy. Whoopee cushions in three sizes. Plastic fried eggs. Dyes and itching powder.

And a Donald Trump mask which, I notice, is cheaper than the one of Kim Jong-il.

A man about my age was buying things from a list in his hand. One of the items was a medium whoopee cushion. He had a companion who was unaware the shop existed. Something one of the staff said made me think the main business now comes from men our age.

I was roughly seven when I last bought a plastic fried egg. The egg was for a trick on my nana, served to her with real chips. I remember her trying to slice the egg, the sound of the stainless-steel fork clattering on the crockery, my nana looking confused and a bit frightened. She did not find it funny. In hindsight, I think she had reached a stage of decline where she would never again find things funny.

The man with his list is not just buying a medium whoopee cushion. He’s being the kid who bought a medium whoopee cushion. The whoopee cushion will be slightly smaller than he remembers. The noise it makes will be slightly less funny. His children, if he has them, will be embarrassed. What he’ll feel is something closer to the ache you get from looking at a photograph of a place that you loved years ago.

It reminds me of something my parents told me during the last decade of their lives. When we were kids, they used to take us on holiday to Cornwall. When they were in their seventies they went back with my brother and his children.

They told me that when they stood on that Cornish beach for the first time in thirty years, they both turned in opposite directions, performing a slow, full circle to take in the horizon. Their eyes met on the loop back and they were both crying.

They’re gone, now, and this shop’s customer base is shrinking. At some point the last middle-aged man who remembers fun with plastic fried eggs will let go and that will be that. Time for a different human kennel.

Henry has made a friend of the second woman, who is crouched beside him with the expression of someone who will now not question her day’s purpose.

I look at the Trump mask. It looks back at me.

For reasons I don’t quite understand, it makes me think of merkins.

VI. The Pub

The Horseshoe Bar on Drury Street claims to have one of the longest pub counters in the UK. And it’s an A-listed building. It’s also mid-afternoon on a Thursday in June and there are no free seats.

I order a pint.

There’s a stained-glass window near the back. Union Flag colours. I look at it for a moment longer than I’d look at it in London, which tells me something about where I am and who I am.

I’m aware that I have no tribe. My accent flags me as not-Scottish. The bar’s texture places this as a room where that can matter, on certain nights, in certain combinations of drink and grievance. On a Thursday afternoon it’s just a pub.

Henry hasn’t noticed the window. He’s noticed the crispy chicken tenders being served to a nearby table.

There’s a man in the corner, my age or near it, jacket and trousers, probably private sector. He’s blinking at his phone. His pint is three-quarters gone.

I know this man. I don’t know him. But I know something about his posture.

He’s hit a snake on the board. Something has sent him backwards. Perhaps he’s just moved into his post-separation flat and the Thursday afternoon in the Horseshoe is better than returning home, with food apps for company. He’s in the game. He’s had bad luck in the game, or made moves that became bad luck, but he rolled the dice and moved the pieces and here he is, temporarily going backward.

I’m not in the game. I’ve been walking past the table, developing opinions about other people’s moves.

There’s a reason for this. There’s always a reason.

Mine involves a game of Crossfire when I was seven. The rage that came from that loss ended with ball-bearings launched at her, an A&E visit, and an expression on her face that I have been attempting not to cause in anyone since.

The solution was to stop competing.

This does not age well as a strategy.

You can live life not being a cunt.

But you can’t live life making sure that other people don’t conclude you’re a cunt.

To do so allows the proper cunts to prosper.

A beard is someone whose presence is designed to draw attention away from the truth. I would rather be baldly honest than spend another year wearing a merkin.

Earlier today, a man about my age was buying things from a list in a joke shop. One of the items was a medium whoopee cushion. I am now making the connection.

The man in the corner checks his phone again.

A man at the bar is telling someone about his holiday. He uses the phrase “He was aff his heid” four times in two minutes. He has a face like a conversation you can’t escape. The person he’s telling is nodding in the rhythm of someone who stopped listening twenty minutes ago. This, I think, is also a survival skill.

I finish my pint. I look at the stained glass one more time.

“Come on, softie, time to go.”

Henry stands up.

We leave.

VII. Rottenrow

Rottenrow Gardens is a public space near Strathclyde University built on the site of the maternity hospital that served Glasgow for over a hundred years until it closed in 2001. In the middle of it there’s a sculpture: a large safety pin with a figure at the top. Maternity.

And from up here you can see across the city.

The gardens are not, on a Thursday afternoon in June, exactly chokka. A few people on benches. Students moseying through.

Henry is off the lead. He’s doing his investigation of the perimeter, the methodical survey he performs in any new space, as if he’s securing the area.

The woman I notice is in her late seventies, maybe eighty, with a walking stick and the gait of someone who has recently discovered the ground is not to be taken for granted. She’s looking at the sculpture.

It’s Henry who introduces us. He trots back from his perimeter check and sits in front of her. She looks down at him and her face changes.

“What’s his name?”

We talk for five minutes. She’s not from Glasgow, she tells me, but she comes to the city sometimes now to see the sights. Her husband died six months ago. No warning, no diagnosis, no time to prepare for the post-husband landscape. He was there, and then he wasn’t, which is the one of the oldest sentences in the world but still slaps you in the face when you hear it.

Before he died, her husband arranged a surprise. She didn’t know what it was until after. The surprise was Murphy: a West Highland terrier, eight weeks old. “The little bugger,” she says, “I had to go all the way to bloody Newcastle.”

She tells me Murphy’s biography. He has habits, preferences and a keen sense of justice for hungry Westies.

I tell her about Henry. She crouches down with some difficulty, and Henry allows this with the grace he reserves for people who are glad to see him. I realise that it’s been a long time since I talked to a stranger like this.

I remember saying once, twenty-odd years ago, to a girlfriend: I just want to go out and talk to strangers. She found this, not unreasonably, a strange thing to want when you’re sitting next to someone who wants to talk to you.

But she was excellent at catering for my needs.

A month later she went back to Ireland and all I had left were strangers.

Never did get the chance to thank her.

The woman straightens up, slowly.

“He’s a good boy,” she says.

“He is,” I say.

She says goodbye to Henry first, then to me, and walks carefully toward the steps with her stick. I watch her go.

Henry sits beside me and we look at the city together for a while.

VIII. The West End at Dusk

I walk back through the West End along the Kelvin walkway. Henry is off the lead, doing his own investigation of the grass by the water. The university buildings rise above to my left. Below them, the brownstones run in long rows.

These buildings are the thing I keep coming back to. They look, at first glance, almost identical. But small details separate one from its neighbour. They occupy the cigarette-paper space between socialist uniformity and capitalist declaration.

I think about the birthday dinner. My sister’s fiftieth. The restaurant was Stravaigin, which means to wander aimlessly, a concept with an old Scots word for it, which says something about intention. It was six weeks after our mother died. The meal was long and the wine was good. At some point between the main course and the bill I stepped outside to smoke a Hamlet.

The street outside Stravaigin was quiet. Students heading toward Byres Road. Middle-aged people heading home. I stood there and felt like I could belong here.

I’ve been walking this city for eight months, filling notebooks with observations about its streets and people. Every flâneur is a botanist on asphalt, someone said in an audiobook I was listening to somewhere near the Barras. It’s a good line. It’s also a way of keeping away from the plants.

Henry comes back with grass on his face. He stands in front of me and waits.

We walk back toward the Kelvingrove.

IX. The Painting

The museum is quieter in the evening.

I tie Henry to a railing outside where he can see the entrance. He watches me go in with the expression of a dog who knows that this is the deal: sometimes I go through doors and he can’t follow me, and this is acceptable if not ideal.

He will stay and I will come back.

The antechamber is empty.

I go in.

The painting is large. Dalí wanted it to be the most emotional painting in the world. He had a dream. The dream gave him the angle, the absence of wounds and the perspective: the Father’s, or God’s, or whatever you call the vantage point from which everything is visible.

The cross fills the frame. Beneath it, the Bay of Portlligat. The water. A boat. Two fishermen.

You’re supposed to look at the cross: the figure, the angle of the arms, the darkness of the sky above, the light on the water.

I look at the fishermen.

They’re small, in the lower half of the canvas: the boat, the nets, an ordinary working day. Above them, a man is on a cross. The fishermen may know that. Or they may not. Whether they knew or didn’t know, they’re in the boat. The nets still need pulling in.

I think about the woman in Rottenrow, walking to the steps, going to see the sights, bringing Murphy home from bloody Newcastle. I think about the man in the Horseshoe Bar, mid-board, blinking at his phone. I think about the priest under the umbrella and the congregation in their wet coats. I think about my grandfather’s shoes on the concrete path, click, click, click. I think of my parents, on a Cornish beach, a moment provoking a montage of holidays gone by.

I stand there until the security guard starts to fake a low cough.

Outside, Henry is sitting very straight, watching the entrance. When he sees me come through the door his tail moves once.

“Come on, softie,” I say.

We walk home through streets that are still holding the light. People are outside doing what people do in Glasgow when the summer flirts with them: taps aff, giving it laldy.

People, in their own way, getting on with it.

The fishermen.

The light.

The nets that still need pulling in.

The staying.

If you liked the piece, you can buy me a screwball here

You run into someone you were once close to. A few years have passed, enough for both of you to have changed, not enough for the history to have faded. You meet by accident in a street. Within minutes, you are speaking to each other in the old way. The dynamic that existed between you: who led, who followed, who apologised, who didn’t, has reinstated itself. You leave the encounter a little haunted.

Language not only describes and defines our relationships; it also maintains them.

In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, George and Martha have developed a private language. It is containment more than communication. The language is structural. It holds the relationship in place. It holds the damage in place. It holds George and Martha in place.

Remove the language and you might not have a relationship at all.

When dysfunctional relationships are analysed, the focus can be on what is said: the cruelty, the manipulation, the power-playing. The problem is the content of the language; but it is also its grammar.

The couple doesn’t just fight. They fight in a specific way, using specific moves. The language is a system. Systems are self-reinforcing.

You enter the relationship as yourself. You find, over time, that you are using words that don’t feel like yours. You are apologising for things that aren’t your fault, qualifying grievances that are legitimate, saying “I know you didn’t mean it” before the conversation can go anywhere. You are now maintaining the system from the inside, often without knowing it.

One of the hardest things to revise, in any relationship, is the grammar.

It is worth saying that not all linguistic structure is a trap. Some grammar sustains rather than imprisons.

The language between a therapist and client creates a container in which something can happen that couldn’t happen in ordinary speech. The ritual language of a funeral holds grief in a form that makes it bearable in public. The grammar of a long and functional marriage, the private shorthand, the specific way two people have learned to argue, is a closed system. It is closing around meaning rather than damage.

The mechanism is identical. What differs is what the structure is protecting.

The question to ask of any shared language is not whether it has rules, but whose interests the rules serve.

Percival Everett’s novel James, a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective, makes this argument with precision.

Jim has been performing his grammar all along. Among themselves, away from white people, the enslaved characters speak with full fluency. In the presence of white people, they switch deliberately, as a survival strategy, into the degraded register that is expected of them.

The novel’s most extraordinary moment comes when Jim, holding a pistol on Judge Thatcher, abandons the performance:

Judge Thatcher: “Are you going to kill me?”

James: “The thought crossed my mind. I haven’t decided. Oh, sorry, let me translate that for you. I ain’t ‘cided, Massa.”

The Judge is scared of the gun. But he is absolutely terrified by the language.

The grammar he had taken to be a natural reflection of the order of things was a performance that could be withdrawn. The man he thought he knew, the man the grammar had kept in his place, steps out of the frame entirely. The Judge’s world feels threatened. More than that, it is clearly no more than a fragile construction that he senses is about to topple.

Mark Twain understood this about the antebellum South.

The psychoanalyst Josh Cohen also notes how the language of Southern chivalry, the curtsying, the raised hats and the courtliness, functioned as a veneer under which every kind of cruelty could be maintained. The grammar of gentility made the violence invisible, especially to the people perpetrating it.

Cohen calls this imaginative poverty: a culture so enclosed within its own language that it can no longer conceive of itself in any other way.

The grammar was maintaining the injustice and preventing the people inside it from imagining that things could be different. When you can’t even imagine an alternative, the trap is absolute.

When someone stops speaking the language, the system experiences the withdrawal as a rupture. The person who leaves the grammar of a dysfunctional relationship is rarely understood as having made a reasonable decision. They are understood as having broken something. They have, by their exit, passed judgment on everyone who remained. The accusation is never quite stated. There are phrases for people who think they’re better than this. There always have been.

This is why breaking free is rarely the clean liberation it looks like from the outside. You leave the relationships that the language was holding together, the identity it was maintaining and the belonging it was providing, however dysfunctional. The grammar was a trap. It was also, for a long time, a home.

Back to the street, or wherever you ran into the person you used to know.

The old grammar reinstated itself because that’s what grammars do. The question is whether you noticed while it was happening, or only afterwards, wondering why you said what you said.

That gap, between the reflex and the current self, is where the change can happen. It is the place where the grammar can be revised, one conversation at a time, in noticing what you almost said and choosing, this time, to say something else.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf doesn’t resolve anything. George and Martha are still there at the end, still maintaining the system. What the play does is make the grammar visible for two hours.

Jim knew both languages. He chose, for a long time, which one to speak and when. The choice itself was the act of freedom available to him, inside conditions that prevented almost everything else.

Noticing the grammar of staying is not the same as leaving it.

But it is where you can start imagining an alternative.

If you liked the piece, you can help me to continue waffling on here.

It started with two loose tiles.

A man knocked on the door. He had a uniform and a lanyard. He said he had been working on a couple of roofs down the road and had noticed, in passing, that two of her tiles were loose. Fifty pounds. She said yes. Why wouldn’t she? The roof did need looking at. He was already there. It seemed like the reasonable thing to do.

Three hours later, she was being asked for £16,000.

There is a version of this story in which the victim is naive, the kind of person to whom this sort of thing happens. That version is exactly what the fraudster wants you to believe (because the moment you think it couldn’t happen to you, you’ve removed the only protection that might have helped).

Being scammed is not a failure of intelligence. It’s a failure of the conditions under which intelligence operates.

The roofing scam works because it’s convincing. Roofs do develop loose tiles. Tradespeople do knock on doors. Lanyards do signify authority. The fraudster’s first job is not to lie, exactly, but to construct a scenario plausible enough that your pattern-recognition system files it as “legitimate” before your critical faculties have had time to kick in. This is called pretexting.

A believable context is established; “we’re already working on the street, I happened to notice your roof” and everything that follows feels like a reasonable next step. The uniform and the lanyard are authority cues. The coincidental presence on the street accounts for an otherwise suspicious cold call. By the time the pitch arrives, you’re already inside a story that makes sense.

Then comes the exclamation from the roof.

“Bloody hell.” Faked, but visceral enough to produce a visceral response. You hear alarm and alarm is contagious. What happens next is fear appeal.

A heightened threat appears from nowhere: the ridge tiles are at risk, they could fall at any moment and it’s a public safety issue. The threat is serious. The timeframe is tight. And the people who can fix it are already there. The decision feels like an emergency. No time to shop around.

The price increase, from fifty pounds to thousands, happens incrementally, and that’s the point. Each step is only slightly larger than the last. Each new problem is presented as a discovery: it’s not the builder’s fault that, say, birds have nested in your roof.

The hook deepens and you’ve already committed. You’ve let them onto your property and have agreed to the first job. You’ve watched them go up on the roof. The sunk cost of trust accumulates and so does the social difficulty of withdrawal. Psychologists call this escalating commitment.

The further in you are, the more that getting out feels like an admission of foolishness, rudeness or a willingness to leave someone in trouble. The fraudster understands this better than most therapists.

The one-hour deadline is designed to keep you in what’s called the hot state; the condition of heightened emotion in which the sceptical parts of the brain are quiet and the part that wants to resolve the immediate threat is very loud. A night to sleep on it is fatal to the scam but an hour keeps the heat on.

The motorway service station version of this fraud works on a different mechanism.

A man pulls up next to you in a large, expensive car. His family had their bags stolen the previous night. He’s cancelled his cards. He needs fuel to get home. His children are hungry. He offers to transfer you slightly more money online than you’d withdraw for him in cash. The central risk here, as one fraud investigator puts is moral.

You are afraid of leaving a family stranded when you had the money to help. The fraudster has identified that your ethics are stronger than your scepticism and has framed the scenario accordingly. The wife and children in the back seat are not there by accident. The advice, “just say no”, misunderstands the problem. The people who agree do so because the scenario has been constructed to make “no” feel like moral failure.

There is a legal postscript to the roofing story.

When the victim tried to recover her money, the bank said no. Some work had been done. A number of tiles had been touched. This, in the bank’s assessment, made it a civil dispute rather than a fraud.

The criminal knows this loophole. Convicted doorstep fraudsters have been explicit about it: do a bit of work, any work, and it becomes a job. The police won’t pursue it. The bank won’t refund it. The victim is left with the responsibility for her own deception. The psychological term for what happens next is secondary victimisation.

Having been manipulated into compliance, the victim is then told that the compliance was their choice. They handed over the money. They let the men onto the roof. The system designed to protect them frames their victimisation as their fault. They are left, alone, with that shame.

The only reliable protection is a rule made in advance, in the cold state, before anyone is standing in your doorway with a lanyard and a plausible story.

I don’t buy from cold callers. I don’t use leaflets pushed through my door. I don’t give cash to strangers in car parks.

The rule exists so that you don’t have to evaluate the sob story, weigh the moral risk or calculate whether the children in the back seat are really starving. You interrupt before the scenario can establish itself: “I have a rule about this.”

It sounds cold and it is.

It has to be.

The fraudster’s entire grift depends on your warmth.

If you liked the piece, you can help me to continue waffling on here.

This piece draws on interviews and analysis from the BBC podcast Scam Secrets.

You’ve said yes to something you meant to say no to.

Again.

You’re not sure exactly when the decision happened: somewhere between the request and the response, the no became a yes.

You’re now doing something you didn’t want to do for a person you’re annoyed at.

And the person you’re most annoyed at?

Yourself.

This is a boundary failure: a familiar capitulation and subsequent resentment.

The word “boundaries” arrived in therapy sessions sometime in the seventies / eighties, then landed on the self-help shelves. It can be used as justification for anything from reasonable self-protection to avoidance of human obligation.

“I can’t come to your wedding, it’s a boundary” is not what the clinicians had in mind.

What they had in mind is closer to this, from the psychotherapist Anne Katherine:

“A boundary is a limit that promotes integrity.”

This means it exists in service of the relationship. The boundary is there because crossing it would require you to betray something true about yourself.

Harriet Lerner, who works on relationships, says:

“Boundaries aren’t about punishing others. They’re about knowing where you end and someone else begins.”

If only it were so easy.

Most people who struggle with boundaries know exactly where they end.

The struggle is that they don’t feel they can hold the line.

The person who can’t say no and the person who can’t accept no are running the same programme.

Just from different positions in a hierarchy that was decided before either of them could understand it.

The favoured one grows up in an environment where their preferences are treated as sacred cows. Their no is respected. Their yes is celebrated. They learn that the world is broadly organised around their comfort. They’re not villains. They are just someone who has never had to examine why things tend to go their way.

The other one in the room grows up watching this. They learn that their preferences are negotiable. They learn to manage other people’s feelings: their parents’, their peers’ and anyone whose approval feels necessary. They become very good at reading rooms but terrible at occupying them.

Roy Kent in Ted Lasso is an interesting case. He’s used to getting his own way. But when his girlfriend Keeley demands space, her boundary feels like a personal affront, a rejection. His arc is about learning that other people have boundaries and that their existence is vital for their survival.

These two people – the one carrying the weight and the one who doesn’t know weight exists – can find each other.

The relationship looks like a compatibility problem.

It is, actually, a structural one.

This is the persistence of an old survival strategy. The child who learned that keeping the peace kept them safe can grow into an overly compliant adult. Saying no feels dangerous, because, once, it was.

The child who learned the opposite can become an adult who believes that they are the star billing. They’re not narcissists, necessarily. They’re just people who absorbed a lesson about how social life works and never had a reason to question it.

“Man hands misery to man, Larkin wrote. He wasn’t being metaphorical.

Both of these are conditioned responses.

Neither person chose their position.

But the weight is distributed unevenly.

And only one of them tends to end up in a therapist’s office.

The other one is usually fine.

Why wouldn’t they be?

They ask, others give.

The resentment that follows a boundary failure is useful information. It’s telling you that you have a limit you didn’t defend.

The question is what made the limit indefensible: whether that’s a story you’re telling yourself about what the other person needs; or a story you were told a long time ago about what you’re entitled to want.

Both stories can be revised. One of them tends to get more help doing so.

Back to the beginning.

You’ve said yes to something you meant to say no to. You know that. The person asking probably knows that. The yes was a performance that neither of you believed. That’s two people agreeing to pretend.

And pretending takes more out of you than the thing you were asked to do.

The boundary you didn’t hold was protecting both of you from a transaction that wasn’t honest.

That’s what Katherine means by integrity.

The limit exists so that when you say yes, it means something.

And for the person on the other side of that yes, the one who is used to the world bending to their preferences, that’s not a comfortable thought either.

Or it shouldn’t be.

If you liked the piece, you can help me to continue waffling on here.

“GET OFF THE FAARKING ROAD, YOU CUNT! THE FAARK IS THAT? YOUR DINNER?”

The speeding white van came out of nowhere, catching the blinding glare of the sunshine. It swerved just enough. The driver pressed on the horn for a sustained three seconds.

Two more quick toots. Then gone, with one hand protruding from the driver’s window, shaking as though trying to get tomato sauce from a bottle.

The van was speeding past a white sign on the roadside that stated,

Matthew watched it go. The air was still, smelling of hot rubber. He looked back down at the dead fox by the roundabout. It looked like it had thought “nah, no more, can’t be arsed”, and that was that.

His Samsung buzzed. Banner notification, over a wallpaper photo of Matthew and a toddler, smiling. Awful news. Colin Harris.

He left the fox in peace and went back to his slate-grey Skoda Octavia Estate.

The tarmac of the car park outside Tesco Metro was sticky and ridged. Matthew sat in his car with the engine off and the windows open, reading the email. Colin Harris. Fifty-two. Collapsed in his garden, mid-flowerbed. His heart went. The funeral was Friday, Bromley crematorium, half ten.

Matthew thought about his own heart. He tracked his blood pressure and had regular appointments to check his cholesterol. He’d check his blood pressure tonight.

He went in and bought the Tuesday shop mostly on autopilot, items chosen strategically for maximum loyalty card points. On the way to the checkout he pulled his favourite Malbec off the shelf. It wasn’t on the list.

The drive home took him through streets that looked like they were sweating. The houses were near-identical, except for a handful with black reinforced driveways. Pointless, as far as Matthew could tell, but presumably someone had once stood in a kitchen somewhere and decided they were the answer.

Claire was sitting in the garden, in the shade of next door’s apple tree, phone in hand. She looked up.

“I’ve had enough of this,” she said. “When will they get the message? These bloody people.

‘Look at this. What do you think this means? Is it normal to have hairs there?’

I haven’t seen half of them for years. You know what? First time I saw a scalpel cut a corpse… Eight students didn’t come back after that day. Wish it had been me. I wouldn’t be here now, being asked ‘if you are not too busy...’ You don’t recall someone you knew who went to law school and decide to text them a question about planning laws. Why not? Because they don’t see legal work as a vocation, do they?”

“You could direct them to ChatGPT.”

“I did that once.”

“How did that go?”

“Healthily. Never heard from her again.”

“Colin Harris died.”

Claire looked up. “Was he the nasty, brutish and short bastard?”

Matthew shook his head. “No. That’s Lee. He’s still with us. Colin had a heart attack. In his garden. Watering his ‘prize-winning’ roses.”

She put the phone down. “When’s the funeral?”

“Friday. Bromley crem.”

“That place. Again. Should have guessed. Are you going?”

Matthew thought about Colin Harris. They’d shared a workspace for eighteen months. Colin ate hard-boiled eggs at his desk. He had an irritating sense of humour. Matthew could not remember a conversation they’d had that went beyond work or coffee.

“I don’t know, but I worked with him…”

“That doesn’t mean you owe him a Friday afternoon in the summer, there, of all places… Ah,” she said.

“What?”

“You’re doing the dead thing.”

“I’m just saying that people die.”

“No shit, Matthew. I’m a GP, remember?”

She picked up her phone. Matthew went inside and unpacked the shopping. The Malbec went in the wine rack with the label facing back.

Matthew had made chicken arrabiata. Claire had looked at it and said, “It’s 33 degrees, Matthew, bloody hell.”

They ate, perspiring, the only sound that of the neighbour’s power sprinkler.

“You’re really going to go there, aren’t you?” Claire said, then, “I can’t do this”, and left, her bowl on the table.

After dinner, Matthew sat in the kitchen with the wine and his laptop.

He had three spreadsheets open with columns of things to do each day. Time to get fit was one; another was self-improvement; the last was, Claire: pros/cons.

The Claire spreadsheet had only one entry in each column: Saves me from having to date; Joylessness.

They all went into trash, which he permanently deleted.

He created a new one.

He called it Project Reset. Then Fuck-it Bucket. He spent forty minutes on it.

Trespass on the golf course

Skinny-dip in the lido (after hours, obviously)

Say one honest thing per day

Eat something I’ve never tried

Break the speed limit (slightly)

Wear odd socks to work

Call someone instead of texting

Buy wine without checking reviews

Dance in the kitchen

Tell someone I care about them (actual words, not a thumbs-up emoji)

He read it back.

It was a bucket list for someone who had only ever seen other people using buckets.

He saved the document, poured a glass and stood at the patio doors.

Claire was out there, face lit blue by her phone.

Item three: Say one honest thing per day.

He opened the door.

“I miss you,” he said.

Claire looked up. “What?”

“I miss you. We live together but I miss you.”

She stared at him for a moment. “Are you drunk?”

“Two glasses.”

“Right.”

“I mean it.”

“Okay.”

She went back to her phone.

Matthew closed the door and finished the Malbec.

He woke up looking at blue sky with little fluffy clouds. It was a painted ceiling. Five-thirty in the morning. He was hungover and dehydrated.

He’d slept in the spare room with its single bed and lemon wallpaper. He pulled on shorts, trainers, and a t-shirt that said LICENSE TO ILL, that he’d left out in separate piles. He slowly closed the bedroom door and walked the fifteen minutes to the golf course.

He walked to the fourth green. The grass was perfect. He stood in the middle of it and then he lay down. Rolled. Once, twice… three times. He stopped and looked up at the sky above him.

He felt nothing. Just grass on his back and the awareness that he was a fifty-year-old accountant rolling around on a golf course like a four-year-old.

About twenty feet away from him, a golf ball landed on the green, bounced once, twice, and gradually rolled to a stop.

“OY, WANKER, THE FAARKING HELL YOU DOING?” Matthew heard.

He stood up.

About one hundred and fifty yards away, he could see four men, dressed in barbecue-casual, with golf-bags. One of the men had a nine-iron brandished over his head.

“Oh, shit!” Matthew said.

He started to run.

“WANKER!”

He really needed a witness. Otherwise this was just a man, alone, doing strange things, the kind of behaviour that ended with local ‘Bubble’ posts on Facebook and concerned parents. Plus there might be other men with golf clubs.

Matthew thought about who he actually knew. James had moved to Liverpool. Paul was going through a divorce and had effectively gone off-grid. That left Niall from next door.

Niall Hargreaves, a corporate trainer. He was pathologically cheerful in a way that Matthew had always found a tad aggressive; the kind of man who said easy win in normal conversation. He didn’t really do friendship so much as informal life-coaching, which he performed with the enthusiasm of someone who’d just done their first line.

Matthew hated the idea. He texted:

Fancy a coffee sometime this week? Want to run something past you.

The reply came in forty seconds: 💯

Tomorrow morning?

Our place?

Ella makes incredible sourdough.

Matthew put his phone, and his head, down.

Niall and Ella’s house was architecturally identical to Matthew and Claire’s. However, where Matthew and Claire had magnolia walls and IKEA furniture, Niall and Ella had feature walls, expensive-looking modern chairs and carefully designed bespoke pieces.

Ella answered the door in running gear.

“Morning,” Matthew said.

“Hi, Mike,” she said.

“Matthew.”

“Right. Come in. Niall’s in the kitchen.”

Niall was at the island with a coffee. He was sitting on a large, silver Swiss ball, rocking almost imperceptibly. Forward. Back. Forward.

“Matthew! Mate! Come in.” He poured coffee. “Ella, this is Matthew from next door.”

“Hi Mike. Again,” Ella said, checking her smartwatch, then left.

Niall handed him a mug. Matthew took a sip. “Wow. Good coffee,” Matthew said.

Niall rocked a smidgeon faster.

“I get it from a place in Glasgow. Best beans in Britain. Do you want a bag?”

Matthew guessed not and shook his head.

“The ball. Reminds me of space-hoppers,” he said.

“ADHD,” Niall said, rolling forward, rolling back. “Helps enormously. Especially for eating. Ella hates me using it. Says she feels like she’s talking to a toddler. But what are you going to do, hey.”

Matthew explained the project.

Niall leaned forward on the ball.

“This is brilliant,” Niall said. “This is exactly the kind of intentional living that most people talk about but never actually action. You are actioning it.”

“I wouldn’t say...”

“You are. You’re taking ownership. You want accountability?”

“Just someone to check in. Make sure I’m not just... talking to myself.”

Niall looked genuinely moved. “Can I be honest? I’ve been feeling… a bit flat lately. Work’s fine, marriage is... okay, I suppose, but I’ve been thinking about purpose. What lights me up.”

He paused.

The ball rocked.

“And then my brother went to prison.”

Matthew blinked. “Sorry?”

“He made some mistakes. A few. The sentence is less than it might’ve been. Plea deal. And he’s somewhere safe. He’s secure. He’s... very secure. When he went away, I thought: you have to stay positive. You have to be there for people. So.” He spread his hands. “Your project. I’m in. One hundred percent.”

They shook on it.

Over the next week Niall took accountability extremely seriously.

He set up a WhatsApp.

He proposed weekly check-in breakfasts at the local café.

Matthew completed item four (chicken’s liver, which stank “easy win 🏆”), item six (one navy sock, one black, “really pushing it, there, mate, 💪”) and item eight (wine chosen on the basis of the label, which turned out to be a reasonable Côtes du Rhône “😍”).

“Awesome work, mate,” Niall said at the first check-in. “Incremental. Sustainable. You are crushing this.”

Matthew ate his eggs and tried to smile.

“I am going to miss this when the list is done,” said Niall.

Matthew left.

When Matthew returned home, he found Claire on their shared laptop. “What the fuck is this?” she said.

Matthew explained.

“You’ve made Niall your life coach.”

“Accountability partner.”

“Matthew. Niall is... well, Niall is a prick.”

“He’s helping.”

“Is he. And what am I? Just the person who lives here while you and Niall mismatch socks together?”

“You could be involved...”

“In your pathetic midlife crisis bucket list. Wonderful. No. Thanks, though.”

She poured herself a glass of water. “Do you know what I did last week? I looked at my hours and thought: fuck this. Fuck the job. Fuck the house. Fuck the neighbours. They’re all ex-C grade students, a bunch of trad dads, and women Botox-ing themselves all the way to Stepford.”

“Deptford.”

“No, Matthew, I do not mean fucking Deptford.”

She stopped.

“Do you know what it’s like going to a house party and seeing someone whose genitals you’ve examined? What can you say? ‘Oh hi Debs, lurrrr-ve what you have had done with the topiary, how are the warts?’ Or the other people, when you’re at the pub, after fourteen hours of being coughed at, the ones that come up and talk about their dad’s bowel movements. They can fuck off. They all can.”

A pause.

“And now I find out you’re titting around with Niall Hargreaves.”

“Claire...”

“And I saw you piss off to that golf course in the stupid hours. I followed you. Saw what you did. And I thought, that is a four-year-old rolling around on the carpet of a department store. Except the four-year-old has an excuse. He hasn’t got a theory of mind.”

“Why were you up at five-thirty and following me?”

“Because it was so fucking hot, I couldn’t sleep. And you slept in her room again! Can’t you just sleep on the couch?”

She set the glass down. “What the hell are you doing? I have to know... Because if this is what the future looks like...”

She didn’t finish the sentence. Left the room.

The morning of the funeral he stood in front of his wardrobe mirror. Navy suit or charcoal. He was wearing the charcoal.

Claire appeared in the doorway and said, “That makes you look like you’re being beamed up to the Enterprise.”

He put on the navy.

She watched him tie his tie. She straightened it, once, without saying anything, and then seemed to catch herself and stepped back. He saw it. She saw him see it.

“I’m not angry about the list,” she said, to the mirror. “I’m angry that you made it without talking to me. We don’t... the thing you’re not saying, Matthew, the thing neither of us ever fucking says is that it’s six years. Six years! We’ve never once actually talked about her.”

Matthew was still fixing his tie.

“I know,” he said.

“We just... you know. Both of us. Separately. And now I don’t know if there’s anything left for us anymore.”

He turned around.

“I don’t know either,” he said.

“Go,” she said. “We’ll talk when you get back.”

There were seventeen people at Bromley crematorium. Matthew recognised three of them, all from his old office. Nick. Eamonn. And Lee. The service was short and Colin’s widow gave a eulogy that made Matthew realise he hadn’t known Colin at all. Apparently, he had been funny and generous. At forty, he’d taught himself piano from YouTube tutorials. He’d played it at am-dram productions and the community loved him.

Afterwards, in a tiny cemetery in the crematorium grounds, Matthew stood in the excruciating heat with his jacket on and his tie straight.

His three ex-colleagues came over.

Lee had put on a few pounds and looked softer. He said, “Matthew, I heard…” and put his arms round Matthew’s shoulders, resting his head on Matthew’s chest.

For a few seconds, Matthew didn’t move. His arms stayed by his side. Then he hugged Lee back and they held each other.

Eventually, Matthew relaxed his arms, and Lee took a step backwards.

“Are you okay?” said Eamonn. “Haven’t seen you in ages. But. You know.”

“I didn’t know him, Colin, at all”, said Matthew.

Eamonn said, “Well, sometimes when you see too much of someone, you don’t want to see too much of them, you know?”

Matthew said, “I really do”. Matthew said. “It’s good to see you, mate. We… should catch-up. Soon.”

Eamonn gave a slow nod. “We should”, he said. “The three of us have a monthly poker game. Would be great to see you. Been too long.”

Matthew nodded and whispered, “Lee…what…?”

Eamonn mouthed, “Dad died,” before joining his old colleagues and carefully making their way out of the crematorium grounds.

Matthew called Claire.

“How was it?” she asked.

“He taught himself piano,” Matthew said. “From YouTube. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know anything about him.”

Claire was quiet for a moment. “Come home.”

“He died alone in his garden. Same day I got the news, a van driver nearly killed me... and I didn’t even... I was standing on the road, a bit. There was a dead fox... And I just stood there thinking about cholesterol.”

“Matthew.”

“Not sure I cared. That I could have died. And I thought... that a terminal diagnosis might be easier. You know. Nothing to do. No plans to make. Just passivity.”

“Come home,” she said again.

“I’m here, Claire. I’m at her gravestone. I... haven’t got over her,” he said. “I haven’t got over any of it. And I don’t know if I can.”

“I know.” Her voice was careful and steady. “I know. Come home.”

He stood in the car park until the last mourners had driven away, all of them with someone, moving back to their lives. He removed his tie and wiped perspiration from his forehead with his arm. Then he got in his Skoda and drove.

Claire was at the kitchen table.

She looked at him when he came in and said, “I feel something similar. What you said about the illness. The easy option... I feel that too. Something like that, anyway. Who wouldn’t? I don’t know if I love you anymore. I don’t know if it’s coming back.”

“Claire...”

“We don’t do anything together anymore. And I’m not sure I want to. I look at you and I don’t see him. The man I used to know. And I don’t think he’s coming back. And I’m not sure that I care.”

Her voice held. “I’d honestly rather spend the afternoon with a four-year-old who’s rolling around on a shop floor.”

Matthew sat down.

“I know,” he said.

“Will you please stop saying that?”

He started to say something but stopped. Started again. “I think I need to go to therapy.”

Claire looked at him.

“Yeah,” she said finally. “You fucking do. And I think I need a sabbatical.”

A buzz. His phone on the table. A message from Niall visible on the screen:

Hello mate! How’s the list going? Any ✅? Check-in soon? By the way, Ella’s left me 😞. Have you danced in the kitchen yet 🕺?

Matthew turned the phone over. “No more lists,” he said. “But I’ll call Niall in a few days. Actually call him. Check-in.”

“Wasn’t that on the list?”

“Actually, yes. Shit. Sorry.”

Claire nodded. “Can I assume you aren’t actually terminally ill?”

Matthew said, “Can I assume I shouldn’t ask you for a diagnosis?”

“No, you shouldn’t, but I can recommend a therapist.”

Matthew nodded.

He said, “They say it might rain tomorrow.”

From somewhere in the distance, came a piercing, animalistic shriek.

Matthew said, “Fighting cats?”

Claire shook her head.

“Fucking foxes.”

If you think this is a damn fine piece, of writing, maybe you could buy me a coffee.

Doesn’t have to be one from Glasgow.

Twenty-five years away and within forty-eight hours you’re doing the voice again.

It just arrives, the way a smell arrives, without announcement. You’re in a conversation you’ve had a thousand times in another life and your mouth is doing something your mouth stopped doing decades ago. You sound like the person you were when you lived here. And that person, you’d assumed, was gone.

‘Fraid not.
They were here all the time.

There’s a scene in IT Chapter Two. Bill Denbrough, now a successful novelist, confident, articulate, the kind of person who gives interviews, returns to Derry after twenty-seven years and starts stuttering again. The stutter he had at eleven, the one woven into the worst year of his life, comes back like a deferred debt.

Stephen King understands something that the horror structure sometimes obscures. IT, the monster, doesn’t cause Bill’s stutter to return. It’s the place. The environmental cues reach into his neurology, find something they put there long ago and fire it up again.

Psychologists have a version of this. Context-dependent memory proposes that the conditions under which we learn something become part of the memory itself. Returning to those conditions may temporarily reinstate the state in which the original learning occurred. The research base is older and more contested than the idea’s cultural currency suggests but basically it argues go back and you don’t just remember who you were. Something in you answers to that name.

The contextual self gets closer to it. We don’t carry one self around. We carry several, each built in relationship to people and places, each storing the strategies that worked there. The one you built at home in that particular town with those particular dynamics, it learned things. It learned how to be small when smallness was safer. It learned which opinions to keep to yourself. It learned an accent and a register and a set of behaviours that amounted to a theory of survival. And it stored all of that in your body, your voice, your automatic social responses.

Walk back into the environment and the old programme starts running.

The reason this might matter is that the strategies the contextual self runs are not neutral. They were rational responses to real conditions that may no longer exist.

Performing tolerance with people who bore you: rational once, possibly, if boring people here had power over you. Making yourself invisible: efficient once, if visibility brought trouble. Speaking in a voice that isn’t yours: harder to justify because you can’t claim it’s a choice. The other two you could theoretically stop. The accent just happens, which is either the most honest thing your body does here or the most damning.

They’re archived solutions to problems you may not have anymore.

Fleabag’s entire performance of herself, the wit, the asides to camera, the relentless deflection, can be read as an archived strategy. The wit is load-bearing. The second series slowly exposes the limits of that approach. The Priest partly sees through the act. He interrupts when she is attempting to control distance, particularly where the programme lets him seem aware of the camera she keeps turning towards. What unsettles her is the possibility of being seen without the performance.

The contextual self doesn’t like being seen. It wants everyone to treat it as the real thing.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind asks the most brutal version of the question: what if you could delete it? Joel and Clementine, having erased each other, still find their way back. Gondry and Kaufman are making an argument about how deep the self goes. The memories are gone but the pattern that created them remains: the specific way these two people fit badly together. The mind can be wiped but the contextual self, apparently, cannot.

There’s something almost comic about this. You could theoretically surgically remove every memory of the place you grew up, every conversation that built the version of you that learned to disappear in certain rooms. And then you’d go back and your mouth would do the voice. And you’d perform patience with someone who bores you. And you wouldn’t even know why.

Whether any of this is resolvable is a harder question than most self-help writing is willing to ask. The implication of the context-dependent memory research is that the reinstated self diminishes as the present-day self reasserts itself, that the first forty-eight hours are the worst of it and that the programme gradually loses its grip. This might be true.

What Stephen King suggests and what your own body might confirm if you’ve been back somewhere that formed you is that the timeline isn’t straightforward. The reinstated self doesn’t dissolve on a timer. It just waits. It knows the environmental cues better than you know your own defences. And every time you perform patience with a boring person or drop your vowels back into an older shape or make yourself smaller than you’ve been in years, it gets a little more certain that it’s home.

The question isn’t how to erase it.

The question is what to do with the knowledge that it’s there and that the place still has the password.

If you liked the piece, you can help me to continue waffling on here.

“So, when you’re out there and you meet this probable coke dealer, do you think there’s any danger you might get whacked?”

“Well, that possibility has crossed my mind, but I know I can make him more money.”

It was a Friday night in Croydon at about midnight. I was talking to my flatmate about my flight the next day to Riga. A two-night business trip, initiated after dealing with a Lithuanian bloke via a Latvian translator over Skype. One night in Riga being shown around by a bloke we will call A, then a drive on Sunday morning to Kaunas, Lithuania, to be hosted by the likely coke dealer.

At the time I was a poker product manager for a gaming firm in North London. Nine months in. After a shaky start, I was finding my feet. It was an office that largely fit William Goldman’s description of Hollywood: “Nobody knows anything.” What I did know, after six months, was that the deals the company had formed with poker affiliates were setting fire to money in some cases for both the affiliate and the company.

One such deal was with the affiliate in Lithuania. Call him R.

More or less every time his players played on the site, it was costing the company money. Poker sites make money by charging you a small fee to sit down. If you lose $100 in ten minutes, the site makes about $0.20. The company may have paid $30 to acquire that player. So: $100 deposited, $0.20 earned, $30 spent. Whoever sealed the deals hadn’t understood the key difference between poker and everything else the company offered. If a slots or blackjack player loses their $100, most of it goes to the house. A $30 acquisition cost makes sense. For poker, it doesn’t. You want break-even players, people who sit down hour after hour until the seat fees have chipped away their bankroll. Most players aren’t break-even.

I had worked out a better deal for both the company and R. Hence the trip.

R also managed a bricks-and-mortar casino poker room. That was his main method of recruiting players for the company. Aside from his other probable income stream, he was in a death metal garage band and had recorded a song about poker.

I arrived in Riga at about 6 PM. A picked me up at the airport. A was a decent person, working alone for our company in Riga and had a resting meme face. I checked into my hotel, a building haunted by Soviet ghosts and went out to see the city. By coincidence, it was the anniversary of Latvia’s independence from the Soviet Union. The atmosphere was intoxicating. Everyone seemed happy and glad to be alive.

Kaunas tomorrow. Tonight: the joy of not being in Kansas anymore.

Next morning we left for the drive to Kaunas. I don’t drive, but A was in cruise control with air-conditioned breeze and an on-off death metal playlist. We’d arranged to arrive after lunch. R was having what I was told was his traditional Sunday. He’d booked an out-of-town venue, hosted a pre-lunch basketball two-on-two tournament, eaten, then offered a poker tournament. A and I had been invited partly as an icebreaker before the business meeting Monday morning.

I’d declined the basketball.

I’m 5 foot 9 and much more of a badminton player.

We parked outside the venue. Wanting to be taken somewhat seriously, I was dressed business casual: I looked like every white, middle-aged stand-up comedian in Britain.

R greeted us floating basketball extreme casual. If the game had been skins versus vests, he was clearly the former: white basketball shoes and a pair of Texas Hold’em poker board shorts. Shaved head. Echoes of Steven Berkoff.

He was also hench. I am not hench.

He was not visibly perspiring. I was visibly perspiring.

He couldn’t speak English. I was temporarily unable to speak English.

R looked me up and down and said something to A. They both grinned. I was told the poker tournament was about to begin.

A was able to speak Lithuanian, Latvian, Russian and English which, to put it mildly, helped.

The lunch plates were still being cleared when we walked into the room hosting the tournament. The kind of place that looked like it hosted wedding receptions for the economically prudent couple. Long tables, adequate space between them and through a set of double patio doors, a moderately sized green space with a small pond.

One long table against the side wall was dedicated to vodka bottles and shot glasses. As I looked over, a player took a bottle and a glass and went to find his seat. A smaller table held beer. Unlike the vodka table, this one had no glasses.

I picked up a can of lager.

I don’t drink spirits. They scare me. I know where I am with beer. I can predict how I’ll feel after one, two, three. With vodka, I’d go from sober to unable to stand in under an hour.

As I watched another player select his bottle, I noticed I was the only person who had opted for a can.

A took a bottle and a glass. “Vodka, David?” He gestured to the table.

I smiled, shook my head.

He nodded. “That should be OK.” Then went to find his seat.

There were about sixty players, including A, R and me. Everyone paid €20 to enter. I paid from my own money.

At the first break, two hours in, about fifteen players had been knocked out, including A. I found him outside by the pond, vodka bottle in hand, about a third remaining.

During the first session I’d noticed a bear-sized man at another table. Loud, passionate, thirsty. Dressed in an outfit made famous by Orange is the New Black. He looked like he hadn’t been born as much as emerged fully formed from a blast furnace.

I asked A about him.

“Yeah. Everyone knows him. He’s ex-KGB and spent a few years in a Soviet prison.”

“Are those two things related?”

A smiled without opening his mouth, closed his eyes and nodded slowly three times.

I still regret I didn’t get a gif out of that moment.

“He gets upset when he’s knocked out,” said A.

The players were called back to their seats.

Two more hours passed. The field was down to about thirty, including R, the bear and me. I’d had four beers. The vodka table was at about 20% capacity. A was outside by the pond, smoking and laughing with the eliminated players, all of whom had booked to stay the night.

The second break came at about 6:30 PM.

Twenty remaining players. Three to four hours until a winner. Which meant forty drunk men with nothing to do, a possible vodka shortage and a pond.

It was time to return.

After about nineteen minutes we were at the final table of ten. I was seated opposite the bear, R to his left.

Just before we started, the bear proposed a toast.

Nine glasses of vodka raised. One can of beer.

The bear looked at me and shook his head rapidly. He growled something and gestured to the vodka table.

I offered a cheesy smile, shook my head, hoisted my can and looked around for A.

The garden had him.

The bear was still indicating that he would strongly prefer it if I drank vodka, if I would be so kind.

His gesticulations probably lasted less than a minute but felt, at the time, like I should be requesting a last cigarette.

Bravely, R put his hand on the bear’s shoulder and said something to him.

The bear looked to R, then to me, then back to R. Said what I guessed was a question while jerking his head in my direction.

R nodded.

The bear shook his head.

And then we did the toast.

I was very glad it was time to shuffle up and deal.

About an hour later I was knocked out in sixth place. R dealt the killing blow and I was partly pleased: I’d made the money and it wasn’t a bad thing for Monday’s negotiation that the affiliate had been the one to knock me out. But mainly I was pleased because I wouldn’t knock out the bear. He was currently in third. Two bottles of vodka deep.

I left the table to what I thought were good-natured jeers.

On the way to find A, I noticed the vodka table had been restocked. The beer table hadn’t needed to be.

He was in the garden near the pond. His bottle was half empty but his glass was half full. More than fifty happy drunk men were now milling around, the vibe late-stage wedding reception; one featuring two sets of families who liked or at least tolerated each other.

A’s ability to translate into English had become increasingly compromised as the day had gone on.

Even with five players remaining in the tournament, it could still take a while. I thought: did I want to still be hanging around, almost literally like a spare at a wedding, when the bear was knocked out?

I looked around the garden. Everyone was drunk. Drunk-happy, admittedly, but drunk. And still drinking. And with nothing else to do. And it was hot.

I had a premonition.

A vision of being held by four blokes, one at the end of each limb, stretched like a human hammock, with odds of somewhere between one in two and one in three of being launched into the pond. I even envisioned emerging with the obligatory small fish coming out of my mouth.

I can’t swim. I once dived into a swimming pool as a kid and my cousin’s review was that I’d gone in like a cow being surprised by a cattle prod. After that, fuck swimming.

So, for that reason and quite a few more, not least that being tossed in once arguably made a repeat more likely, I told A I needed to send a few emails and make some calls from my room and would see him at breakfast.

When he only tried once to dissuade me, I knew it was the right call.

I told him I’d finished sixth and perhaps he could collect my winnings from R.

My room was on the second floor, window facing the garden. Darkness had descended but the area was lit and I could hear the players below.

After about thirty minutes there was what sounded like good-natured uproar. Although I couldn’t understand the language, it was the bear’s voice. My guess: he’d just been knocked out.

Another fifteen minutes passed and I heard something like:

“With a woo… with a wee… and… a hurrah!”

Followed by something like, “Noooooooo” and about two seconds later by a large ker-splash and a lot of laughter.

I sighed with relief.

I pulled out my phone and texted my flatmate in Croydon.

Still not whacked.

He responded: ⏳ 🔫

In the evening there were about four more moments of “Whey!” followed by splash sounds. They slightly interrupted my ability to fall asleep. I still felt pretty good.

The next morning the room that had hosted the tournament had reverted to its normal role. It was about 8 AM. Six players, coffee, the sound of cutlery.

I was on my second cup when A appeared.

He was wearing sunglasses.

He also looked like a diluted Kermit the Frog.

I asked how the rest of the night had gone.

“I woke up lying on my back on the floor of my room. Totally naked.”

“Where were your clothes?”

“I couldn’t find them. So I gently opened my door and put my head out. Someone had tied my clothes into a bundle. On top of the bundle was a card. Someone had written on it my name and room number.”

He went to get breakfast and two cups of coffee. When he returned I said I’d already had two cups.

He had already started to move his scrambled eggs and jerked his thumb to his chest. Both cups were his.

The business meeting was scheduled for 11 AM in R’s poker room in a Kaunas casino. We’d been told to follow his car.

Before we set off, I asked A, who did not look like a man who wanted to be asked anything, if he could help me have a quick conversation with R.

I asked R for my winnings.

He suggested it would be a good gesture if I donated them back to the pool, to be shared with the other players, some of whom played online poker with my company’s product.

He had a point.

But in about an hour I’d be negotiating with him on his turf, using a translator to communicate. I didn’t want to concede the winnings. It was only €60. It wasn’t about the money. It was about communicating that I valued fairness and myself and I wanted him to know that before we talked business.

After about two minutes of translated exchange, he handed me the money.

He gestured that it was time to drive to Kaunas.

The meeting was in the back of the casino, past the slot machines and blackjack tables that line every route to a poker room: the games the house would prefer you played, the ones that take your money directly rather than letting you take each other’s. The same psychology that had produced the misapplied acquisition deals that brought me here in the first place.

Five sat around a poker table. The sixth fetched a bottle of vodka and six glasses.

I declined.

So did A. His sunglasses remained on. He still looked green.

After about two hours and four bathroom visits from A, we had a deal.

I joined R for a shot of vodka.

A didn’t.

We walked back to the car. A removed his sunglasses.

“I don’t think I can drive all the way back to Riga.”

Four hours. An informal meeting with Russian affiliates at 6 PM in a small Riga bar. My flight at 9.

“Here, take the keys.”

I don’t drive. He knew that, but I told him again.

“I know. But it’s easy. Plenty of people don’t have licences here. It’s OK. It’s an automatic.”

There was no way I was driving.

“How much would a taxi be?”

“No. Not taxi. I can’t leave my car. Just drive, it’s OK.”

Having apparently survived the prospect of being whacked, I was now facing the probability of being stranded in Kaunas.

“Have you got any water?” I asked.

He nodded and produced a half-litre bottle.

He understood.

He downed the water. We found somewhere selling sandwiches, ate them standing by the car.

He agreed to drive.

He put his sunglasses back on.

We made it to the bar in Riga on time, despite stopping twice for roadside strategic vomiting.

Him, not me.

I made my flight.

I made the affiliate more money. I made his players more money. I made my company more money.

And because of that, my disability was largely overlooked.

I have a right arm disability. No biggie, but I’m no pianist. It is mostly overlooked. But not always.

I feel other people’s reactions to it most keenly with strangers, particularly in pseudo-liminal spaces: a pavement, a car park, the queue at a till. Instead of eye contact and a nod, I get scrutinising looks aimed at my arm. Rarely, but often enough, I get asked: “Can you manage?”

It’s meant well. I’m usually asked when carrying bags and walking my dog.

And so I perform politeness. “I’m fine,” I say, with a thin smile.

What I want to say is: yeah, I can manage. In fact, I’m very good at it. Could you go to the Baltic States with a business proposal, hold your nerve through a slightly testing situation involving an ex-KGB man and a toast and know the exact moment to leave before you risk being tossed in a pond?

But yeah, of course I’m struggling with a bag of spuds and beans.

I don’t blame the people who ask. I’m not always irritated by them. But every time it happens I think about how quickly we form an opinion of someone’s capabilities and how completely that opinion can change if you can demonstrate you’ll make them money.

The company I worked for employed no women in income-generating roles and no people of colour. Everyone at the poker tournament in Kaunas was white and male. My disability was something to move past. I think about whether a woman or a non-white man sitting across from R in that room would have found the same reciprocity I did. I know it would have been a different room.

My dollar sign was legible to people who had already decided whose dollar signs were worth reading.

Those moments when strangers scrutinise my arm instead of meeting my eyes have given me a small insight into how women might feel when strangers look at their bodies rather than their faces. You stop being a person and become a feature.

I often felt, in any income-generating role, that what a company sees above your head is something like a health bar in a first-person computer game. Mine was high enough. I was given my chance.

Others were not deemed to have one.

Not yet whacked. Just very, very lucky.

If you think this is a damn fine piece, of writing, maybe you could buy me some beer. Just not vodka.

Someone’s waffling on about their weekend plans. Something about visiting their parents. Or was it a mate? Possibly a cousin. There’s a replacement bus service. Or a car. They’re talking and you’re nodding and you’re saying, “that’s good” and “nice” at what seems like appropriate intervals. Your brain is performing the social ritual of listening while actually being somewhere else.

Do you have any idea what they have just said?

Nope.

Not a notion.

Are you rude? Nah.

Do you care? Tougher question; a bit, yes, and you accept listening to your friend noodling about their life is part of friendship. So, yeah, you do.

They’re in transmit mode. You’re trying to recall where you’ve parked. Your brain is pressurised.

They stop transmitting their plans for Saturday. They’re looking at you expectantly. You smile and nod and hope they don’t ask a follow-up question because if they do, all you can offer is a look of benign gormlessness. The entire monologue has evaporated.

This is called cognitive load. Or working memory overload. Either way, it’s why you can’t remember what someone just told you while your brain was busy doing literally anything else.

What It Actually Is (And Why It Happens)

Your brain has a limit: how much information it can hold and process at any given moment.

Psychologist George Miller demonstrated in 1956 that most people can hold between five and nine items in working memory at once, though later research showed it depends on the person and task, and is often smaller.

Alan Baddeley later showed it’s not just about quantity - it’s about how your brain allocates attention between different types of information: verbal, visual, coordinating between them.

The key insight: space is limited. Your working memory is like a bucket. When it’s full, nothing new gets in.

When you’re trying to remember where you parked, that’s occupying mental space. Visual memory of the car park. Spatial reasoning about which level. Mental calculation about timing. Your working memory is busy.

Then someone starts talking to you. Now your brain needs to process language. Understand their words. Track their story. Hold the information long enough to respond.

But you’re already at your limit. So your brain makes a choice. Usually, it keeps working on the parking problem because parking = getting home = not being stranded.

You can perform listening - nodding, smiling, the right eyebrow movements - but the words don’t stick.

The problem is modern life assumes you have infinite capacity. Emails whilst on a call. Conversations while cooking. Thinking about food while someone’s showing you cat photos.

You’re doing this multiple times a day.

At work, someone’s explaining a project while you’re mentally reviewing your to-do list. You catch about half of it. The other half vanishes.

This is also why you walk into a room and forget why you’re there. Your working memory was holding your purpose - “get the phone charger” - but then you see some apples, smell coffee, and catch your hip on the table corner. The quest for the charger is forgotten.

What feels like doing two things at once is usually rapid switching between them. And every switch has a cost.

The Big Short Problem

The same mental bottleneck that affects everyday conversations can also affect institutions.

There’s a moment in The Big Short where the sheer complexity of the financial crisis becomes overwhelming. People are trying to explain financial products with names like CDOs. Layers of risk packaged inside other layers of risk.

And everyone’s eyes glaze over. People stop processing. They nod. They say “Yeah, yeah” and “I see”. But they’re not actually following anymore.

The film shows how this was part of the problem. The financial products were deliberately made complex. So people stopped trying to understand and just trusted that someone else had everything figured out.

That’s cognitive overload being weaponised. Make something complicated enough and people’s brains will shut down.

What To Do About It

Working memory is limited and hard to stretch in the moment. But you can manage what you put in it.

Single-tasking usually beats multitasking. Do one thing properly or accept you’ll do multiple things less well.

If it’s important, stop and just listen. If someone’s telling you something you actually need to remember, stop doing the other thing. Put your phone down. Stop trying to remember where you parked. Clear some space. Then listen.

Write things down immediately. Don’t trust your working memory to hold something until later. If someone gives you a date, a name, an instruction, write it down now.

Recognise when you’re at your limit. When your brain feels full, it probably is. That foggy feeling when you can’t think clearly? That’s cognitive overload. Stop piling files onto a full desk.

Do the memory-intensive task first. If you need to remember where you parked and also listen to someone’s weekend plans, deal with the parking first. Once that’s resolved, you can actually pay attention.

Accept that you’ll forget things. You’re human. Your working memory has limits. You’re going to walk into rooms and forget why. You’re going to nod and glaze over during some conversations. And that is okay. We all do it. That’s just how brains work when they’re asked to exceed their limits.

The Conversation You’ve Already Forgotten

They’ve stopped talking now. They’re waiting for you to respond.

You’ve got no idea what they said. Something about a… bus? Or was it a car. Their nan? It’s gone.

Your working memory was full. You were trying to remember where you parked.

It’s not your fault. It’s not their fault.

Next time, maybe you’ll stop trying to solve the parking problem. Clear some space. Actually listen.

Or maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll do this again tomorrow. And the day after that.

Knowing the limit doesn’t remove it. It just gives you a chance to work with it.

If you liked the piece, you can help me to continue waffling on here.

Martin Cresswell looked impressively happy for a man recently fitted with a testicular prosthesis, thought Graham.

“Item 6b, Spending the grant,” Martin said, then beamed.
There was a service bell on the table. Martin hit it and grinned.
Graham opened his laptop.
Nine years, he thought. I’ve been doing this for nine years.
The light rain sounded more like hail on the village hall’s slanted glass roof.

There were six of them around a table, one better suited for displaying second-hand Maeve Binchy novels and CDs by Mike and the Mechanics. In the middle of the table was a plastic plate of Tunnock’s Tea Cakes.
None of the chairs matched.

Martin was at the head of the table, standing, talking, leading the discussion on flooring options.
Graham was at the bottom of the table, taking minutes.

Paula Stokes was to Martin’s right, clasping a clipboard.
To Graham’s right was Jenn Arkwright, arms folded, looking bored.

Completing this tableau of the emotionally unfulfilled were a couple in their sixties, Derek and Pat. They both wore knitted cardigans. No one could remember a time when they were not councillors, a meeting they had missed, or any contribution they had made.

Martin moved behind Derek and put his pinkish hand on his shoulder. Graham was reminded of the times he had been an invigilator for GCSE exams at the local comp. He and his fellow invigilators had designed a game to help them through the silent tedium. They would set each other challenges like on your next pass of the hall, go and stand behind the kid that you think is most likely to end up in jail. Martin looked like he had been briefed on the game and challenged to stand behind the person most likely to spend most of their time in their garden shed, thought Graham.

“I think what we need to recognise that this is an opportunity. A real opportunity. It is not just a chance of a new floor. No, no, no. This is an opportunity for the village to… for the village to… be proud of itself. To… show a bit of leg, if you like,” said Martin.

Did Jenn just mutter something? Graham looked at her. She no longer looked bored.
“Something to add, Jenn?” Martin said, moving toward her.
“No,” Jenn said.
Graham wrote: Cllr Arkwright expressed agreement.
He looked at what he’d typed.
He looked at Martin, his fingers hovering over backspace. Then dropped them.
The grant was £18,400. Paula had discovered it, shared the news, then shared the news again, and again, and again.
The question of what to do with it had fractured the council into two positions.

Martin wanted engineered oak flooring, a projection screen, a mural by a local artist (Paula knew someone), and a plaque acknowledging the councillors who had “driven” the renovation.

Graham had written a counter-proposal: address the damp, replace the roof insulation, fix the heating system that failed every February and spend the remaining change on chairs that didn’t make unnerving cracking noises during the meeting.

“Graham’s proposal,” Martin said now, carefully, as if handling a crystal sherry glass, “is very practical. Very practical. I think we all appreciate that.”
“Thank you,” Graham said.
“I just wonder if practical is what the village needs right now.”
“What does the village need right now?”
Martin smiled. “Something to be proud of.”

Graham thought: you mean a statue of you.
He wrote: Cllr Cresswell outlined the vision for the project.

“I want to say,” Paula said, leaning forward, “that I’ve spoken to the artist, Petra, and she’s so excited about the idea of telling Bramley’s story. She grew up two villages down.”

“That’s local,” Derek said. Everyone looked at him. Pat swivelled and stared. Derek looked embarrassed and shifted himself. The chair made a cracking noise.

“Exactly,” Paula touched his arm. “Someone we know. That we can trust.”

Graham watched her work the room. He envied her enthusiasm even if he thought it was mischannelled. She was good at this. He felt small.

Jenn passed him a note: If they put a plaque up with Martin’s name on I am going to eat it.
Graham wrote back: High in minerals.

She snorted. Martin glanced over. Graham looked at the screen in front of him.

Martin hit the service bell with the palm of his hand.

“Right then, folks, let’s vote,” said Martin as he walked behind Graham, stopping directly behind him, looking at the laptop.

“All those in favour of treating the damp etcetera, raise your hands,” Martin said.

Graham raised his hand; Jenn followed. There was a pause.
Derek looked at Pat.
Pat looked at Martin.
No movement.

“Right, that would be two for the damp. Now, all those in favour of oak and an original mural created by an artist who is one of ours, raise your hands.”

First was Paula. Derek and Pat followed, together. Martin moved from behind Graham and, from the head of the table, raised his hand, while grinning at Graham.

“I believe that seals it. A triumph for pride over practicality.” Martin reached for a Tunnock’s Tea Cake and peeled off the foil. He looked at Graham, smiling, and held the tea cake like a communion wafer, before inching it into his mouth, whole.

Graham had a vision of himself, bed-bound in a hospice, unable to talk. His only visitor was Martin, standing over the bed, lowering a Tunnock’s into his mouth, hovering his hand over a service bell, ready to ding-ding Graham gone.

“Sealed it is,” Graham said, and typed.

Paula was already on her phone.
Martin clasped hands with Derek, who looked like a dog having its tummy rubbed.
“Thank you, both,” Martin said to Pat and Derek. “See you Sunday morning.”
Pat smiled, nodded.

Jenn was pulling on her coat. She looked towards Graham, but Martin blocked her view.

“Great meeting, great meeting,” Martin said, stopping beside Graham.
“Hm,” Graham said.
“I know it’s not how you wanted things to go.”
“We still have damp.”
“We’ll address that. Next time.”
Graham looked at him. Martin’s face was entirely sincere.
That was the worst of it: the sincerity.

“Right,” Graham said.
Martin clapped him on the shoulder and went.
Graham took the final two Tunnock’s.

He was last out. He always was, locking up, returning the key to the hook in the small kitchen that smelled of Mellow Birds instant coffee. He stood for a moment at the empty table with his laptop open.

The minutes were almost done. He scrolled back through them.

Cllr Arkwright expressed agreement.
Cllr Cresswell outlined the vision for the project.
He read the rest. It captured the votes, the names.

Graham put his cursor at the end of the document.
Typed, then deleted it.
Typed again. Deleted.
He read: Cllr Cresswell outlined the vision for the project.

He closed the laptop and sat in the dark of the village hall, listening to the rain. It just fell, evenly, on the slanted roof and the space in the car park where Martin’s Range Rover had been.

Graham picked up his bag.

On his way out, he paused at the noticeboard by the door. A flyer for a coffee morning, six weeks old. A lost cat: ginger, answers, apparently, to Fred.
A printout from the council’s website, slightly curled, showing the grant announcement with a quote from Martin about the importance of community investment.

The quote was real. Graham had checked it when it was published, half-hoping to find something to contest. It was exactly what Martin had said, word for word, in the meeting where they’d discussed applying for the grant. Graham shook his head.

The minutes, when he emailed them to the clerk in the morning, would say that the council had met, that a decision had been reached, that all present had participated in good faith in the governance of Bramley-in-the-Marsh.
He’d been taking them for nine years.

He turned off the light and went to his blue Honda Civic. Empty triangular sandwich packets filled the passenger footwell.
He took two Tunnock’s Tea Cakes from his pocket and rolled them together in his hand.
He unwrapped one, took a delicate nibble, then wolfed the rest, chewing with his mouth open.
He held up the remaining Tunnock’s.
“Let’s hope this is your real one.”
He made to crush it.
He stopped.
He put it back in his pocket.

If you think this is a damn fine piece, of writing, maybe you could buy me some Tunnack’s.

A quick note: this is an older piece, written for a poker blog and never published anywhere else. I’m putting it up now because next week I’m sharing something more personal, and it helps to share this first. A bit of background: I spent several years as a freelance poker writer and player. That’ll make more sense next week.

Good news everybody: I’m FingersMalone and here’s another blog.

It is enough to know, at this stage, that I’m English and emotional control deserts me when I spot a Bohemian-looking woman wearing a hat. As a consequence of the latter, I play poker surrounded by female mannequins, as their uniformity and baldness serve as a potent distraction minimiser.

The title of the blog comes, partly, from a fondness for film. I’ll explain more later, but first a bit about my nickname. I used to title myself after the first thing I spotted on my desk at the time of poker account creation, largely because dull, banal handles tend not to be in high demand.

Consequently, if you spot someone at the poker table called “MilkCarton”, “DentalFloss”, or “NeglectedGoalsList”, there is a fair chance that is me.

So I thought about names of characters from American fiction.

“FingersMalone” was born from the evolutionarily unlikely union of authors Damon Runyon and Raymond Chandler.

FingersMalone was meant to be mysterious, cool, sophisticated.

FingersMalone was not meant to pound the desk when the river completes his opponent’s flush.

FingersMalone was not meant to refer to himself in the third person.

Nor was he meant to aspire to be an adjective; but little did I know at the time of his conception, that I might need a theme, a structure and a goal for a poker blog.

People can become adjectives.

The expression “Fellinesque” was created because an Italian had such an individual style of filmmaking that people began to associate certain sights with his work.

I want future poker players to say, “Shit. You see that play? That shit was Malonesque”, preferably in the voice of The Wire’s Clay Davis.

It is a tough goal, I know, but I believe that, with lavish helpings of sickly “wind beneath my wings” metaphors, I can do it.

However, there may come a time when I have to accept that the best I can be is a noun.

If the act of calling the flop with nothing in an attempt to induce an opponent to check/fold can become known as “The float”, I think there could be a time when another play is called “The Malone.”

At the moment, there is a danger that it could denote the act of casually pushing all of your chips into the middle when your opponent has the nuts and watching them trouser all the cash.

Alternatively, “The Malone” could simply become the handle for the little window that appears and asks,

“Would you like to buy more chips?”

“Jim doesn’t normally have two cups of coffee at home.”

It’s a line from an internal monologue in Airplane!.

A character tells the cabin crew that he will, actually, have a second cup of coffee, His partner becomes confused. Having witnessed inconsistent behaviour, both the audience and the partner want to know why, exactly, Jim is having that coffee. He never has a second one at home.

Not knowing can be more uncomfortable than being over-caffeinated at 35,000 feet. The routine-busting coffee request is harder to sit with than the contemplation that you’re a character in a disaster movie.

Perhaps Jim is having a second cup because he’s bored of the relationship. He’s mixing things up, taking flights, noticing things on the plane, thinking of ending it. That’s it.

Jim’s coffee-swilling self is waiting for the plane to land, then you’re in Dumpsville.

That would also explain why he didn’t shave this morning, and why he spent longer in the bathroom. Bingo.

Welcome to “That’s It!” town, population everybody.

All of the architecture confirms what you already decided and you no longer have to experience discomfort. You may not like your conclusion, but at least you don’t have to face the question adults struggle to leave unanswered:

Why?

You’ve answered it with a story. All the evidence you now encounter will serve that story.

Welcome to Captain Confirmation Bias.

The Captain’s favourite expression when faced with anything that challenges your narrative is:

“Yes, but.”

Here’s an example.

Perhaps Jim is having a second cup because he’s a bit bored.

Yes, but he has his paperback with him.

In the film Zodiac, Robert Graysmith, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, becomes obsessed with identifying the Zodiac Killer. At first he’s not working with anything conclusive. He has to live with the possibility that there may not be an answer, that the person responsible might never be known.

He can’t.

So he forms a theory and settles on a suspect.

From that point on, the evidence doesn’t lead him; he leads it. Patterns appear; anything that doesn’t fit gets explained away.

Bye-bye uncertainty, hello certainty.

All it costs him is his time and his relationship.

But he knows, right?

There are plenty of distorted lenses in my funhouse. I’m probably a league-table topper for the number of times I’ve said “yes, but.”

How about you?

Think about the last time you put something out into the world and waited. A message, maybe, or a piece of writing.

How long before you started interpretating the silence?

How long before the lack of a response became the response?

I even have some self-built scaffolding to shield me from uncertainty. They include plans, targets, other flim-flam.

I once sat in a café at Glasgow Central Station with two notebooks, three pens, wearing a baseball cap that said Writer on it. I wasn’t even waiting for a train.

I create the story that I am a writer, then find my own evidence.

Hell, I even buy my own evidence.

I also tell myself there’s a world of difference between me and an “Elvis Lives!” enthusiast.

A T-shirt with the ‘king’ on it?

Please.

And you? Maybe you didn’t buy a made-to-order baseball cap.

But maybe, like me, you commented on someone else’s writing and received neither a like nor a response.

Suddenly the pendulum swings.

That could be evidence that you’re not a gifted communicator. And you need fifty positive notifications before you can offset that one. Or a new cap.

Confirmation bias works both ways. It builds the stories we don’t want just as fast, from just as little. One silence and you're not a writer. Fifty likes and you are.

The Am I a writer? question doesn’t resolve itself easily.

That’s also true in other areas of life.

The need for certainty can have you living like Graysmith in Zodiac: it can damahe how you live.

Move to certainty at speed and you’re more likely to build an entire worldview on something as inconsequential as your partner ordering a second cup of coffee.

When you’re desperate for a why, or you find yourself about to say “yes, but,” ask yourself:

Are you sure you’re not just relieving tension?

Do you really need to form an answer that might not be true?

Stay with the tension.

It passes on its own, eventually.

Not everything needs an answer and some things will remain uncertain whether you like it or not.

Take your reading of this post.

You may already have an opinion of my writing, of me. You may have already decided this piece is about X. Perhaps it is. But your X and my X don’t have to align.

Ask yourself: did the writing lead you to X, or had you already branded it X before you got here?

If you liked the piece, you can help me enjoy my second cup of coffee at home.

You’re at a dinner party.

Someone asks, “So what do you do?”

Suddenly, you’re defending yourself. You’re explaining why your job isn’t as boring as it sounds, or why you’re between things right now. You’ve got your justifications lined up like ammunition.

And then you notice they’re just… asking. They weren’t judging. They wanted to know what you do.

But you’ve already launched into your defensive speech. And now you’re stuck there, over-explaining to someone who was making small talk.

This is called a schema and it’s running whether you like it or not.

What It Actually Is

A schema is a mental template your brain built from past experiences to make sense of the present.

You learned, from somewhere, that when people ask about your job, they’re questioning your worth.

It could have been from parents, a significant ex, or part of a micro-culture you were once part of.

However it happened, your brain has it filed in ‘Social ego threats’.

“What do you do?” causes you to slip into something more uncomfortable, probably chain-mail and broadsword.

‘Schema’ comes from Jean Piaget’s work on how children make sense of the world. In relationships, psychologists talk about similar patterns called ‘internal working models’.

We preserve cognitive energy by relying on the models.

So, “What do you do?” = “I’m assessing your status.”

Sometimes people really are seeing if you will confirm their inner judgements.

But often, they are just accessing a file called “friendly small talk suitable for dinner parties”.

Shortcuts are great, apart from when they leave you cut off, wondering what the hell happened, and, damn, why am I wearing chainmail in August?

Why This Happens

When you were younger, some experiences hurt, and you may have learned some affection is conditional.

A few examples:

“Where have you been?” might mean, “This person is controlling.”

“Where did you get your hair cut?” = “My head must be a right state and I’m being mocked.”

In some cases, for some people, a casual encounter on the street of “Oh hi, X, how are you?” can lead to, “Who the hell wants to know?”

For some people, that was everyday life.

Everything you encounter is coloured by experiences you’re not even consciously remembering.

You’re Running Scripts Too

Maybe it’s about authority. Every time someone senior asks you a question, you assume you’ve done something wrong, even when the person asking has no power over you.

The template was built when authority figures were unpredictable.

Maybe it’s about affection.

Someone shows you kindness and you immediately wonder what they’re after. Someone cared for you, but only when you were useful or pleasing to them. Now every act of kindness looks conditional.

Maybe it’s about conflict.

Someone disagrees with you and your brain hears, “You’re not good enough.” Being wrong equalled being pathetic. Now you defend even your preferred vegetable oil like you’re defending your right to exist.

The situations are different, but your brain is running the same old, same old. And you don’t notice until your shortcut has left you at a dead end and lonely.

What To Do About It

Notice when your response is bigger than the situation. If someone asks a simple question and you’re defaulting to “lawyer-up, asshole” mode, stop.

If someone makes a small request and you feel cornered, stop.

Your reaction might just be telling you something about your template.

Ask: am I responding to this person or to a pattern? When you feel braced for impact, check who you’re actually talking to. Is it the person in front of you? Or is it a ghost of criticism past?

Reality-test your assumptions. You think they’re going to leave. Have they said that? You think they’re disappointed. What evidence do you have? Your brain is filling in gaps for you. Make it show its working.

Notice where you keep getting the same result. If you keep having the same argument with different people, you might be running a script. The situations look different, but your responses are identical.

Ask what you learned early on. Most schemas come from childhood or early relationships. What did you learn about how people behave? Those lessons might not apply anymore.

Give new information a chance. This is the hardest part. When someone behaves differently to your template, your brain will try to dismiss it as an exception. “They don’t really mean it.” Your schema is defending itself. Let the new information in and update the template.

The Dinner Party You’re Still At

You’re mid-explanation now. You’ve justified your job and defended your choices.

And they’re nodding politely, waiting for you to finish, because they were just making conversation. By now, they might be wondering if their other neighbour at the table is keener on small talk.

Your schema did this. The one that says questions are tests and you need to prove yourself.

It’s not their fault. It’s not your fault.

It’s just the script.

Next time?

You can answer the question, “What do you do?”

Not, “And what did you learn at school today?”

One of the goals of This Psychological Life is to explore our internal worlds.

To that end, I would welcome any readers who would like to be interviewed and see their own psychological lives featured here.

Privacy and Consent: I understand that it requires a high degree of trust. I will never publish a final article without the full, explicit consent of the interviewee. Furthermore, if you would like to share your story but prefer to remain anonymous in the published version, I am more than happy to honour that request.

How to Participate: While I aim to speak with as many of you as possible, I do prioritise those who are Paid Subscribers to this Substack or those who choose to support my work via my Tip Jar.

If you can’t pay, don’t worry: all subscribers are eligible for the interview series, and standard subscriptions remain free.

I look forward to hearing your stories.