Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Twenty Five - The Journey Beyond Kierkegaard

I was not the only person to have a new job, though mine was only temporary. My new friend Jerry, who I had met and had 'come out' to me as 'having had gay experiences' in church at the end of a life changing church service mere months ago also accepted a new job.

His new job involved him permanently moving down south. We remained friends, but to adapt with the circumstances he became a long distance friend. We wrote and phoned each other up often. He was a very good on the phone. He made me more at ease with phone calls. We had engaging conversations that were often forty minutes which was something new for me.

But there was a lot that was new in Agape house for me. It was the first house I had lived in as an adult that had a land line and a phone. My parents had no interest in having a land line fitted at the parental house. If they could agree that easy access to a phone was a good idea, then they would disagree about who having it was meant to favour most until getting a landline fitted  favoured neither of them. Between the age of eleven and sixteen I attended a care home/boarding school for thirty nine weeks of the year. It had a pay phone for the boys to use and be rung up on there. Mother rang me on that pay phone once a week, but she used the Social Services phone without telling dad, lest he disagree and stop her calling. She dealt with the discomfort of the cost of the call by having local government pay for the calls.

This new adult relationship I had with phones where I paid for the itemised calls in the bill. This was quite an advance over past disagreements. In the past the least argued over means of communication with family had been by letter. There mother wrote on behalf of both her and dad. He never wrote or sent anything in his own right. He never wrote his own name on family birthday and Christmas cards that were sent on behalf of all the family. His friends rarely, if ever, wrote and send him cards. There was no unpacking or explaining that at the time. If their had been it would have been tempting to claim men disliked writing, whilst leaving unexamined the ongoing role of alcohol in their friendship.

One of the more pleasant effects of Jerry leaving was that he gave me several demijohns of his home-made-from-kit wine to drink with my meals when he moved away. Drinking modest amounts of alcohol by myself was an advance I had not expected. Adelaide was pro-drink but anti being-drunk. I quite liked the philosophy of modest drinking close to where my bed was. The better to lie down with greater ease after. The wine also increased my appreciation of the melancholic nature of many of my favourite angsty middle aged male singer/songwriters, who combined regret with reflection in their songs.

I worked for Boots the Chemist for seven weeks. My job was simple and repetitive. It was to count, and note what I counted. Nothing else. Whilst I did the work I vehemently resisted feeling as if I fitted in there. I felt that there was nothing there for me to fit in with. I was the only male and the youngest in a team of four people and the leader of the team reminded me slightly of Patricia Routledge in one of the women-boss roles she inhabited, as created by Alan Bennett. We worked in a small windowless room where we counted the value of the vouchers that had been spent in different Boots stores across the country. We noted each store's location and the amount in money of the vouchers that had been redeemed there, after they had been given as seasonal gifts to be spent by the recipient in the January sales. The job was not designed to be interesting, and could not be made interesting, had anyone made attempts to improve it.

My way of making my time seem more interesting for me was to speed-read my 1938 paperback of 'The Journals Of Kierkegaard' in my breaktimes and stay in the room and eat my packed lunch every day, rather than investigate the canteen. I did not learn where the canteen was, and the other staff made no indication to show me. They made it clear to me that I was just another temporary worker. Either that or they regarded the work we did together as the least interesting work that Boots and I was the least interesting person there could be for being chosen for it. It would be easy now to see that my choice of reading was a form of protest, where I the outsider chose to read about the life and thoughts of a fellow outsider, Kierkegaard, to prove my sense of being an outsider to the team. If that was so then I was guilty as recognised. But part of me had always been an outsider who was difficult to draw in and warm up. It was part of how I had been brought up.

I had read 'The Journals of Kierkegaard' before and enjoyed it. This time when reading it, I wanted something far away from the four walls I worked in, and it was that. It was also a journal, and I was curious about journaling, writing in private that later became public. My journal was written in private, to be read in private for therapeutic reasons, and because I was in a queue/waiting list of an unknown length for my therapy, where I did not want waiting to be the point of the queue. But waiting was what the waiting list made me do. In the world I lived in individuals writing long documents that were not going to find a publisher seemed to be a rarity: the culture was built on television, or radio. So me writing these screeds and arguments, was never for profit, beyond recovering my sense of my own voice and character from whoever had abandoned it.

I was nowhere near being the writer that Kierkegaard was. What I wrote was messy, argumentative, and repetitive, but then my family were like that, and who they were was the start point for my evicting them from my head, illogical as that was at the time of writing. Not being the equal of Kierkegaard as writer did not mean that I was less of an outsider than he was. One of the strange tricks to being an outsider was that the less obtrusive the outsider seems to the cliques they have to skirt around, the less the cliques noticed the outsider.

The dialogues between therapist and the Dibs, in the book were interesting to me, where their discussions paralleled conversations my family had avoided having with me. Where the therapist offered the boy exits from conclusions he'd come to in his playing, I tried giving myself exits from how my parents shut down worlds and opportunities I saw and they did not want me to see. The most circular of my parents arguments were painful and circular indeed, stopping me sleep many days as they came back at me. But in writing that was a mix of patience and aggression the parental arguments  against choice stopped repeating themselves. Then another circular parental argument would pop up and keep me awake and have to be argued against on paper, and made to retreat, repetition by repetition.  

Every so often I would want sex. When the the only sex I could have outside of myself on my own was in public toilets then I wanted to go there. I started using the journaling to reason with myself as where the urge had started-tracing my thoughts backwards to the trigger, the earliest traceable thought. If I could write what that was in this dialogue in which I was one person, two character, one writing the other reading what I had read, then it was slow work. But it was work worth doing because it involved me slowing taking on what the church refused to deal with and the logic behind why the church refused to deal with it.

The logic of the arguments against sex in public toilets that the church permitted became more like the Victorian arguments against male masturbation, and admitting to being sexual for its own sake. There, the greater the less scientific the arguments were, the more popular the ignorance was. The adult/church based arguments were like a filing system with a bad indexing system for what they filed away. The stated purpose of index was set out as 'The point of sex is to produce children'. Children are necessary for the future of society and homosexual behaviour is wrong as sexual expression, because it was/is not about producing children. That most heterosexual sexual behaviour was both poorly negotiated and did not produce children either, but it at least contributed to the attempt to acquire property, something that could protect children-a motive worth defending even when it was corrupted and corrupting-justified heterosexual behaviour. And children are worth creating, if only to justify movement and variability the property market.

As Margaret Thatcher would have said 'If what you are doing is not contributing to your place, your marker, on the competitive property market, then it is not worth doing.'. The unity of the church was in its approval of the individual acquisition of property. Cottaging certainly did not, even indirectly, contribute to the acquisition of property. 

So cottaging was sinful 1-because it was secretive 2-it did not bring children into the world 3-because it did not bring children into the world it did not promote a competitive housing market. 4-in a world where England was shrinking as a world power, houses costing more was marker of economic growth. Finally, if 'economic growth' meant more money to fewer people, and less money for many more, then such growth mirrored the logic of the church where always there were wealthy few were saved, whilst many more were damned to blame themselves for not being saved.

Perhaps I was closer in spirit to Kierkegaard than I dared to think. 

Please left click here for Chapter Twenty Six.