Hello, good afternoon, and welcome. As always, I will start by apologising for how long it has taken me to get my latest post out - the goal has always been one post per week, but life, as they say, is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.
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Anyway, that’s enough pre-amble - time to get into todays essay, where I question whether I matter or not…
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I’ve been doing a lot of thinking recently about what some people would call fate. With the death of a good friend of mine a couple of weeks ago, I started thinking about all of the things that had to line up in a certain order just for the two of us to even meet, never mind what happened in the decades since. And it’s a staggering amount of things.
From my side, my mother had to have dreadful taste in men, meaning first she got involved with my sperm donor, then a series of ‘uncles’, before deciding, when I was eight years old, to get hold of her first husband and give him another try. Then we had to move to Manchester, and then to a different place in Manchester.
Then, to make ends meet, she had to get a job in a bar, and then another one, and another one. And she had to stay in that last bar for a very long time – long enough that when the landlady got sick and was unable to continue, she was the one trusted with running the place until a new owner could be found.
Then she had to go to the brewery, a broke mother of five, and convince them that they should loan HER the money to take over the pub, rather than give it to someone willing to give THEM money so they could turn it into a trendy wine bar or something equally hideous. And make a success of it.
And me? I of course lived with her until I was sixteen. But then I moved to the other end of the country to live with my sperm donor, which, as they used to say on Top Gear, went well. Then I had to move home a year later. Then I got a job that took me to a different place at the other end of the country, and had to be shit enough at that that I was soon on my way home again.
Lots of different things, which meant that by 1996 I was living in the pub with my mother, despite making several attempts to break out on my own and do my own thing.
So that was us, but there were other people involved in this whole thing as well, who also had to do a whole bunch of things to make this meeting even a possibility.
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