Low life | 21 March 2019

I said my goodbyes and went outside with my trolley bag to wait for the taxi. While waiting, I looked across the sheep field at the sea. The wind direction had changed from due east to south-west and the surface of the sea, formerly turbulent, was placid. For the past ten weeks I’d been my mother’s full-time cook and carer. I’d put in a decent stint; nevertheless I felt guilty about leaving. Mum isn’t a great talker and, given the opportunity, neither am I.

For ten weeks we had coexisted in amicable and introspective quietness, while outside one Atlantic gale after another shook the house. When I came here back in January from France, where the boozy chatter is non-stop and there is little opportunity for introspection, I had lost touch with my subconscious mind. After ten weeks of hardly speaking, and venturing out of the house but rarely, I was in touch with it maybe a bit too much.

So wrapped up in myself was I that I had begun to notice, fear and despise the role of presentation and performance in ordinary conversation with the daily succession of visitors. Now I was leaving, I was dreading a simple ride in a taxi and being in a confined space and having to make small talk.

Then the taxi arrived. I slung my bag in the back, climbed in the front, and my rehabilitation began immediately. It was a kind of shock treatment. The taxi driver — late fifties, stout, wearing a country shirt of a decisive check — started talking before my backside had touched the fabric and he didn’t stop talking until he let me out, traumatised, at the station 25 minutes later.

This friendly man was almost bursting with inspiring thoughts and ideas.