Let Them Eat Cake - nibbling away precariously
You have heard that famously unhappy sentiment, allegedly spoken by Marie Antoinette about the starving poor of 1700s France. It justified her execution.
But have you heard the more erudite version?
‘The only thing the poor have to worry about is finding their next meal.’
Purposefully contentious and derided as propaganda, no civic-minded person would readily agree with this.
Yet this also holds a painful truth - that a life that relies on socialising is psychically precarious. And my youth suffered from my family's precarity.
Family life for me in 1980s Britain was decidedly broken, eating beans on toast most meals, relying on a father mostly absent, first with emotions, then with money, and soon in being. Those extended family who could help us would ignore our plight, still do. Now I have money, they venture more towards us.
School was difficult, a place without passion. Pointlessly institutionalised, the teachers showed zero interest in the things that I might like. Writing was merely plentiful techniques that an examiner could idly mark - no technique, no tick. Science was about percentages in exams and copying diagrams from textbooks - no questions, no wonder.
School social times were punctuated by flare-ups of violence. Most conversations coalesced on that which lived immediately in front of my face. Life was small and still.
Then one summer the school gave me running. Such races were the only thing in which I could be passionate about in public. My happy memory, like all powerful memories, is beyond easy narrative.
My running was intense. I ran the 400m flat out from the start, a copper-tinged taste in my mouth, young lungs pushing passed preset capacities, such pain temporary, yet actual and real. Trying hard now worked. In running I had found a fate that did not rely upon the vagaries of others.
When running, the derision of violent peers melted into physical admiration.
When running, the teachers became happy with the success I brought.
When running, Forrest Gump lived true.
Even now the sense of fresh cut grass awakens that first recognition of passion, of the chance to be beyond myself, of beating out the angst of that black and white town, of living the first kind of recognisable expression.
Like all potent memories, it makes me realise the simple pleasure of something that exists beyond measurement, away from awards, money, or even livelihood. It is a sense of when my youth became less precarious, away from the nibbling uncertainty of a limited life.