The Pitcairn Perspectives by Philip Spires - HTML preview

Edward Pitcairn’s blog

This has to be more than a valediction, but a goodbye it is. A goodbye to whom is a significant question, because my blog over the years has never achieved regularity, let alone ‘viral’ status, each entry being accessed by a good dozen faithful followers, only some of whom have even a passing interest in what I write. The rest just want to sell me something. If you have read my words in the past, thank you for showing an interest in my work. Like all human activity, my writing was conducted with no awareness of whether its significance would be anything other than personal, with no conscious effort to appeal to its audience, whoever they might be, with no ulterior motive. It was always born of a need to communicate, a need I have always felt, but a goal I have always found I had to strive only ever to partially achieve. I also dedicated it to the infinitive split, just to annoy the Disgusted Tunbridge Wells grammarians, who trawl the language of their lives in search of something that might annoy them. But as a valediction, there is a need to get something off my chest, as we used to say before Covid, to register something for posterity that cannot be expressed another way, at least not in the short time I am told I have.

I have just a few weeks, perhaps days to live. Like anyone, I suppose, I am not party to the schedule, but I am its destination, and the buffers at the end of the track are now in sight. I might have enough time to write again, but the decision is made. I am a man of my word, and this will be the last entry. Whatever time remains I must devote to my family and my work, since both seem in need of attention, both suffering from the same human frailty, that of duplicity. “All is fair in love and war,” I was once taught to recite, though the teacher never believed the phrase that was only ever used ironically, to signify that some behaviour had actually fallen short of what we normally accept as human, certainly well short of anything seen as ‘fair’ or ‘just’ or indeed anything that was ever born of the undeclared warfare that is love.

It remains a characteristic of the perspicacious human, perhaps retained from genes that were moulded by a different way of life, to seek short-term advantage. Feed and breed are both apparently rewarded by a competitive edge, while tire and expire remain longer term, an unwanted destiny. Perhaps that is why we are willing to shun tomorrow for the sake of gratification today. What is the point of assisting the inevitable?

The remnants of human life are all that are left to me. I hesitate to call them dregs. Of course, we must try to ignore the immediate, to take the longer view, to promote that which will benefit humanity, that elusive characteristic, a quality that is so rarely demonstrated by the animals included in its collective label. Only the consequence remains. A fight over food leaves one human dead and one alive, soon to die. The conflict, the winning, the losing, are nothing when compared to the consumption, which would have happened anyway, though perhaps in a different way. And, when long-term consequences of that assumption need to be assessed, ask the planet. With limited time remaining, I have lost interest in anything short-term, and perhaps the longer-term is to be denied me, permanently. Perhaps I am becoming obsessed with the unattainable… Perhaps that is what we all do, probably all of the time, but especially at the end of life.

At least this is true of individuals, though perhaps does not hold for societies and cultures. Perhaps those that survive compete more effectively, more successfully. Perhaps survival is for ‘the fittest’, the just analysis that appeals most to assumptions that have been planted in the human psyche, since the alternative of ‘better adapted’ removes any conscious individual human agency from the process. And it is this idea, perhaps, that fundamentally differentiates archaeology from history, since the latter must consider motive, tactic, success or failure, while the former merely records the eventual summary state of the community, within which all participants have shared the same destination, apparently uninfluenced by the passing detail of everyday life, though remains of the communally mundane provide our sole source of evidence. We diggers do not care who won or who might have lost, let alone why, if that ever be a valid question, because we are only interested in the ‘what’, the summary end product. An identified individual, especially one that is traceable across the lives of others, will make your own name, forever locate the pool of knowledge you have created as your own but, for an archaeologist, the individual find is no more than one more entry in a database of evidence, an anonymous but counted individual, where individuality is thus ideologically denied. In my career, I have never achieved such celebrity. Like any individual find, my career will only ever be added to the generality of things.

I find I have just argued a fundamental point. The short term is the only aspect of our lives that human agency can influence. It was Keynes who said, “In the long term we are all dead”, but the argument goes beyond mere comparison. “Plant pears for your heirs” was the fruit farmer’s proverb, because nature herself demanded that the rewards would inevitably be deferred. But when we, as humanity, allow individuality and personality to dominate over collective identity, such as culture or community, we have precisely no incentive to consider anything other than the here and now. The longer-term always hides behind more immediate personal priorities, the uneventful sum of miniscule change, and it is this that gives rise to environmentalist oxymorons such as, “How can I consume more sustainably?” I apologise for the dissolute nature of my thought… I am finding concentration increasingly hard.

In my current state, where a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer spread widely throughout my body predicts nothing but the short term for me, paradoxically it is posterity that becomes my obsession. Only the longer-term can now offer a sensation of victory, itself a short-term gratification felt on the perceived achievement, perhaps illusory, of a long-term goal. Personally, I never did seek permanence. The fact that my name, Edward Pitcairn, became associated with Watulapitiyalu and indigenous Australian culture was a mere by-product of an immediate involvement. We live, we love, we make love, we eat, drink and be merry and, in the end that combined experience, if experienced, takes us to the next day which, when we are honest with ourselves, is the only diurnal we have. It is only, paradoxically, when that goal is denied, or we decide to intellectualise the process that anything beyond tomorrow might enter the argument.

Yes, in my work there was a long view, but that seemed to develop only in retrospect, after the daily grind of work had revealed its accumulated finds, after the here and now and its experience had satisfied its needs. And then, just like an artist’s self-portrait must consciously reconstruct an imagined mirror image to place the brush in the correct hand, but probably leaves the face inverted, it is perhaps the later intellectual involvement with the short-term evidence that generates the perhaps illusory image of permanent conclusion or, more fundamentally, of a mere encounter with truth. The schema is constantly under review, but once crystallized it becomes knowledge, something to help us formulate judgment and to endure, but only, like the humans that created it, until it wears out, only until it is itself replaced by someone else’s clearer, longer, perhaps better view.

So, it becomes apparent that not only the find, itself, is important. Not only does evidence need to be amassed, but it needs to be assembled in context, in an environment where it might potentially make sense. Something uncovered before its significance can be assessed is worthy only of dismissal. It becomes an irrelevance, since it does not fit into any known pattern and, because it has no relation to any known reality, it cannot convey even its own significance. And no matter what that potential significance might be, it can only be realized by later interpretation which begins by rejecting the original reasons for dismissing it. The new schema must accommodate the old evidence and perhaps re-interpret it, as well as admit the new. Now this illustrates how the timing of the find is crucial: too early and the evidence is likely to be dismissed, too late and events have moved on. At the right time, discovered evidence can both construct the discussion and determine its outcome. It is for this reason I have deferred the publication of this last blog until after my predicted demise. Should events deny me my death, I still have an opportunity to suppress this evidence. To publish now would risk forcing the issue, which would be unwise. Things are still unclear. The present is still revealing itself.

When it comes to my name and its enduring association with the Australia work at Watulapitiyalu, I must set at least this record straight. The real credit should accrue to Gina Chupesi. She initiated the study, provided its framework, created the theoretical model which we together later demonstrated to be correct and organized most of the work. My ownership of the findings arose out of my pre-existing superior academic status, in particular my title, my achievements thus accruing by rank rather than by merit. I do not claim culpability, but I do accept responsibility.

Now merit is also an interesting, if also possibly an illusory concept in this context, since my entire involvement in the work of Dr. Chupesi came about as an entirely short-term exploitation of advantage, when, after an evening in the bar after a conference in Singapore, the two of us finished in bed together, excavating the depths of our shared desire to dig. The discoveries were significant and long lasting, and our relationship endured until her untimely death in that wholly avoidable accident. Roads in Northern Territories are usually not full of traffic. At night, an oncoming road train is often visible for miles before it arrives. The road is straight and good quality, so the head-on collision was put down to driver’s drowsiness. It was perhaps a coincidence that just four hours beforehand, she had asked me yet again to divorce my wife, her desire for official status to be added to our relationship again overcoming the pragmatism that had, for over a decade, kept it alive. Of course, I had told her, I could never divorce my wife. “It could kill her,” I said. The record, at least potentially, can now be straightened. It has only taken me twenty years…

Where I deserved recognition, and where I will nevertheless forever be seen as just an also-ran, is on Sawu. It has taken over ten years of detailed and intense work to assemble evidence that can thus far be described, at best, as minimal and merely circumstantial in reality. Paradoxically, in this case, it was my possession of status relative to my colleague, the indomitable Dr. Sarnu, that was always going to relegate my contribution to the references. A star student, an achiever, an ambitious rich boy intent on proving his significance, Dr. Onggo Sarnu was also once a friend, the protégé who became an equal and then a torturer. For the larger part of our years working together, we cooperated, shared decisions, jointly owned outcomes. And then, in a divergence that in retrospect might appear sudden, we adopted different, conflicting and irreconcilable standpoints based on the same evidence. Neither of us was willing even to consider the other’s point of view. For me, Sarnu has become a self-seeking, self-promoting, power-hungry liar. It could be that his position was always being dictated by those who hold influence over him, by powerful interests merely intent on asserting national and cultural control over identity-conferring history in the making. In the end, it’s all about ownership. Gone are the days, and rightly so, that colonial adventurers qualified only by their parochial ignorance could attach their names to places and ideas that had been known to indigenous culture for centuries. Thompson’s Falls in Kenya, Low’s Gully on Mount Kinabalu, Macquarie River in New South Wales, not to mention the thousands of others, are mere appropriation by the unworthy of other people’s collective identity. Good riddance to that horrible presumption of power-blinded white supremacy, but personally I cannot welcome the narrow-minded walled-in nationalism that has replaced it.

But on Sawu, my achievement is being denied me by the contemporary reaction to arrogant colonialism, that demands a foreigner in a former colonial possession cannot even be acknowledged as being involved and must be written out of the story. It is inverted discrimination which, like inverted snobbery, is every bit as vicious as the original. I cannot recognise Homo sarnuensis as a new species, in the same way that he cannot accept my postulate of a regional presence for florensis. Does it matter? Perhaps not. Perhaps it never mattered that the laws of thermodynamics were correct. Ask an engineer.

This conflict, this war that has been waged between us is not merely personal. There are surely bigger actors involved. Sarnu’s family business is a sponsor of my emeritus employer. They have become one of the tails that wags the dog, which is currently involved in biting off my daughter’s career. Gemma has been identified for censure in the past and her field is always populated by the conveniently expendable. For her part, Elsie is organizing the whole of London, it seems, to oppose the company’s and therefore the university’s plans. Who is to say that her campaign has had no impact on her mother’s status? And just how much of Sarnu’s insistence on claiming his pitch in posterity is personal? How much of it might be an official position, a policy of not wanting a foreigner to claim ownership of something now perceived as a national asset, or a method of promoting a fragile national identity or political position? How much might it be the Sarnu family identifying another, albeit minor, path to corporate promotion? And, if all or any of these were true, why did it become so personal? What drove a former student, someone I have known for over twenty-five years to try to break my skull? And, in the spirit of confession, which I have never officially attended, why do I so vehemently oppose? Am I being true to science, rationality, the persuasion of evidence, or am I pursuing the short term, the advantage to myself that will deny victory to my male competitor, like a stag clashing with another’s antlers to no avail? Why, in the end, does everything relegate to the personal, the individual? Ask Hamlet…

Over the years my blog has been a personal record. It has never tried to approach the official or the scientific, but it has always claimed rationality and judgment, albeit via a lens of reflection, not analysis. There have rarely been times when this light has been totally internally reflected, but one has now arrived. Indeed, I can feel the spotlight isolating me from within. The fact that this entry will probably never be published allows me freedom to relate the detail.

The events in question are confined to the history of last week, but now demand they be relived. It was just a fortnight after my diagnosis. I was released from my legal quarantine and I was intent on activity, but I could already sense the tiredness intensifying. I was starting for the first time in my life to lie in, to feel unable to wake. Gemma brought me my mug of tea. The slightest clatter onto the bedside table opened my eyes. She apologized. I said not to worry, that I couldn’t drink the tea if I was still asleep. She told me not to worry and reminded me that, breaking the imposed habit of weeks, she was going into college that day. She had asked me if I wanted to come, to say hello to old friends, to catch up. The night before I had suggested such a visit, convincing myself I was merely keen to show my face, but perhaps also imagining the little immediate victories that could be claimed in person. But by the morning, when the click of pot on wood woke me, she knew I would not stir. Will you come? she asked. I must have answered, though I don’t remember speaking. I was too tired. It was eight o’clock, she said, and confirmed that she was about to leave, that Geoff had already gone and that Elsie, poor, downtrodden, now redundant Elsie, was still in bed. “Just let her be,” Gemma said. “I’ll be back around four.” And then I slept.

I know that I slept for almost exactly an hour. When I woke, after subconsciously recording the slam of the door below and then reimagining its sound as dreamed, I was facing my watch, habitually propped on its strap so it’s dial - can a digital display be said to be a dial? - behaved like a miniature bedside clock. It displayed 08:44. The tea was tepid. I reached and drank. I felt suddenly better, ready to wake, recalling the numerous times I had found myself persuading disbelieving others of tea’s ability to deliver a caffeine shot. It was then that I heard the voices.

Backstreet London can be as quiet as anywhere. Street parking keeps traffic slow. There are a few motorbikes, especially when compared to the constant cacophony of two-stroke Yogya, fewer pedestrians, fewer still who converse. And the street, after all, is three floors down. Aircraft rarely intrude here, the low drone barely louder than a distant kettle, and, in times when viruses travel, people do not, so the skies, that quiet morning, were anyway empty.

Two familiar voices muffled through the bare, stained floorboards, the draughty gaps between also admitting sound. The number two and the familiarity are crucial. Elsie’s room was below mine. It had not moved, at least in the three weeks since I had begun my now permanent residence. I had heard the heavy, panelled door close many times, its squeaking ceramic handle announcing entry or departure. I had heard the cupboard doors open and close, drawers slide and chairs move, but though my granddaughter’s touch could never be described as subtle, it was never heavy. She used headphones to access her beloved media, and used her phone sotto voce, too quietly for me ever to catch the detail I regularly found myself trying to eavesdrop. But here, this morning, there were voices. There was also noise.

An anatomist friend once introduced me to an experience I would never have independently sought, but which I have never forgotten. The academic in question was also a specialist in anatomical archaeology and we had attended a conference in Nairobi. The subject had been recent finds in Kenya and Tanzania, Olduvai, Turkana, and the rest. For some weeks we had been in contact because we had prepared and then presented a joint paper on what might constitute definitive evidence on the identification of species-defining differences in bone fragments originating in the human foot. She had suggested a side trip, to somewhere where speciation was quite specific, if that’s not a tautology. It all depends on which specific vowel gets stressed… And so, we had a wonderful few days on Fregate in the Seychelles, where we encountered the blue pigeon, the incomparably rare Seychelles magpie robin and the fly-clouded olfactory experience of the giant tortoise.

It was when we were walking across this utterly quiet, car-less, engine-less diminutive island, that we had heard what sounded like tree felling in process. The tropical forest so close to the sea is not thick – we call it kerangas in Bahasa – but it was thick enough in places to deny more than twenty metres of clear sight. The noise grew, literally in our estimation describing an axe determinedly attacking a substantial trunk. And then the clearing opened, and we were presented with the spectacle of a pair of giant tortoises coupling at its centre, shells banging like car crashes. Our disturbance resulted in coitus interruptus, as the male slid to the side with a rasp, grunted and immediately started to feed. The newly disinterested female made her way to the edge of the space, paused by the first tree and gently sank down into mud and peed.

I mentioned the noise. My companion reminded me that humans make noise too. We were both silent for a moment, our eyes on each other, reminding ourselves that the island’s only hotel boasted bamboo-stilted rooms whose walls were acoustically transparent palm fronds. Here, in Islington, on this particular morning, the plaster, lath and the floorboards that separated my hearing from the coupling below provided no acoustic insulation. Tortoises, unlike people, do not have memorable voices.

My thoughts were immediately thrust back a day, recalling a conversation that had stayed so firmly etched in my mind that I doubt it will ever fade, the ‘never’ for me being about a month, or perhaps less… We had eaten. It was one of those now rare events, the family meal, where all the occupants of the house had gathered to share. To share food might be a necessary qualification, but for such sharing to be familial, it implies the sharing of everything. It’s a mark of the age that, despite having a kitchen equipped to the rafters, boasting enough workspace, even not counting its recently installed island, to display apparently the entire stock of a Camden Lock antiques market, the meal was a take-away, or should I say a brought-in, a telephoned order to the Jaweli Tandoori around the corner on Holloway Road and delivered by a helmeted young woman dressed in shorts, a high vis vest, and Doc Martens on a bike. I’m told that when it rains, she comes in a van.

It was a memorable experience, chicken jalfrezi, chana aloo, sag paneer, brinjal bhaji, vegetable biryani, nan and raita. Over the years, I seem to have developed a photographic memory when it comes to eating. It was all a bit too bland for me, I announced, making reference to Indonesian food, which tends to be spicier than British-Indian, and Elsie, forever the one to please immediate need, had retrieved a more than mature half full jar of lime pickle from deep within a cupboard to satisfy my craving for spice. I accepted, noting that it still was not Indonesian sambal belacan. Gemma had expressed disbelief, saying that her daughter cooked so little she was surprised she knew where anything was in the kitchen. Elsie announced, to her mother’s clear astonishment, that she knew where everything was in this house. It was the little wink she gave in my direction that caught the attention. What was she saying? And to whom was it being addressed? Apparently, none of us knew. But the food diverted our attention. We ate. We enjoyed. We conversed. We were family, with our dietary preferences apparently taken away by a take-away.

A family meal. Except for Geoff, of course. Grandad, Mum, Elsie, all in a line of onlys, only son, only daughter, only daughter. Whose son was Geoff? Exactly who was this outsider, this invitee to the household, this bed partner for my daughter, this part-time brought-in order, this temporary resident, this largely silent presence who seemed to harbour opinion but never express it?

Geoff Sullivan was his name, he had told me, soon after my arrival, so presumably his father was also a Sullivan. He had told me before, of course, since I had already met him, albeit always in passing on my previous visits. But we had never spent what might be described as ‘time’ together, since he is a relatively recent addition to my daughter’s not extensive trophy cabinet. It was John Harness, of course, who was always the devoted husband, until he definitely lost both aspects of that label, when a fling with a younger woman destroyed the devoted and a hurried divorce cut the husband. There was another bloke, another academic, a philosopher if I remember, who did not last long. They never do. And then there was Geoff, the long-term benefits clerk, with his South London pedigree, conveniently far enough away not to impinge, neither to be locatable nor traceable. I had taken the trouble to ask Gemma if she had ever met any of his family. “No,” she answered. How about an old flame? “No,” she answered. A colleague? “He never brings his work home,” she said. “Boring.” Again, I find myself intrigued by the distance this Geoff created, as if the resulting void were a shield.

I had been feeling better a couple of days before that shared meal. I had announced at six thirty in the morning that I wanted breakfast out, partly because I was feeling more than a little enclosed. My misnamed ten-day quarantine had just ended and I needed to get out of the house, away from the confines of that potential coffin and partly because I wanted perhaps for the last time to renew my acquaintance with Islington, the place I had got to know so well over the years, the place, if any such place might exist, that I called ‘home’.

I walked. Highbury Corner, down the gentle slope of New North Road to Essex Road and beyond as far as Coleman Fields. Then back up the streets via Packington to re-join Essex, where, down an adjoining alleyway that would pass by a mere passer-by, there is a café, pronounce ‘caff’, of course, that does the kind of food that once characterized working-class life in what was once a working-class area, the kind of food that now contributes to the embarrassment, depressed property prices and bad name of a postcode, though probably not in London N1. Liver and onions. Steak and kidney pie. Pie and mash with or without liquor. Steak and kidney pud! And, importantly for someone hailing from a household that breakfasts on coffee, fruit juice, quinoa, muesli, sun-dried tomato Mediterranean bread in a plastic wrapper, and more coffee, the caff offers a full English breakfast, complete with meatless sausage, fatty bacon and two eggs, a vision on that morning that took on the character of a revelation from heaven. I can hold on the baked beans, but tinned tomatoes are a treat that soddens the toasted white sliced.

The place was vibrant, filled with the chatter of still-spaced people, eager to renew their acquaintance with life after the forced closures and confinements of recent months. I had eaten. I had just taken a top up to my tea, the vast stainless-steel teapot having been clattered open, an extra bag tossed in, hissing steam pressured into its cavernous space, its hinged lid noisily closed, and the entire volume bodily shaken for a few seconds to mix the old with the new to retain the quality. It was then I saw Geoff Sullivan, ten minutes’ walk away from that kitchen I had left over an hour earlier, heading down Upper Street towards the Angel.

Instinctively, no doubt bloody-mindedly, I left the tea, paid up and followed, frantically trying to keep up. Ostensibly he was on his way to work, I suppose. Somewhere near the Angel, had been the answer to my query of where exactly does he work? He would leave the house always at seven forty-five and always walked. To where, specifically, neither Gemma nor Elsie knew, nor, it had occurred to me, was he willing to say. But this was well past ten o’clock, long after the occupant of a desk job ought to have become rooted to his furniture.

I followed. It was a large building near the Angel, the kind that boasts presence, but shuns identity, the kind where there are no grand corporate signs, only an admixture in matrix array of labels, each visiting card size, bearing collections of names that read like a randomised phone book. He went in. Five minutes later, while I was still loitering over the road, wondering what I might do with my embarrassingly devious mind, which seemed to seek out opportunities to distrust people, he reappeared, crossed the road and went into the tube station. He did not reappear. In a feat of true intellectual deduction, I concluded he may have taken a train. Perhaps an appointment out of the office, perhaps a meeting… A devious mind decided to check.

I crossed the road and entered the building via its permanently rotating glass doors, which I gently pushed. They immediately stopped, causing a young man in the opposite segment of circle to shout, “Just let it hang, mate! Cool. It stops if you touch it. Just let it happen.” I was still trying to translate his message when the door abruptly restarted and resumed its independent, stately rotation. Inside there was an over-lit void. A large metal contraption probably called an artwork occupied the atrium’s upper volume, while an altar-like reception desk left only a narrow alley via which the building’s guts might be accessed. There was a doorman, probably referred to as a security guard, or rather ‘officer’, seated priest-like behind. I approached.

I asked for Geoff Sullivan by name. The doorman was in a bright uniform which bore the type of over-stated, over-coloured, logo one might expect to advertise a contracted private security firm, one that probably employed exclusively on zero hours. It resembled a costume that might have been better suited to the private army of a James Bond film villain. I`ve come to see Geoff Sullivan, I announced. I was of course immediately bombarded with the Covid rules. I wasn`t wearing a mask. I hadn’t sanitized my hands. Appointments are prearranged via the website or app only, mate. I need to see Geoff Sullivan, I said. Who? The man who came in ten minutes ago and left five minutes later, I said somewhat over-specifically. No chance, mate, came the reply. Appointments only. I don’t know his name, anyway. But he’s never here. His office is upstairs, but he uses it just for mail. Comes and collects and then disappears. We hardly see him. Do you want to leave a note? No, I said, it’s not urgent, which, of course, it now was. Benefits clerk? With an office in the building that was clearly not municipal? Privatized services? Contracted out? There were many possible explanations, but the only one that made sense was opacity.

Twelve hours later, we happened to be watching television together back at Gem’s house. Unusually in a household without a content contract, and thanks to the Covid virus, there was football on the television, not that the experience excited sufficiently to generate much comment. The blokes were still being blokey, the uneventful match eventually giving way to talk smaller than usual.

You’re from the south, I had asked, the ‘London’ being both implied and understood. Yeah, West Hill, Wandsworth. I nodded, indicating I knew the generality. I was, of course, lying, silently. You would have gone to Elliott, no doubt, or perhaps Southfields. Sure did. Elliott. Mid-nineties? He nodded. There was a near miss on the box. We both commented that if basketball players regularly missed the target, they would be dropped. Geoff appeared to want to be sociable. He seemed relaxed, defences momentarily down.

You will remember my wife, I said. She used to teach there. Elliot? Yes. He paused for a just a second or two, just a tad longer than he had previously anticipated would be necessary. Mrs. Pitcairn… I don’t remember being taught by her, though I do remember the name. Geography, I said. Didn’t do much geography then, he said. She was a small woman with long grey hair, swept back in a bun? It was all his personal, freely offered memory. Yes, that’s her. Her hair wasn’t always grey, of course, and the bun came later on, the style she adopted having declared herself an old woman. We used to joke about it. Mrs. Pitcairn… Ah, yes. She was very quiet. She never taught me, but I do remember the name.

My wife, Penny, was a devoted teacher for many years. She had worked in several London schools, having risen to the status of an advisory teacher at the height of her career. Her subject area was Special Needs, Learning Support, as it became, my invention of geography being the bait that was swallowed. By the later nineties, she was already ill, already having been forced to give up her full-time position because of the pressures of illness and its treatments. The step back was advised, and a step back she took, opting to do peripatetic special-needs tuition to small groups of students, largely part-time, largely without contract, largely on supply. She did work in Elliott school, and so would probably have never encountered a mainstream pupil such as Geoff Sullivan. But the complication for Geoff arises from two little details his briefing had not anticipated. The small woman with the grey hair in a bun was a perfectly accurate description of my wife. It accurately describes a specific picture of her I had published on my website, a picture that has been public property via the Internet since I nostalgically put a personal site together and published it when I started the Sawu work. It was a special photo, that specific picture, taken on a wedding anniversary just a few months before she died. It was like a final memory of her real self before the cancer would effect its terminal devastation of her body. I chose it for that reason, to give it special memory status. I didn’t have many photos of her from that period, because she became reluctant to pose and so it was that this unrepresentative representation, taken on that special day, so special that the hair, which normally hung loose to her shoulders, was tied up in a bun in deference to the near formality of the occasion, so it was that this image appeared on my site. God knows why, because for our anniversary dinner we were only going to the Sultan’s Armpit up Essex Road.

Penny and I were from that generation before mobile phones existed, and we only carried a camera when we travelled. In our youth, photography was expensive, at least the developing and printing of photographs was expensive. We took few photographs. And when we did take them, their prime function was to record experience, not to advertise ourselves. There are in existence only a handful of photographs that have survived the years of travel and hard work. The grey-haired bun of our wedding anniversary was the pick of the bunch. All the others, had anyone had access to them except me, showed Penny with her long hair down, shoulder length, originally black, later increasingly grey, streaked at first and then all consuming.

The other complication that Geoff Sullivan could not have anticipated, the other bait he swallowed whole, was that Penny Pitcairn qualified as a teacher before we were married. She was after all two years older than me, a fact that often had me call her a ‘cradle snatcher’, a term that used to render her playfully argumentative. Her maiden name was Stead and she never changed it, at least professionally. Throughout her career she was Stead, first Miss and later Ms. She was never Mrs, a title she despised, though representing an institution she persistently worshiped. At least in school she was never Mrs. Pitcairn, always Miss or Ms. Stead.

So, Geoff Sullivan was not a benefits clerk. And he was not a student in Elliot school. And his claimed recollection of my wife was merely a regurgitation of the publicly available, certainly not born of any personal experience. And that particular morning, given the loud humping and shouts percolating through the ceiling and floorboards from the room below, he was no longer the chosen partner of my daughter, Gemma, but the bedmate of Elsie, my precious, beautiful, promiscuous and now devious granddaughter.

Over that take-away carry-out brought-in meal from the Jaweli on Holloway Road, extra spiced by the lime pickle Elsie had just located, I decided to play the advocate of a devil, though which one I am not sure.

There’s nothing like a bit of extra spice in life, I said to Elsie, with a wink. She smiled. She always does, partly to show off those perfect teeth. How was Hackney Metro today, Gem? I asked. She shrugged. I wish I could say ‘same’, she said, but it’s not. It’s full of teachers frantically preparing materials, frankly, doing more prep than they have done in years, and confused administrators imitating headless chickens, carrying letters of complaint under their wings. There’s a concerted campaign amongst the students to ask for a reduction in their fees because they are not being taught. Did anyone ask after me? I asked. No, said Gemma. Didn’t you go into college as well? asked Elsie. Edward was too tired this morning, darling, said Gemma. I decided to let him sleep. Do you have any more of those fresh green chillies you put in my soup, Gem? I asked. I fancy a bit more spice in my life, I said, tittering, and offering another wink towards Geoff Sullivan, who partially choked on a chickpea.

Short term rules… Or does it? Perhaps I am part of a longer game.