Discontinuities

31/12/2024

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1

They were two incidents so small that many in the prospective supermarkets would hardly have noticed, and they had nothing of the melodrama I remember reading about when a customer in a shop in London told a black security guard that he didn’t belong in the country. That was an incident of drunken abuse and it became much more than a scene in a supermarket. It became a media story. 

I suppose the two moments I am thinking about are examples of mundane entitlement and opportunism (as opposed to the exaggerated, abusive and undeniably racist one that made it into the news). In the first, which happened a couple of years ago, a friend was in the queue at a shop in Oxford when someone came in, took a peek at the lengthy line and asked my friend, who was at the front of it, would he be awfully kind and get him a packet of cigarettes, pressing ten pounds into his fist as he mentioned the brand. Victor thought it churlish to say no, knew it would only take a few seconds of his time, would thus hardly hold up the people behind him, and so did what he was told. It was only retrospectively he thought of the phrase doing what he was told, and yet though he knew he would have done the same for anyone, not anyone would have asked. When he told me the story about a week later, on a visit to Scotland, where I live, he said that for days afterwards and indeed even on the train up, he knew that only certain people would make such a request, and told me that the man was in his early twenties, clearly a student at the university and, no less clearly, Victor reckoned, a product of an elite education that started long before he got to Oxford. He didn’t deny the young man had asked him politely, knew too that the request wouldn’t take long, and perhaps that the young man was in a hurry. But he also knew that he would never have been able to make the same entreaty, and while he may have liked to think that his refusal to do so would have been based on decency, he supposed it was based more on a lack of confidence: that he couldn’t have dealt with the humiliation of being told that he could wait in the queue like everyone else. I asked what he thought the young man would have done if Victor had said that. He guessed the young man would have shrugged his shoulders and asked the next person. I asked Victor what he would have done. He reckoned he would have immediately left the shop, perhaps not returned for weeks, maybe months, afraid someone who witnessed the humiliation might have seen him.  

I said to him there really was nothing to chastise the person over even if he might want to attack the system that gave some people immense confidence and appeared to rob it from others. The man was affable and hardly pushy — he couldn’t dislike him for chancing his arm, pushing his luck or any other idiomatic phrase that nevertheless when thinking of such terms brought to mind not a toff with an expensive education, but a cheeky chappy with a comprehensive one. 

We were talking in the Park Bar, a pub not far from Kelvingrove Park in Finnieston, and a place I would frequent for its proximity to my flat and its nostalgic distance from the Outer Hebrides. I was born on the island and returned often for holidays after my parents moved to Glasgow when I was three. But when they sold the cottage when I was fourteen, it was as though my memories were trapped in time. Though I have returned on occasion since, even hiring out the very cottage that I vacationed in when I discovered it had become a holiday let, I seemed happiest frequenting the pub rather than returning to the island. Those two further vacations were nice but I couldn’t access my past feelings and, perhaps because my expectations were so high, the disappointment deterred me from further visits after those them. With no such expectations in the Park Bar, I am sometimes surprised when I have a moment of recognition in an overheard conversation, and find myself back on the island. I described this to Victor that day. He was up for a weekend conference, and I would see him several times a year since he was closely affiliated with the university. Anyway, I wondered if some live more continuously than others: that the private schoolboy existed as if there were no separation between his childhood and his adulthood, between his private schooling and his university education, and that he would go and find a job where the old boy’s network would allow for the continuation not only of the wealth that his parents probably had, but the set of assumptions that meant he need never question how continuous his life is. I said to Victor that I didn’t want to exaggerate my kinship with the island, nor my alienation from it. But I said that often when sitting in this very bar, I would see someone come in and immediately start a conversation with another Islander. Within minutes, they were talking about people they knew in common, Stornoway pubs, and incidents at school. I supposed they too had their continuous existence; my distance from it, that I knew the island but didn’t know the people and hadn’t gone to the school, meant mine could only be discontinuous. It was an island that contained many of my memories but not shared ones: I couldn’t pop into the Park Bar and expect to recollect various moments of my childhood with others except in a vague, geographical way — saying I knew the beaches in Gary or Uig, that I knew the cafes the Coffee Pot and the Rendezvous, and liked the ice cream from the latter. I could talk a little about the Woolies that occupied the very centre of this small town, and the pick ’n’ mix sweets that I would buy and very occasionally steal, with my heart hammering in my rib cage, my throat dry with fear, and my face burning with adrenaline, and the shame of possibly being caught. Once in the bar, I heard others speaking of stealing from the shop. It was after the chain closed down and people would often joke that their first shoplifting experience was at Woolworth’s. In the bar, three men around my age were discussing the shops’ demise and saying how they hoped they had contributed just a little to bringing down capitalism. They were laughing and insisted, while their parents sometimes went on strike, or would go to the mainland and down south to help families who were involved in trying to keep the Scottish collieries open in the mid-eighties, they were fighting the system from within, taking down capitalism one sweet at a time. They laughed as though it was a source of great pride, and I was reminded of the shame that I felt then, and supposed might have felt less now, if I too was sharing the memory with others who had likewise stolen from the shop.  They remembered collectively and alleviated any possible shame with a humorous politicisation. I found myself wondering how frequently shame isn’t the consequence of an act of wrong-doing but of singular-doing; that the shame arises because the act and the feeling aren’t shared. There I was overhearing a story of the very shoplifting I too had practised and they joked together while I recalled in shameful solitude. 

In trying to explain such thoughts and feelings to Victor, I knew I wasn’t alone in them even if they were solitary acts — and when I overheard the others it was a solitary response. What I liked about my friendship with Victor, and with a couple of other friends, was that we weren’t part of a peer group where we all shared experiences collectively, but were isolated individuals whose default state was solitude. We alleviated it in company rather than generated experiences out of it together, and if Victor, as well as Liam, Jean-Louis, and  Mark, were my closest friends, then that didn’t mean they were close with each other. Liam and Jean-Louis had never met, and the others only very occasionally. They all lived in different cities: Mark in Glasgow, Liam in London, Jean-Pierre in Paris and Victor of course in Oxford, and they were all living quite different lives. Mark worked in television sport, Victor was a language professor, Liam, a social worker, and Jean-Pierre, a music journalist who made his living working in a record store. I would say I was the common denominator but it probably would be more accurate to say that a relationship to solitude happened to be, even if Mark was married with children and Liam had been with his partner for a decade. It was as if we drew out from each other a reserve we could share but that in our daily lives took the form of observation. Yet while with Mark I could discuss the intricacies of a spor person’s psychology, with Jean-Louis a shared understanding of music and more generally the arts, and with Liam the vulnerability of not just his clients but his ongoing fragility as I knew he believed he drank too much and took drugs too often, with Victor, many of our discussions were based on experiences we would have that seemed too negligible to pass for anecdote. He told me of his example just after I had told him mine, an incident that happened a week earlier and in a cut-price German supermarket I often used to even up the costs of shopping in the city’s most expensive one on Byres Road. 

        2

I was queuing behind four other people, with about fifteen items in my basket, when a woman behind the person behind me, and who only had a punnet of strawberries, asked if he would look after her basket, which had a dozen or so items in it. She said she had forgotten a couple of things and would be back in a moment. She was gone for several minutes and returned with another four or five items. During the minutes she was away, he pushed the basket with his feet as the queue edged forward. Just after she returned I was due to go the checkout when I said to the boy, who couldn’t have been more than eighteen, he should go ahead; it was only one item. I stepped aside a few inches and he continued ahead. The woman, whose basket the boy had been looking after, then said to me I needed to get in the right queue, that I was standing in the wrong place. I said that the only reason I was a few inches out of it was because I just let someone in ahead of me, someone who had been taking care of her basket. I added that one good deed deserves another and I looked at the person who was next in the line after her and asked him to confirm that I'd been waiting a few minutes. , He concurred but at the same time looked like he didn’t want to get involved, and with perhaps good reason. The woman flicked her head round and told him to shut up. He wasn’t there, she said. He obviously had been and said I could go ahead of him.

The thing is, I said to Victor, the woman was black, and I offered this only because I believed it was central to the exchange. When I said I had been in the queue before her she insisted I shouldn’t make trouble, that people like me were always making trouble. I looked at the person on the checkout as she said this. He was also black, and I felt if I pushed ahead and insisted I was next, he would have served me, but she was moving towards the counter and started putting items on the conveyer belt. He appeared to show her neither warmth nor contempt, and when I came after her he apologised and said he didn’t see what happened. I believed him, even if his position may have been difficult and that it would have been easier just to ignore it: a black woman feeling a white man wanted to jostle ahead of her and he feeling obliged to back her up. But such a claim would reflect my own prejudice, however well-meaning the assumption may have been. He was his own man and there was no reason why he should automatically have sided with her when he didn’t know precisely what had happened. I admired him for it, though I sensed he knew she was in the wrong in his very apology. Did he know that this was something she generally did, even if he didn't see her doing it on this occasion? It made his position perhaps all the more admirable: he knew she would usually skip queues and generate animosity but still he didn’t wish to pre-judge. But that would be to put a thought in a person's head who may have never seen the woman before, and certainly hadn't seen her jumping queues. 

Victor asked me how important I thought it was that the cashier was black. I said while I didn’t think there was any reason that he was, it was my prejudice that made me wonder why he didn’t side with her; so reckoned I should share that perception with him. Victor asked, saying he knew of someone who presented an anecdote about a van backing into him with the clear premise that it was a Polish driver. Four of them were having dinner, in his place in Oxford, all of them post-graduate students, and one of them was discussing a trip they had taken to the Highlands after hiring a car in Edinburgh. Genevieve found it easy enough driving in the city, and up the A9, but when they found themselves on single lane roads with passing spaces, often on winding lanes up hills, they felt they were driving in a different country from only an hour earlier. If part of the pleasure of the Highlands was the isolation; part of the precarity lay in those single lanes. Richard said roads can be pretty precarious in towns like Oxford as well, and started speaking about this Polish driver who backed into him a couple of weeks earlier. Jan asked whether it was so important that the driver was Polish, and Fatima looked uncomfortable, as though she could see in Richard’s remark, a prejudice she had previously observed. Jan asked Richard if there was anything specifically about the man’s actions that meant he needed to be designated as Polish. Richard looked bemused and Jan added that if one were to say the army attacked the army it wouldn’t make much sense: you have to say the English army attacked the French army, or vice versa. It is important nationalities are named. But a Polish driver backing into his car seemed only to need a driver; it didn’t need a nationality attached. Victor was impressed by Jan’s reasoning and had noticed like Fatima a couple of previous occasions where Richard’s comments could appear prejudiced, but he remained silent. Richard became more animated, saying why shouldn’t he say the driver was Polish when he was, and Fatima said that if this were an isolated example the redundancy could pass. But she remembered a conversation with him a couple of weeks earlier; he said that he had been ripped off by a Pakistani shopkeeper. The point of the story seemed to be that you cannot trust Pakistanis just as now, she said, you can’t trust Polish drivers. Richard said maybe it was true: the country was overrun by foreigners as he went on to say that the Polish driver, after backing into him, pulled away without acknowledging the accident.  Genevieve asked how he knew the driver was Polish if he hadn’t spoken to him. Richard said that he was driving a transit van and had been working on a house on the street - and everybody knew that most of the work done in Oxford these days was by Poles. 

        So, Victor explained to me, here we had an Englishman (Richard), telling a French student, a German student, and a Lebanese immigrant whose family came in the eighties, and thus a foreigner over-running the country, all hearing a story about a terrible Polish driver who may not have been Polish at all. Fatima asked Richard if he couldn’t see that his remarks could be seen as racist, at least xenophobic, and he replied of course they weren’t: there he was with friends from different countries, and what he liked so much about being English was the tolerance. Jan wondered if that was a useful adjective; that it meant the English tolerated people unlike themselves. Richard said he’d been persecuted enough; that all he wanted to do was tell a little anecdote and here everybody was turning on him. He left, and the others continued discussing the question in Richard’s absence, as though determined not to talk rudely and directly about Richard, but to make sure they weren’t merely offering a counter-prejudice. Victor didn't want to give the impression that Richard would have seemed hounded out of the room. 

It was the first time during the discussion that Victor said anything and he said to me he found it amusing that while Richard was needlessly invoking a characteristic that was irrelevant to the story in invoking Polishness (and where the person may not have even been a Pole!), how often now do people describe people fairly but vaguely, determined to avoid offence? He told the others, and in turn me, that he was at a couple of parties in recent months and on both occasions absurdities arose. At one, a colleague was trying to speak about someone who was coming to the party; he asked Victor if he knew him. The colleague described the man as of medium height, with dark hair, glasses and that he usually wore a suit. They were all accurate descriptions of the man but they could also have described half a dozen people at the party already, and it wasn’t until twenty minutes later when the man arrived and the colleague said there he is, that Victor knew he was talking about. It was a man who was distinctive because of his size: he weighed around 20 stone, and yet this was not offered as part of the description since it might have been deemed prejudicial. A similar instance happened a week later when someone was describing another person in the building next to theirs and told him just about everything about the man except that he was black. As this man was the only black academic in the building, and there were several of medium height, black, curly hair and glasses (including Victor’s own colleague who also happened to be obese) then the description was lacking its most salient feature. In this context, in each instance, obesity and blackness were the distinguishing feature. He added that Richard’s designation had no descriptive necessity, no reason at all to mention the man was Polish, and perhaps here resides in these anecdotes the problem of racism and political correctness. In the first instance, the potential racist or xenophobe insists on an adjective when it is unnecessary; in the latter refuses the most pertinent one when it is important.  

      3    

By this reckoning, I said, we weren’t racist, xenophobic or politically correct in telling stories about an English public schoolboy or a black woman asking for a favour. But we might be by someone else’s standards. Ours were analytic but were they objective? How could they be, we both admitted, and he reckoned was this not my job rather than his, was I not the philosophy teacher? It was true that I did my undergraduate in philosophy and psychology and decided to teach philosophy when the chance arose. But I usually taught old problems, a sort of greatest hits that allowed just a little room for the students to meditate upon some of the questions. I had never in my classes wondered what would happen when describing a situation without prejudice; what are the terms upon which it can be achieved? Perhaps if the students didn’t have an exam to pass, I would have proposed a philosophical question each week based on a story from the news or their lives. It wasn’t that Descartes’ Evil Genius, Plato’s Forms and Mill’s utilitarianism weren’t of interest. Still, I am not sure if any of them were useful to our present discussion, nor many other problems people have to comprehend. 

Victor suspected they were more pertinent than I was willing to admit. I was probably just showing my frustration towards curriculum learning rather than to the thinkers I mentioned, and he wondered whether utilitarianism might be of some use to at least our discussion, even if in a negative way. How for example, he wondered, does the greatest good for the greatest number work in the context of race, when black people are a minority in a given country? Should their perspective be ignored because it isn’t a majority one? He apologised for simplifying utilitarian theory, yet it was only so he could say something about the majority. In the examples he gave, about the student discussing the Polish van driver, and mine about the black woman, we could view them from two utilitarian prisms. The greatest number thought Richard was wrong when he felt the need to invoke the Polish van driver, believing it wasn’t relevant to the story he was telling. But at the same time, it wasn’t just that the majority agreed; what mattered too was that an argument could be made convincingly which the majority could justify. If everybody had said Richard was wrong, without any evidence beyond a majority rule, that wouldn’t have been very fair. Richard would have been right to have exited aware he wasn’t given a just hearing. But that he walked out, despite others determined to explain why what he said was problematic, left Richard, they all thought, very much in the wrong. Richard may have felt they were all picking on him — instead, they were picking apart a troublesome remark he made. Richard couldn’t see the difference. 

Now let us, he said, think of the story I had told him about the black woman in the queue. Would she, too, have felt that she was being picked on rather than that I was picking up on an injustice? All things considered, she was acting badly: she expected someone to do her a favour and keep her place in the queue, and then when she saw the chance to jump the line, when I stood to one side to let the person who had helped her go ahead of me, she took it. But what was this injustice next to many she may have suffered over the years, in the process perhaps of getting into the UK, or the racism she may have endured once here? And there I was invoking others to point out her unfairness, assuming that a majority view would be enough to dissuade her from continuing ahead of me. He said what was interesting about my anecdote, as opposed to his about a queue jumper, was that he assumed with some certainty that the man was comfortably off and took for granted a level of entitlement that meant of course he would ask in an affable manner if he could get served early. It was as if in allowing the man to do so or not Victor needn’t entertain the variables of colonialism in doing so. I looked a little surprised as he said this, and he quickly added that he didn’t want to mock post-colonial discourses and the little he knew about them. But the reality was that he understood the context of the young man in the supermarket as I appeared not to understand the broader context of the black woman in the line. When she said that you people are always making trouble, what did she mean by such a claim? It was as if she had invoked a history of racial injustice to justify a moment of mundane unfairness, and was this a moment of astonishing opportunism or the reawakening of a trauma that so mundane an incident as a person chastising her in a queue could invoke? He said it seemed to him that though his incident showed a pleasant young man asking a favour, people could more easily see what he did as taking advantage, but in such an agreeable way that few would have seen obnoxiousness in the deed. The thing was, the behaviour wasn’t objectionable; the confidence behind it, the private education, the family wealth, generations of privilege, might have been, and Victor felt it to be so because he knew he couldn’t have acted likewise. It reminded me of the phrase ‘never in a million years’. But this was an exaggeration containing within it a simple point: maybe four or five generations are enough to possess that type of assurance. 

Victor accepted the point: generations of confidence which made the young man so agreeable may have been part of the generations of oppression that made the woman so disagreeable. However, to rush to the latter judgement, to justify such behaviour in historical terms, seemed too easy, and Victor concurred. But the flipside was easier still, and one that would allow many a racist to claim that black people are difficult. Yet he admitted there was another position a potential racist or xenophobe might take that was harder to dismiss, or at least potentially valid in its argumentation. Let us say, he proposed, that you are not claiming to be a racist, or a xenophobe (though you might be); you want to be pragmatic about race relations in your country, and you’re also seeking the greatest happiness for the greatest number. If that greatest number is white, surely the whites’ happiness should be the priority. He of course didn’t believe this but it was he supposed a utilitarian racial argument and one he reckoned many in the UK agreed with; this was their country and why should they be expected to conform to values other than their own? He said perhaps one of the problems with many an argument today is that the two are conflated by opponents: the racially utilitarian with the outright racist. The racist will insist that other races are inferior; the white British person who reckons this is their country will say no more than that those from other countries should abide by the values and expectations of this one. 

As we talked I wondered what others would make of two white men discussing race theory; what would those who spent years studying and those who have suffered the consequences of racism, make of this? I said to him that there we were in the Park Bar in Glasgow, and in this environment, we were strangers, though he was a far greater stranger than me. I knew snippets of Gaelic,I  knew the cafes and pubs they were talking about, and also various locations on the island. When they said the Coffee Pot or the Rendezvous, these names meant nothing to him but conjured up memories in my mind. But I knew I was an outsider here as I would come in occasionally on my own, sometimes with a friend, but rarely talked to anyone else. If I did talk, I would say I knew the island a little, that I was born there and holidayed there as a child, and they were pleased that I remembered the island fondly enough to come occasionally to a pub that reminded me of it. But I wasn’t asked to sit at anybody’s table and I suppose I was seen as no more than a tourist who recalled places as visitors look at photos of the countries where they have been. My nostalgia was much greater than that, but it wouldn’t have been the equal of those in the bar who would prefer to live on the island but where work had removed them from it. Their existence was both continuous and discontinuous, and the continuity rested on coming to this bar aware that for various reasons they had been expected or obliged to leave the island they loved, a love I assumed — otherwise why keep coming to the one bar in Glasgow that invoked island life and drew so many from the island to it? If leaving the island was the great moment of discontinuity; then the bar was an attempt at that continuity. But what I was doing there, why did I keep returning to a place that if anything emphasised my discontinuousness? 

4

It could seem like I wanted to drag Victor into my personal reflections, and perhaps I did, but I think the main reason I asked was to understand an aspect of the black woman’s experience without pretending to know what that might be or to dismiss her selfishness as just that. Looking at her queue-jumping in isolation, all I could see was a terrible person, someone who wished to take advantage of others for her own gain. But perhaps I needed to understand better the discontinuous possibilities in her life; how she may have been in a country that she found hostile, speaking a language she never felt was her own, and finding the only way she could hold on to a sense of self was by assuming that people exploit or are exploited. Instead of seeing that a person had offered a good deed (the boy who looked after her basket) she saw the easily exploitable, and decided that in me was someone who wanted to take advantage; even though all I could see was my place stolen in the queue, what she saw was someone trying to get one over her — even if I was merely ahead in the line. Victor looked at me as though I was trying too hard to justify her behaviour, but I wanted to make clear it wasn’t hers that I was trying to understand. I  was trying to comprehend how when the continuity of our lives is broken, when we either feel our values are relative or our situation fragile, we act in a way that is inexplicable, unacceptable or even neurotic. I didn’t want to underestimate the selfishness of this woman’s actions, even if the event was itself so minor.  

I added that maybe some would say this is why we need to practise a utilitarian morality; if the greatest number represents the values everybody is expected to live by, perhaps situations like the one in the supermarket would have been avoided. I suspected it would do nothing to change the situation Victor witnessed and was party to. There was a young man who seemed to both of us an example of great continuity, potentially going back several generations, and he offered his request with politeness and would no doubt if asked have said that someone would be equally entitled to ask him, if he were queuing, to buy a packet of cigarettes for them. But that entitlement he would be invoking in the immediate sense would be of little value if it weren’t contained by the wider sense. That other person, like in this instance Victor, wouldn’t have that feeling of general entitlement allowing him to ask a favour that for many could seem like an impertinence. Victor said what I was saying reminded him a little of an interview he was reading, about a working-class actress talking about a film she made with a couple of actors from private schools. She acknowledged they were amongst the nicest people she met. But she also added that she was astonished by their self-belief, seeing in this not something that shouldn’t be admired, but something that ought to be shared. If everyone had this type of confidence, then everybody could equally ask another to buy them some fags in the queue. In this sense, when we have, I said, only 6 per cent getting the private education that instils such confidence, then that is very far from utilitarian — and perhaps what he was resistant to wasn’t the confidence but the exclusivity of it. 

Yet what about my example he said: if this woman was obnoxious while the posh boy was not, were they two sides of the same coin, no matter the monetary difference? I said I didn’t quite understand, though got the pun, and he added he wasn’t sure if he did either. But just as the young man had all the confidence we surmised of generational entitlement, maybe the woman was channelling generations of anger and resentment. She was doing so out of astonishing self-interest, but we couldn’t pretend there wasn’t a historical situation, just as there would have been with the private school person who thought nothing of asking a favour. The woman's behaviour was far worse taken in isolation but more justifiable contextualised. Vincent was speaking as though he didn’t quite agree with what he was saying, which is different from not believing what he was saying.        

     In the latter, I’ve always thought the person can offer assertion without conviction; in the former, the person offers conviction without assertion - as they are feeling their way to a point that possesses validity even if they might not quite claim it as their own. With politicians I often thought they were all the more determined to convince, well aware that what they were saying was nonsense. This seemed to me important as we were trying to explore the intricacies of two apparently small incidents, ones that we both seemed to believe contained within them a far greater import. It was as though we were both wondering what a politician would do with them and were determined to resist such a stance. 

Victor continued by saying he supposed in his example what we had was entitlement; in mine opportunism. The young man thought nothing of very politely asking for a favour and the woman reckoned she ought to go ahead and, if I didn’t allow her, and if the person behind her acknowledged she was jumping the queue, then this was just ‘people like us’ making trouble and oppressing her. She wasn’t oppressed, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a genealogical oppression, one that gave her position a historical validity just as with the young man there was equally a historical assumption in his sense of entitlement. We were both, he said, and from a certain point of view, and despite the obvious differences, victims of historical circumstances. Victor offered it with a feeling of triumph and an awareness of absurdity. 

I said why then did I feel only an indirect sympathy for a woman I had reason in that instance to loathe and an instinctive liking for the person who asked him to buy a packet of cigarettes even if I disliked the assumption that he could ask? If for no other reason, he said, than that the young man was likeable and the woman I was dealing with wasn’t — but my assumption about her broader circumstances was worthy of sympathy. It was as simple as that and as complicated as history had made it. That is the thing, he said: many who believe in the class system in Britain, who want to keep immigrants out, or at least in their place, struggle with such gaps in existence and seek continuity. They would prefer a young man making cheeky requests that leave them feeling inadequate over awkward situations revealing how troublesome history happens to be — and from a certain perspective, they are right. He said he was sure that if he had said to the posh student he could wait in the queue like everyone else, the boy would have sloped off, maybe even apologised for his presumption. But what would have happened with the woman in my queue, who had already told someone to shut up since it was none of his business? It would surely have escalated. Why wouldn’t people prefer the historically privileged revealing their entitlement, rather than the historically oppressed opportunistically taking advantage? There was a sense that the entitlement was so casually assumed, while the woman’s opportunism so insistently demanded, that perhaps we should have far more of a problem with the former over the latter, even if as a situation the latter could be viewed as much more serious, and the woman much more disagreeable. 

We seemed to have reached some sort of conclusion, or it may have felt like it as the barman, who had called last orders fifteen minutes earlier, came over and said we should start making our way out the door as the bar was now closed. 

    5

It was Friday night and I had no reason to rise early, but Victor had the conference and his paper was at 11. We wished each other good night as he moved in the direction of the hotel, where other delegates were also staying, while I went back to my flat. As I walked, I realised we had spent much of the evening on so trivial a subject as queues. At the same time, I found myself thinking I had arrived, with the help of Victor, at an insight, one that probably wasn’t of much originality but felt of value to me. People have talked for many years about the value of the Other, of alterity and so on in understanding anything from the scapegoat to the immigrant — which are of course often one and the same. But it was as though I never quite understood this discourse, never believed it could generate a compassion which wasn’t without condescension. Yet when I found myself thinking about discontinuity, it seemed to allow an associational and adjacent relationship not just with others but with myself as well. I would go to the Park Bar, and know nobody, and then I would have friendships based much more on conversational musings rather than peer-based accumulation. All my friendships were predicated on the idea that all men are islands but were joined together by peninsulas, by an insularity crossed. If I both envied and commiserated with the people in the Park Bar, who seemed to know everybody and could conjure up their pasts collectively, even if they no longer seemed to be able to live in the place they so loved, I knew too that I was severed from the island even if some of my most vivid memories remain located there. I thought too of the black woman from the supermarket, and whether there were places she could go to in Glasgow where she might at least retrieve a few memories from her homeland, a home that might never have been hers, but her parents or grandparents. Perhaps I am condescendingly and ignorantly applying an exile status to someone who may have been born in Britain, and whose parents may have been born here as well. But there was, in her remark about ‘you people’, a comment on exile and alienation, even if it seemed to me an example of someone chiefly seeking a chance to use whatever it would take so she could get her own way. 

And perhaps I would have said nothing of this story, allowed it to be a couple of dangling anecdotes theoretically mused over with a friend, had I not seen the woman again in another supermarket, a few weeks later.  I was behind her in the queue, with only five items in my basket of shopping, while hers was full and, just as it was her turn, she insisted I go on ahead. I could only assume that she recalled my face and recalled the incident, and was relieved she could rectify it, but she didn’t say a word, showed no sign of acknowledgement, and for a moment I wondered if it was the same woman. I was sure it was, though maybe she was unsure that it was me, the person she had usurped in a queue a few weeks earlier. Perhaps she was so ashamed of her earlier deed that she had been making amends with others too. I thanked her for her offer and went ahead, feeling as if the world had far more hope in it than such a small gesture would be expected to merit.

 

 

 

 

 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Discontinuities

1

They were two incidents so small that many in the prospective supermarkets would hardly have noticed, and they had nothing of the melodrama I remember reading about when a customer in a shop in London told a black security guard that he didn’t belong in the country. That was an incident of drunken abuse and it became much more than a scene in a supermarket. It became a media story. 

I suppose the two moments I am thinking about are examples of mundane entitlement and opportunism (as opposed to the exaggerated, abusive and undeniably racist one that made it into the news). In the first, which happened a couple of years ago, a friend was in the queue at a shop in Oxford when someone came in, took a peek at the lengthy line and asked my friend, who was at the front of it, would he be awfully kind and get him a packet of cigarettes, pressing ten pounds into his fist as he mentioned the brand. Victor thought it churlish to say no, knew it would only take a few seconds of his time, would thus hardly hold up the people behind him, and so did what he was told. It was only retrospectively he thought of the phrase doing what he was told, and yet though he knew he would have done the same for anyone, not anyone would have asked. When he told me the story about a week later, on a visit to Scotland, where I live, he said that for days afterwards and indeed even on the train up, he knew that only certain people would make such a request, and told me that the man was in his early twenties, clearly a student at the university and, no less clearly, Victor reckoned, a product of an elite education that started long before he got to Oxford. He didn’t deny the young man had asked him politely, knew too that the request wouldn’t take long, and perhaps that the young man was in a hurry. But he also knew that he would never have been able to make the same entreaty, and while he may have liked to think that his refusal to do so would have been based on decency, he supposed it was based more on a lack of confidence: that he couldn’t have dealt with the humiliation of being told that he could wait in the queue like everyone else. I asked what he thought the young man would have done if Victor had said that. He guessed the young man would have shrugged his shoulders and asked the next person. I asked Victor what he would have done. He reckoned he would have immediately left the shop, perhaps not returned for weeks, maybe months, afraid someone who witnessed the humiliation might have seen him.  

I said to him there really was nothing to chastise the person over even if he might want to attack the system that gave some people immense confidence and appeared to rob it from others. The man was affable and hardly pushy — he couldn’t dislike him for chancing his arm, pushing his luck or any other idiomatic phrase that nevertheless when thinking of such terms brought to mind not a toff with an expensive education, but a cheeky chappy with a comprehensive one. 

We were talking in the Park Bar, a pub not far from Kelvingrove Park in Finnieston, and a place I would frequent for its proximity to my flat and its nostalgic distance from the Outer Hebrides. I was born on the island and returned often for holidays after my parents moved to Glasgow when I was three. But when they sold the cottage when I was fourteen, it was as though my memories were trapped in time. Though I have returned on occasion since, even hiring out the very cottage that I vacationed in when I discovered it had become a holiday let, I seemed happiest frequenting the pub rather than returning to the island. Those two further vacations were nice but I couldn’t access my past feelings and, perhaps because my expectations were so high, the disappointment deterred me from further visits after those them. With no such expectations in the Park Bar, I am sometimes surprised when I have a moment of recognition in an overheard conversation, and find myself back on the island. I described this to Victor that day. He was up for a weekend conference, and I would see him several times a year since he was closely affiliated with the university. Anyway, I wondered if some live more continuously than others: that the private schoolboy existed as if there were no separation between his childhood and his adulthood, between his private schooling and his university education, and that he would go and find a job where the old boy’s network would allow for the continuation not only of the wealth that his parents probably had, but the set of assumptions that meant he need never question how continuous his life is. I said to Victor that I didn’t want to exaggerate my kinship with the island, nor my alienation from it. But I said that often when sitting in this very bar, I would see someone come in and immediately start a conversation with another Islander. Within minutes, they were talking about people they knew in common, Stornoway pubs, and incidents at school. I supposed they too had their continuous existence; my distance from it, that I knew the island but didn’t know the people and hadn’t gone to the school, meant mine could only be discontinuous. It was an island that contained many of my memories but not shared ones: I couldn’t pop into the Park Bar and expect to recollect various moments of my childhood with others except in a vague, geographical way — saying I knew the beaches in Gary or Uig, that I knew the cafes the Coffee Pot and the Rendezvous, and liked the ice cream from the latter. I could talk a little about the Woolies that occupied the very centre of this small town, and the pick ’n’ mix sweets that I would buy and very occasionally steal, with my heart hammering in my rib cage, my throat dry with fear, and my face burning with adrenaline, and the shame of possibly being caught. Once in the bar, I heard others speaking of stealing from the shop. It was after the chain closed down and people would often joke that their first shoplifting experience was at Woolworth’s. In the bar, three men around my age were discussing the shops’ demise and saying how they hoped they had contributed just a little to bringing down capitalism. They were laughing and insisted, while their parents sometimes went on strike, or would go to the mainland and down south to help families who were involved in trying to keep the Scottish collieries open in the mid-eighties, they were fighting the system from within, taking down capitalism one sweet at a time. They laughed as though it was a source of great pride, and I was reminded of the shame that I felt then, and supposed might have felt less now, if I too was sharing the memory with others who had likewise stolen from the shop.  They remembered collectively and alleviated any possible shame with a humorous politicisation. I found myself wondering how frequently shame isn’t the consequence of an act of wrong-doing but of singular-doing; that the shame arises because the act and the feeling aren’t shared. There I was overhearing a story of the very shoplifting I too had practised and they joked together while I recalled in shameful solitude. 

In trying to explain such thoughts and feelings to Victor, I knew I wasn’t alone in them even if they were solitary acts — and when I overheard the others it was a solitary response. What I liked about my friendship with Victor, and with a couple of other friends, was that we weren’t part of a peer group where we all shared experiences collectively, but were isolated individuals whose default state was solitude. We alleviated it in company rather than generated experiences out of it together, and if Victor, as well as Liam, Jean-Louis, and  Mark, were my closest friends, then that didn’t mean they were close with each other. Liam and Jean-Louis had never met, and the others only very occasionally. They all lived in different cities: Mark in Glasgow, Liam in London, Jean-Pierre in Paris and Victor of course in Oxford, and they were all living quite different lives. Mark worked in television sport, Victor was a language professor, Liam, a social worker, and Jean-Pierre, a music journalist who made his living working in a record store. I would say I was the common denominator but it probably would be more accurate to say that a relationship to solitude happened to be, even if Mark was married with children and Liam had been with his partner for a decade. It was as if we drew out from each other a reserve we could share but that in our daily lives took the form of observation. Yet while with Mark I could discuss the intricacies of a spor person’s psychology, with Jean-Louis a shared understanding of music and more generally the arts, and with Liam the vulnerability of not just his clients but his ongoing fragility as I knew he believed he drank too much and took drugs too often, with Victor, many of our discussions were based on experiences we would have that seemed too negligible to pass for anecdote. He told me of his example just after I had told him mine, an incident that happened a week earlier and in a cut-price German supermarket I often used to even up the costs of shopping in the city’s most expensive one on Byres Road. 

        2

I was queuing behind four other people, with about fifteen items in my basket, when a woman behind the person behind me, and who only had a punnet of strawberries, asked if he would look after her basket, which had a dozen or so items in it. She said she had forgotten a couple of things and would be back in a moment. She was gone for several minutes and returned with another four or five items. During the minutes she was away, he pushed the basket with his feet as the queue edged forward. Just after she returned I was due to go the checkout when I said to the boy, who couldn’t have been more than eighteen, he should go ahead; it was only one item. I stepped aside a few inches and he continued ahead. The woman, whose basket the boy had been looking after, then said to me I needed to get in the right queue, that I was standing in the wrong place. I said that the only reason I was a few inches out of it was because I just let someone in ahead of me, someone who had been taking care of her basket. I added that one good deed deserves another and I looked at the person who was next in the line after her and asked him to confirm that I'd been waiting a few minutes. , He concurred but at the same time looked like he didn’t want to get involved, and with perhaps good reason. The woman flicked her head round and told him to shut up. He wasn’t there, she said. He obviously had been and said I could go ahead of him.

The thing is, I said to Victor, the woman was black, and I offered this only because I believed it was central to the exchange. When I said I had been in the queue before her she insisted I shouldn’t make trouble, that people like me were always making trouble. I looked at the person on the checkout as she said this. He was also black, and I felt if I pushed ahead and insisted I was next, he would have served me, but she was moving towards the counter and started putting items on the conveyer belt. He appeared to show her neither warmth nor contempt, and when I came after her he apologised and said he didn’t see what happened. I believed him, even if his position may have been difficult and that it would have been easier just to ignore it: a black woman feeling a white man wanted to jostle ahead of her and he feeling obliged to back her up. But such a claim would reflect my own prejudice, however well-meaning the assumption may have been. He was his own man and there was no reason why he should automatically have sided with her when he didn’t know precisely what had happened. I admired him for it, though I sensed he knew she was in the wrong in his very apology. Did he know that this was something she generally did, even if he didn't see her doing it on this occasion? It made his position perhaps all the more admirable: he knew she would usually skip queues and generate animosity but still he didn’t wish to pre-judge. But that would be to put a thought in a person's head who may have never seen the woman before, and certainly hadn't seen her jumping queues. 

Victor asked me how important I thought it was that the cashier was black. I said while I didn’t think there was any reason that he was, it was my prejudice that made me wonder why he didn’t side with her; so reckoned I should share that perception with him. Victor asked, saying he knew of someone who presented an anecdote about a van backing into him with the clear premise that it was a Polish driver. Four of them were having dinner, in his place in Oxford, all of them post-graduate students, and one of them was discussing a trip they had taken to the Highlands after hiring a car in Edinburgh. Genevieve found it easy enough driving in the city, and up the A9, but when they found themselves on single lane roads with passing spaces, often on winding lanes up hills, they felt they were driving in a different country from only an hour earlier. If part of the pleasure of the Highlands was the isolation; part of the precarity lay in those single lanes. Richard said roads can be pretty precarious in towns like Oxford as well, and started speaking about this Polish driver who backed into him a couple of weeks earlier. Jan asked whether it was so important that the driver was Polish, and Fatima looked uncomfortable, as though she could see in Richard’s remark, a prejudice she had previously observed. Jan asked Richard if there was anything specifically about the man’s actions that meant he needed to be designated as Polish. Richard looked bemused and Jan added that if one were to say the army attacked the army it wouldn’t make much sense: you have to say the English army attacked the French army, or vice versa. It is important nationalities are named. But a Polish driver backing into his car seemed only to need a driver; it didn’t need a nationality attached. Victor was impressed by Jan’s reasoning and had noticed like Fatima a couple of previous occasions where Richard’s comments could appear prejudiced, but he remained silent. Richard became more animated, saying why shouldn’t he say the driver was Polish when he was, and Fatima said that if this were an isolated example the redundancy could pass. But she remembered a conversation with him a couple of weeks earlier; he said that he had been ripped off by a Pakistani shopkeeper. The point of the story seemed to be that you cannot trust Pakistanis just as now, she said, you can’t trust Polish drivers. Richard said maybe it was true: the country was overrun by foreigners as he went on to say that the Polish driver, after backing into him, pulled away without acknowledging the accident.  Genevieve asked how he knew the driver was Polish if he hadn’t spoken to him. Richard said that he was driving a transit van and had been working on a house on the street - and everybody knew that most of the work done in Oxford these days was by Poles. 

        So, Victor explained to me, here we had an Englishman (Richard), telling a French student, a German student, and a Lebanese immigrant whose family came in the eighties, and thus a foreigner over-running the country, all hearing a story about a terrible Polish driver who may not have been Polish at all. Fatima asked Richard if he couldn’t see that his remarks could be seen as racist, at least xenophobic, and he replied of course they weren’t: there he was with friends from different countries, and what he liked so much about being English was the tolerance. Jan wondered if that was a useful adjective; that it meant the English tolerated people unlike themselves. Richard said he’d been persecuted enough; that all he wanted to do was tell a little anecdote and here everybody was turning on him. He left, and the others continued discussing the question in Richard’s absence, as though determined not to talk rudely and directly about Richard, but to make sure they weren’t merely offering a counter-prejudice. Victor didn't want to give the impression that Richard would have seemed hounded out of the room. 

It was the first time during the discussion that Victor said anything and he said to me he found it amusing that while Richard was needlessly invoking a characteristic that was irrelevant to the story in invoking Polishness (and where the person may not have even been a Pole!), how often now do people describe people fairly but vaguely, determined to avoid offence? He told the others, and in turn me, that he was at a couple of parties in recent months and on both occasions absurdities arose. At one, a colleague was trying to speak about someone who was coming to the party; he asked Victor if he knew him. The colleague described the man as of medium height, with dark hair, glasses and that he usually wore a suit. They were all accurate descriptions of the man but they could also have described half a dozen people at the party already, and it wasn’t until twenty minutes later when the man arrived and the colleague said there he is, that Victor knew he was talking about. It was a man who was distinctive because of his size: he weighed around 20 stone, and yet this was not offered as part of the description since it might have been deemed prejudicial. A similar instance happened a week later when someone was describing another person in the building next to theirs and told him just about everything about the man except that he was black. As this man was the only black academic in the building, and there were several of medium height, black, curly hair and glasses (including Victor’s own colleague who also happened to be obese) then the description was lacking its most salient feature. In this context, in each instance, obesity and blackness were the distinguishing feature. He added that Richard’s designation had no descriptive necessity, no reason at all to mention the man was Polish, and perhaps here resides in these anecdotes the problem of racism and political correctness. In the first instance, the potential racist or xenophobe insists on an adjective when it is unnecessary; in the latter refuses the most pertinent one when it is important.  

      3    

By this reckoning, I said, we weren’t racist, xenophobic or politically correct in telling stories about an English public schoolboy or a black woman asking for a favour. But we might be by someone else’s standards. Ours were analytic but were they objective? How could they be, we both admitted, and he reckoned was this not my job rather than his, was I not the philosophy teacher? It was true that I did my undergraduate in philosophy and psychology and decided to teach philosophy when the chance arose. But I usually taught old problems, a sort of greatest hits that allowed just a little room for the students to meditate upon some of the questions. I had never in my classes wondered what would happen when describing a situation without prejudice; what are the terms upon which it can be achieved? Perhaps if the students didn’t have an exam to pass, I would have proposed a philosophical question each week based on a story from the news or their lives. It wasn’t that Descartes’ Evil Genius, Plato’s Forms and Mill’s utilitarianism weren’t of interest. Still, I am not sure if any of them were useful to our present discussion, nor many other problems people have to comprehend. 

Victor suspected they were more pertinent than I was willing to admit. I was probably just showing my frustration towards curriculum learning rather than to the thinkers I mentioned, and he wondered whether utilitarianism might be of some use to at least our discussion, even if in a negative way. How for example, he wondered, does the greatest good for the greatest number work in the context of race, when black people are a minority in a given country? Should their perspective be ignored because it isn’t a majority one? He apologised for simplifying utilitarian theory, yet it was only so he could say something about the majority. In the examples he gave, about the student discussing the Polish van driver, and mine about the black woman, we could view them from two utilitarian prisms. The greatest number thought Richard was wrong when he felt the need to invoke the Polish van driver, believing it wasn’t relevant to the story he was telling. But at the same time, it wasn’t just that the majority agreed; what mattered too was that an argument could be made convincingly which the majority could justify. If everybody had said Richard was wrong, without any evidence beyond a majority rule, that wouldn’t have been very fair. Richard would have been right to have exited aware he wasn’t given a just hearing. But that he walked out, despite others determined to explain why what he said was problematic, left Richard, they all thought, very much in the wrong. Richard may have felt they were all picking on him — instead, they were picking apart a troublesome remark he made. Richard couldn’t see the difference. 

Now let us, he said, think of the story I had told him about the black woman in the queue. Would she, too, have felt that she was being picked on rather than that I was picking up on an injustice? All things considered, she was acting badly: she expected someone to do her a favour and keep her place in the queue, and then when she saw the chance to jump the line, when I stood to one side to let the person who had helped her go ahead of me, she took it. But what was this injustice next to many she may have suffered over the years, in the process perhaps of getting into the UK, or the racism she may have endured once here? And there I was invoking others to point out her unfairness, assuming that a majority view would be enough to dissuade her from continuing ahead of me. He said what was interesting about my anecdote, as opposed to his about a queue jumper, was that he assumed with some certainty that the man was comfortably off and took for granted a level of entitlement that meant of course he would ask in an affable manner if he could get served early. It was as if in allowing the man to do so or not Victor needn’t entertain the variables of colonialism in doing so. I looked a little surprised as he said this, and he quickly added that he didn’t want to mock post-colonial discourses and the little he knew about them. But the reality was that he understood the context of the young man in the supermarket as I appeared not to understand the broader context of the black woman in the line. When she said that you people are always making trouble, what did she mean by such a claim? It was as if she had invoked a history of racial injustice to justify a moment of mundane unfairness, and was this a moment of astonishing opportunism or the reawakening of a trauma that so mundane an incident as a person chastising her in a queue could invoke? He said it seemed to him that though his incident showed a pleasant young man asking a favour, people could more easily see what he did as taking advantage, but in such an agreeable way that few would have seen obnoxiousness in the deed. The thing was, the behaviour wasn’t objectionable; the confidence behind it, the private education, the family wealth, generations of privilege, might have been, and Victor felt it to be so because he knew he couldn’t have acted likewise. It reminded me of the phrase ‘never in a million years’. But this was an exaggeration containing within it a simple point: maybe four or five generations are enough to possess that type of assurance. 

Victor accepted the point: generations of confidence which made the young man so agreeable may have been part of the generations of oppression that made the woman so disagreeable. However, to rush to the latter judgement, to justify such behaviour in historical terms, seemed too easy, and Victor concurred. But the flipside was easier still, and one that would allow many a racist to claim that black people are difficult. Yet he admitted there was another position a potential racist or xenophobe might take that was harder to dismiss, or at least potentially valid in its argumentation. Let us say, he proposed, that you are not claiming to be a racist, or a xenophobe (though you might be); you want to be pragmatic about race relations in your country, and you’re also seeking the greatest happiness for the greatest number. If that greatest number is white, surely the whites’ happiness should be the priority. He of course didn’t believe this but it was he supposed a utilitarian racial argument and one he reckoned many in the UK agreed with; this was their country and why should they be expected to conform to values other than their own? He said perhaps one of the problems with many an argument today is that the two are conflated by opponents: the racially utilitarian with the outright racist. The racist will insist that other races are inferior; the white British person who reckons this is their country will say no more than that those from other countries should abide by the values and expectations of this one. 

As we talked I wondered what others would make of two white men discussing race theory; what would those who spent years studying and those who have suffered the consequences of racism, make of this? I said to him that there we were in the Park Bar in Glasgow, and in this environment, we were strangers, though he was a far greater stranger than me. I knew snippets of Gaelic,I  knew the cafes and pubs they were talking about, and also various locations on the island. When they said the Coffee Pot or the Rendezvous, these names meant nothing to him but conjured up memories in my mind. But I knew I was an outsider here as I would come in occasionally on my own, sometimes with a friend, but rarely talked to anyone else. If I did talk, I would say I knew the island a little, that I was born there and holidayed there as a child, and they were pleased that I remembered the island fondly enough to come occasionally to a pub that reminded me of it. But I wasn’t asked to sit at anybody’s table and I suppose I was seen as no more than a tourist who recalled places as visitors look at photos of the countries where they have been. My nostalgia was much greater than that, but it wouldn’t have been the equal of those in the bar who would prefer to live on the island but where work had removed them from it. Their existence was both continuous and discontinuous, and the continuity rested on coming to this bar aware that for various reasons they had been expected or obliged to leave the island they loved, a love I assumed — otherwise why keep coming to the one bar in Glasgow that invoked island life and drew so many from the island to it? If leaving the island was the great moment of discontinuity; then the bar was an attempt at that continuity. But what I was doing there, why did I keep returning to a place that if anything emphasised my discontinuousness? 

4

It could seem like I wanted to drag Victor into my personal reflections, and perhaps I did, but I think the main reason I asked was to understand an aspect of the black woman’s experience without pretending to know what that might be or to dismiss her selfishness as just that. Looking at her queue-jumping in isolation, all I could see was a terrible person, someone who wished to take advantage of others for her own gain. But perhaps I needed to understand better the discontinuous possibilities in her life; how she may have been in a country that she found hostile, speaking a language she never felt was her own, and finding the only way she could hold on to a sense of self was by assuming that people exploit or are exploited. Instead of seeing that a person had offered a good deed (the boy who looked after her basket) she saw the easily exploitable, and decided that in me was someone who wanted to take advantage; even though all I could see was my place stolen in the queue, what she saw was someone trying to get one over her — even if I was merely ahead in the line. Victor looked at me as though I was trying too hard to justify her behaviour, but I wanted to make clear it wasn’t hers that I was trying to understand. I  was trying to comprehend how when the continuity of our lives is broken, when we either feel our values are relative or our situation fragile, we act in a way that is inexplicable, unacceptable or even neurotic. I didn’t want to underestimate the selfishness of this woman’s actions, even if the event was itself so minor.  

I added that maybe some would say this is why we need to practise a utilitarian morality; if the greatest number represents the values everybody is expected to live by, perhaps situations like the one in the supermarket would have been avoided. I suspected it would do nothing to change the situation Victor witnessed and was party to. There was a young man who seemed to both of us an example of great continuity, potentially going back several generations, and he offered his request with politeness and would no doubt if asked have said that someone would be equally entitled to ask him, if he were queuing, to buy a packet of cigarettes for them. But that entitlement he would be invoking in the immediate sense would be of little value if it weren’t contained by the wider sense. That other person, like in this instance Victor, wouldn’t have that feeling of general entitlement allowing him to ask a favour that for many could seem like an impertinence. Victor said what I was saying reminded him a little of an interview he was reading, about a working-class actress talking about a film she made with a couple of actors from private schools. She acknowledged they were amongst the nicest people she met. But she also added that she was astonished by their self-belief, seeing in this not something that shouldn’t be admired, but something that ought to be shared. If everyone had this type of confidence, then everybody could equally ask another to buy them some fags in the queue. In this sense, when we have, I said, only 6 per cent getting the private education that instils such confidence, then that is very far from utilitarian — and perhaps what he was resistant to wasn’t the confidence but the exclusivity of it. 

Yet what about my example he said: if this woman was obnoxious while the posh boy was not, were they two sides of the same coin, no matter the monetary difference? I said I didn’t quite understand, though got the pun, and he added he wasn’t sure if he did either. But just as the young man had all the confidence we surmised of generational entitlement, maybe the woman was channelling generations of anger and resentment. She was doing so out of astonishing self-interest, but we couldn’t pretend there wasn’t a historical situation, just as there would have been with the private school person who thought nothing of asking a favour. The woman's behaviour was far worse taken in isolation but more justifiable contextualised. Vincent was speaking as though he didn’t quite agree with what he was saying, which is different from not believing what he was saying.        

     In the latter, I’ve always thought the person can offer assertion without conviction; in the former, the person offers conviction without assertion - as they are feeling their way to a point that possesses validity even if they might not quite claim it as their own. With politicians I often thought they were all the more determined to convince, well aware that what they were saying was nonsense. This seemed to me important as we were trying to explore the intricacies of two apparently small incidents, ones that we both seemed to believe contained within them a far greater import. It was as though we were both wondering what a politician would do with them and were determined to resist such a stance. 

Victor continued by saying he supposed in his example what we had was entitlement; in mine opportunism. The young man thought nothing of very politely asking for a favour and the woman reckoned she ought to go ahead and, if I didn’t allow her, and if the person behind her acknowledged she was jumping the queue, then this was just ‘people like us’ making trouble and oppressing her. She wasn’t oppressed, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a genealogical oppression, one that gave her position a historical validity just as with the young man there was equally a historical assumption in his sense of entitlement. We were both, he said, and from a certain point of view, and despite the obvious differences, victims of historical circumstances. Victor offered it with a feeling of triumph and an awareness of absurdity. 

I said why then did I feel only an indirect sympathy for a woman I had reason in that instance to loathe and an instinctive liking for the person who asked him to buy a packet of cigarettes even if I disliked the assumption that he could ask? If for no other reason, he said, than that the young man was likeable and the woman I was dealing with wasn’t — but my assumption about her broader circumstances was worthy of sympathy. It was as simple as that and as complicated as history had made it. That is the thing, he said: many who believe in the class system in Britain, who want to keep immigrants out, or at least in their place, struggle with such gaps in existence and seek continuity. They would prefer a young man making cheeky requests that leave them feeling inadequate over awkward situations revealing how troublesome history happens to be — and from a certain perspective, they are right. He said he was sure that if he had said to the posh student he could wait in the queue like everyone else, the boy would have sloped off, maybe even apologised for his presumption. But what would have happened with the woman in my queue, who had already told someone to shut up since it was none of his business? It would surely have escalated. Why wouldn’t people prefer the historically privileged revealing their entitlement, rather than the historically oppressed opportunistically taking advantage? There was a sense that the entitlement was so casually assumed, while the woman’s opportunism so insistently demanded, that perhaps we should have far more of a problem with the former over the latter, even if as a situation the latter could be viewed as much more serious, and the woman much more disagreeable. 

We seemed to have reached some sort of conclusion, or it may have felt like it as the barman, who had called last orders fifteen minutes earlier, came over and said we should start making our way out the door as the bar was now closed. 

    5

It was Friday night and I had no reason to rise early, but Victor had the conference and his paper was at 11. We wished each other good night as he moved in the direction of the hotel, where other delegates were also staying, while I went back to my flat. As I walked, I realised we had spent much of the evening on so trivial a subject as queues. At the same time, I found myself thinking I had arrived, with the help of Victor, at an insight, one that probably wasn’t of much originality but felt of value to me. People have talked for many years about the value of the Other, of alterity and so on in understanding anything from the scapegoat to the immigrant — which are of course often one and the same. But it was as though I never quite understood this discourse, never believed it could generate a compassion which wasn’t without condescension. Yet when I found myself thinking about discontinuity, it seemed to allow an associational and adjacent relationship not just with others but with myself as well. I would go to the Park Bar, and know nobody, and then I would have friendships based much more on conversational musings rather than peer-based accumulation. All my friendships were predicated on the idea that all men are islands but were joined together by peninsulas, by an insularity crossed. If I both envied and commiserated with the people in the Park Bar, who seemed to know everybody and could conjure up their pasts collectively, even if they no longer seemed to be able to live in the place they so loved, I knew too that I was severed from the island even if some of my most vivid memories remain located there. I thought too of the black woman from the supermarket, and whether there were places she could go to in Glasgow where she might at least retrieve a few memories from her homeland, a home that might never have been hers, but her parents or grandparents. Perhaps I am condescendingly and ignorantly applying an exile status to someone who may have been born in Britain, and whose parents may have been born here as well. But there was, in her remark about ‘you people’, a comment on exile and alienation, even if it seemed to me an example of someone chiefly seeking a chance to use whatever it would take so she could get her own way. 

And perhaps I would have said nothing of this story, allowed it to be a couple of dangling anecdotes theoretically mused over with a friend, had I not seen the woman again in another supermarket, a few weeks later.  I was behind her in the queue, with only five items in my basket of shopping, while hers was full and, just as it was her turn, she insisted I go on ahead. I could only assume that she recalled my face and recalled the incident, and was relieved she could rectify it, but she didn’t say a word, showed no sign of acknowledgement, and for a moment I wondered if it was the same woman. I was sure it was, though maybe she was unsure that it was me, the person she had usurped in a queue a few weeks earlier. Perhaps she was so ashamed of her earlier deed that she had been making amends with others too. I thanked her for her offer and went ahead, feeling as if the world had far more hope in it than such a small gesture would be expected to merit.

 

 

 

 

 


© Tony McKibbin