The disused barns of my rural childhood idyll were the centre of my loci, but Withacott also had another playground – a large expanse of garden we call the orchard.  As one drives down the yard, with the farmhouse in the dip in front of you and the barns to your right, the orchard is on the left, behind a bank rich with primroses and pink campions in the Spring, topped with a higgledy-piggledy beech and hawthorn hedgerow.

The western, further flank of the orchard borders the neighbouring farm cottage, obscured by an established wall of sycamore and ash trees and the enormous, iconic beech tree.  The bottom of its trunk twists and curls amongst the dark, mossy and fern lined bank at its base, with three towers of majestic tree rising in parallel up into its expansive canopy.  In the bank, gnarly and partially exposed roots form a step ladder up into the tree.  Lucy’s (my younger sister) place is about four feet above the ground between the two main towers of trunk with Toby’s place, a further two or three feet scramble up over slippery moss and oozing sap, wedged tighter between the central and Northern towers.

We spent a lot of time in that tree, particularly on warm summer days, sheltering in the cool of its plentiful shade.  Beyond the bottom, north-western corner of the orchard was the Ley’s neighbouring farmyard.  Partially hidden behind some unloved trees on the Northern border are the rear of two – then large and modern, now semi-derelict and much smaller than most – farm buildings:  one a cowshed emitting frequent mellifluous moos of calves and young stock, with the occasional pained moans of a cow in labour.  The other taller and wider shed has a base made of vertical, recycled railway sleepers; a green, now rusted, steel frame and a layer of corrugated, asbestos cladding above the sleepers.  This shed was the covered silage clamp.  Its south-eastern vertex was almost in our garden, very close to the north-western edge of our house.

For most of the year the activity inside it was largely silent, with the sweet smell of silage – fermented grass – filling the soporific air.  But then, for several days – at some point in early to mid May, and again in late June or early July – the inside of this vast building (to my younger self) came alive with the seductive rattle of a three cylinder Perkins diesel engine inside the body of an -F reg (1967-1968) Massey Ferguson 135 tractor.  This was – perhaps – the happiest sound of my childhood.

I was probably four or five years old, perhaps younger, when my mother held my hand and first took my sister and me next door, to investigate.  By the age of six, I was free to pop over to the farm on my own, providing I told my mother in advance.  Between 1978 and 1982 (aged 6-10), I spent as many free hours on the neighbouring farm as I did roaming around my own bucolic paradise.  

My first siting of arguably the most enduring icon of British Agricultural Engineering, the faded red livery of a Massey Ferguson 135 tractor, with the now humble power of forty-seven horses, was with its cab doors and roof removed and double rear wheels attached.  David Ley, the farmer’s son was about sixteen at the time.   A Twose of Tiverton rear mounted buck rake was attached to its three point linkage (well done Harry Ferguson, a most marvellous invention).  David lowered the prongs of the rake and reversed at high speed into a mound of freshly cut grass, lifted the hydraulics inducing an enormous wheelie of the tractor’s front end, pulled forward and then reversed the load up the steep slope on to a far larger pile of compacted grass, which filled the shed.  And repeat.  It was immensely exciting.  From that day on I developed a rather obsessive fetish for tractors. 

There was a brief passing interest in cars in the early eighties including the inevitable James Bond induced fascination with Aston Martins but in the most part tractors, and they still do, satisfied my insatiable interest in wheels.  In my early teens and when working on farms during university summers I became more interested in bigger gear, big six cylinder 100 or 200hp engines, but I’ve since reverted to the romance for the vintage tractors of the 1970s.  Small is beautiful, but it was all big to me back then.

Watching the tractors drive in with trailers full of grass, empty their load and speed off back to the field; and then the MF135 whizz up and down the mountain of grass, gleefully wheelying as it heaved another load up with the buck rake filled me with joy.  The smell of fresh grass was delicious and everything was so clean and fresh: the usual Devon mud or cow shit nowhere to be seen. 

Silage making is the peak of my farming calendar, but I loved it all.  I’d be playing in the barns or the orchard and I’d hear the rattle of a tractor engine which would then lure me next door like a siren call.  David, or his father Brian, were always very welcoming whenever I appeared.  I’d watch them feed the calves, or milk the cows, or tinker in the workshop – asking endless questions.  Sometimes, I’d bicycle down the lane to sit at the foot of a buzzing hedgerow watching haymaking after school: the sweet, dusty smell hanging in the damp evening air.   I wasn’t quite a working farmer’s son but I was farmer’s neighbour’s son which was the next best thing.  It was bucolic and blissful in my childhood’s rural idyll.

It is hard to decipher one’s first tangible memory.  And when we do, it is likely tainted or embellished with multifarious tricks from within the synaptic wiring of our minds.  The family photograph album provides pictorial evidence of something happening and then the image of that moment becomes a trigger of a memory we don’t – if we’re honest with ourselves – tangibly recall.  My childhood family photograph albums – which were  lovingly maintained until I was twelve – contain a lot of photographs from the long hot summer of 1976, the summer I turned four years old.

That summer, my Godfather – an enthusiastic amateur photographer – took a lot of black and white photographs of our immediate family unit: my fifty-eight year old father, my thirty-four year old mother, me, my twenty-one month old sister, Ben the docile yellow Labrador and Pipsqueak (or Pippy), the skittish black and white cat.  I still have one in a frame in my sitting room, and several of them sit in the same place on the polished, dark brown furniture in the drawing room at Withacott, nearly forty-six years later.  One of the photographs is of me on the climbing frame, mounted on a small area of lawn, adjacent to the flat concrete yard in front of the bottom barn.  I remember playing on the climbing frame, remember being a little scared of climbing and then perching myself on top.  I remember outgrowing it.  Later, I remember dismantling – vandalising maybe a better word – its small frame and utilising the various rusted struts and bars on some of the imprecisely engineered and short-lived contraptions that I built throughout my pre-adolescent childhood.

One of my first tangible memories is on that little plot of grass, sitting on the steeply sloping bank in between my mother’s legs, basking in the low evening sun.  My younger sister was with us too, picking daisies.  We called this part of my childhood stomping ground, ‘down the bottom,’ as it lay at the bottom of the long sloping yard, tucked behind the lowest of the barns that bordered the Eastern side of the concrete driveway, and to the west of the four acre field which my parents bought with the property in 1971, sold to the neighbouring farmer in 1976.  Sometimes, Brian or David Ley would usher their dairy herd of black and white Friesians into the field after milking, and we’d watch from behind the fence.

At the bottom of the sloping, daisy infested grass was a flat section of concrete with the bottom barn beyond it; perpendicular to all the other outbuildings and bordering the Ley’s farmyard to its rear.  This barn became my first independent playground. 

From the age of four or five, I’d slip on my wellies and coat in the back porch, and potter Northwards, under the low arch, turn eastwards through the Alpine garden, down a couple of concrete steps next to the Northern, rear face of the farmhouse, turn left onto the last few metres of sloping yard and enter my imaginary world.  On the yard, next to the barn was a disused cattle drinking trough.  The ballcock didn’t work anymore but it was always partially filled with rainwater.  Underneath a thin layer of murky water was a thick layer of brownish black sludge, with the consistency of molten chocolate.

This silted up, sludgy drinking trough was probed and stirred by collected sticks and old, discarded, partially rotten, garden fork handles.  It was my ‘chocolate factory.’  I’m confident that I came up with this name independently, but maybe I had recently seen the Gene Wilder film version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the moniker for this old trough wasn’t original at all.  I was so transfixed by my chocolate potions, that the whole barn became known as The Chocolate Factory.

 The other barns had names too, but their names were less imaginative.  The property had been a working farm up until 1970 and several of the barns had straw and hay bales left in them.  Upon entering the property, the barns were to the right, Eastern side of the downhill sloping yard.  The Shippen, an early 1960s concrete building was first; next the Garage with three open parking bays with steps up to the Granary appended.  The yard opens wider at this point, with the farmhouse to the left.  A small yard separated the Granary from Clinton Court and the Potting Shed which was attached to the Garden House.  Opposite the Eastern face of the house was the Big Barn, with lean to Greenhouse to its south and further down the slope, the attached Barn House.  Then tucked down at the bottom of the hill, the iconic Chocolate Factory.

Of course I took it all for granted at the time, but I now realise how blessed I was to have these barns to play hide and seek in, to build dens and camps in, to jump down from the haylofts onto a bed of straw down below, to chat to a neverendingly busy Dad in the Greenhouse or Potting Shed, to pretend to be a farmer in with my long suffering sister enduring my imaginary games, and – a little later – to set up complex rigs of empty buckets, broken wheelbarrows and pretend to be John Bonham or Ginger Baker drum soloing on stage.

Sometimes my sister would join me, occasionally a friend or two would visit, but I was happiest when free to explore, imagine and create on my own.  The Chocolate Factory and the other barns were my freedom, my place, my whole world.

As I write this, seven months before I turn fifty years old, my father has been dead for over two thirds of my life.  I am also, at the time of writing, five years younger than he was when I was born.  My memory of his presence, his smell and his voice are faded yet I still feel him deeply.  While my character and personality are more similar to my mother than my recollections of him, there is a growing part of me guided by his wisdom, his stature and – yes – his selfishness.

My younger sister and I, his sixth and seventh children, didn’t have him for long but we had the best of him.  He was extremely content in his castle at Withacott Farmhouse, near Langtree in North Devon, with his young family and an adoring young wife: the loyal, loving, whirling dervish of my mother.

My mother was all over my childhood: here, there, and everywhere.  Yet, Dad, or Waddy as my sister and I called him in his later years, was comparatively distant – he was always near and never aloof, but not always there.

When I was very young, he was still secretary at the Royal North Devon Golf Club in Westward Ho!  I think he stopped this when I was only two or three years old in the mid 1970s.  From then, until he died in 1988, he was based at home.  Initially renovating and refurbishing our family home – he was a skilled and very practical craftsman – and then out in the potting shed or kitchen garden, endlessly toiling the soil and growing stuff.  I’ll return to his distant, solid and very loving infusion upon both my soul and mind in subsequent episodes.  But first, a brief history of my father before I was a twinkle in his eye. 

Writing what surmounts to an episodic memoir of my first fifty years feels rather trite when I place my first fifty alongside my father’s first fifty-three.  He led an incredible life and is far more worthy of biography than me.  While he was still alive, virtually everything I knew of his former life came from my mother.  One of my greatest regrets is that I never got to have adult conversations with him: about farming; about drinking; about his past: the war; Cambridge; school; history, maths and science.  Maybe my rose-tinted glasses would be a little cloudier had he parted this life ten years later.  After all, I experienced none of the adolescent and undergraduate tension with him that so many children do with their fathers; including at least three of my five significantly elder half-siblings.  As an adult, I’ve mined various sources to build a more complete picture of Dad: as a father to my elder siblings, as a husband to their mother, as a farmer from various established Devon farmers and as a golfer, friend and much-loved character from family friends, but most of what I write here comes from my mother’s version of her beloved late husband’s version of events, which occurred before she was in his life.

Andrew John Hugh Payne Cook was born on St Andrew’s Day (30^th November) in 1917.  He was the third of four children, and only son, of Rev. Canon George Gerald (known as GG) Payne Cook and Getrude (née Middleton Butler) Payne Cook.  His father and my grandfather, GGPC, was rector in Northam in North Devon.  Genealogically, not much was known about the family history of the Payne Cooks until recently.  The Middleton Butlers were a more documented family, with a line of Butler’s establishing and running Kirkstall Forge, a famous steel works in Leeds in the 19^th century.  There is some evidence, researched by the father-in-law of a niece of mine, that GG was born a Cook but adopted the family name Payne upon marriage due to a bequest from an Aunt from GG’s maternal line.  It is possible that the Payne Cook name was established to impress the more upper class Middleton Butlers.  According to the research, GG’s father was a schoolmaster at Cheltenham college (my great grandfather).  His father and my great great grandfather, a John Cook, was apparently a carpenter.

A young Andrew, my father, purportedly played all sorts of stunts to extract himself from Sunday church services led by his vicar father and was, by all accounts, a very sporting young man.   He attended St Petrock’s Preparatory School in Bude (also attended by my four elder half-brothers) and then went on to Lancing, nr Worthing in East Sussex; a senior school which specialised in football over rugby, a rarity among boys’ public schools.  I have some of his old school reports from 1932-1933.  In his first year (modern day Year 9, or the 3^rd Form), he was bottom of the class in English with this endearingly concise report, ‘Never have I encountered a boy more illiterate or disinterested in his academic studies.’  By the following year, aged 15, he had climbed to 4^th in a class of 14 and had a more promising report.  He went on to become Captain of Football, and Athletics too, I think.

From Lancing he gravitated to St Catherine’s College, Cambridge to read history becoming a Cambridge blue in golf, athletics and football.  He didn’t study hard enough, and misbehaved a lot too, so was ‘sent down’ in his second year, then moving to Wye Agricultural college in Kent.

Then war in 1939, as an officer in the Royal Artillery.  He served in Italy and then later, under General Montgomery in North Africa and ascended to the rank of Lt. Col (Lieutenant Colonel) by the end of the war.  He never spoke about it.  Never glorified it.  As he was dying, when I was studying History GCSE, I did speak to him about the 1930s and the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, but I didn’t manage to glean that much.  He’d been abroad before the war, skiing and partying – there are some great photographs of him smoking, flirting and laughing in the aforementioned family collage compiled by my mother.  After the war, after friends and contemporaries being shot dead next to him; after the irrepressible heat and the unimaginable grimness he vowed never to go abroad again in 1945, and he stuck to his word.

He married Anne Somerset, a niece of Lord Raglan, whilst on leave during the war.  Their first son, and my eldest half-brother, John was born in 1943.  A second son, David, was born in June 1946.  Shortly after his birth, my father was searching for farms in Warwickshire, so that Anne, a stage actress could continue with her career.  Then tragedy struck.  She hung herself and died when David was just three weeks old.

I cannot begin to imagine the grief and pain of those weeks and months for my father: back from the war, two young sons and a dead wife.  I know very little of exactly what happened next.  Initially my father’s two sisters looked after the boys but then he found a good nanny and mother for them, Phyllis, who he later married.  They moved to Devon, where he managed a farm for someone else in Musbury, near Axminster in East Devon for two years from 1947.

In 1949, Andrew and Phyllis, John and David moved to Cleave Farm in Newton St Petrock between Holsworthy and Great Torrington in North West Devon.   Their first son, James was born in 1951; a daughter Elizabeth, known as Lizzie, followed in 1952 and then Quintin (number 5), was born in October 1955.  From 1949 to 1961, they lived in the large Devon Stone farmhouse at Cleave.  My father expanded the farm from 233 acres to nearly 300 acres, a large farm back then by Devon standards.  He employed four men – the three Hutchins brothers and Henry Vanstone who Dad used to tell wonderful stories about.  Cleave is only three miles from the home I grew up in and I have become well acquainted with it in recent years.  The Poole family farm it now.  By all accounts, my father was a pioneering farmer in the growing age of mechanisation and glory days of farming in the post war boom, with huge demands for food and a rapidly growing population.  He milked a herd of Ayrshire Dairy cattle and reared beef and sheep and grew arable crops too.  I am extremely envious of my elder half siblings, growing up on a working farm.  I’d have loved it.

I think Dad still farmed at Cleave until 1964 but in 1961 the family moved, twelve miles North to Woodtown Manor between Alverdiscott and Bideford.  There, my father invested in a herd of ‘virus free pigs’ but the venture, so far as I understand failed.  I have since found out from the Poole family that the herdsman my father recruited to run the Dairy herd at Cleave was also a disaster and all this was going on while my father’s second marriage was breaking down.  I wasn’t there and I’ve since grown very close to my elder half siblings, most of whom feel that my father treated their mother rather badly.  So far as I understand, my father was unhappy, busy farming, drinking a lot, spending a lot of time in the Union Inn at Stibb Cross, having an affair, or countless affairs and – in his spare time(!) – he also spent a lot of time at his beloved Royal North Devon Golf Club in Westward Ho!

Woodtown and the farm were sold in 1964, a year or two before land prices doubled and my father invested a lot of the money into some golf practising contraption, the swingmaker or something or other.  Phyllis and the younger children, moved to Wiveliscombe in Somerset and in the mid-sixties, my father took the rather unusual step of moving to London, in Shepherd’s Market, Mayfair with his lover, Liz.  He was trying to secure investment in the swingmaker but he didn’t patent it and someone else launched a very similar product and he ended up losing a lot of money.

He returned to Devon around 1967, and a flat in the previous United Services college building in Westward Ho!, where Rudyard Kipling had gone to school and became secretary of the golf club: drinking, smoking, playing his part in creating perfect golf greens, and – of course – playing rather a lot of golf. 

Then, presumably boredom, followed by flattery.  Flattery that a lively female, twenty-four years his junior should bat an eyelid at his big man, but rather out of shape presence.  My mother came into his life in 1971, then after nearly eight years of separation and eventual divorce from Phyllis, they married.  Divorce disapproval and subsequent disinheritance from his two rich spinster Aunts from the Butler side of the family left him with very little money.  Then a run down Withacott Farmhouse, in need of modernisation.  Then me, when his story became my story too. 

Before 1) Fertlisation, next 4) A short biography of Andrew Payne Cook then we’ll get onto stuff I actually vaguely remember from 5) The Chocolate Factory and 6) Westward Ho!

2) Nearly born a bastard

I grew up in a late 17^th century farmhouse with a Victorian extension in the rural hinterland of North West Devon.  My mother still lives there, the house now in an endearing yet considerable state of disrepair.  My parents bought it in May 1971, with seven acres and an extensive range of outbuildings, for £8100.

The hub of the house is the large farmhouse kitchen, replete with obligatory and antique oil fuelled Aga, pine dresser and pine table.  Off the kitchen is the ‘Snug’: a gloriously scruffy semi-derelict den of TV viewing, former family TV dinners watching Top of the Pops and Tomorrow’s World on Thursday evenings, board games, my Mum’s old PYE record player and collection of 45 singles and a shelf spewing a wall of technologically defunct recordable VHS video cassettes: Grease; Blame it on Rio; Footloose; Annie; The Sound of Music; Risky Business; Weird Science.

When I was a child we lived in those two rooms – with an army of dogs – and my Mum still does today: now dogless, childless; a widow of thirty-three years; fiercely independent; gregarious and sometimes lonely.   The painstakingly paint-stripped pine door from the kitchen; adjacent to the Snug took you into another world.  A world we passed through – momentarily – every morning and every evening.  My Dad carried the bulbous, heavy, 13 inch portable Panasonic TV upstairs every night, until the mid 1980s: to watch the 10 o’clock news upstairs, having watched the 9 o’clock news downstairs. 

To the left of the long, narrow hallway were two doors into the dining room, a large room used for infrequent late 70s and early 80s dinner parties hosted by my parents, special family occasions and my mother’s delicious Sunday roasts if we had wider family visiting or staying.  The dining room features in a later story (the Strangest Day of my Life), so, at the foot of the stairs, to the right of the hallway (or on your left if you were important enough to enter the house through the front door), we’ll withdraw after our metaphorical dinner into the Drawing Room, nicknamed the Dromy (droy-me).

The Dromy is my favourite room in the house.  It has a large East facing window recessed deeply into the Devon cob walls.  On the windowsill there are sun degraded bottles of Whisky, Sherry and Cinzano untouched since pre-lunch drinks in the late 1980s.  Bookcases, brimful full of books that haven’t moved for over forty years cling to the rest of the eastern wall and the south-eastern corner.  The external ground level to the south is about a metre higher than the floor level internally, so my Dad decided – somewhat eccentrically – to fit two circular, wood framed port holes either side of the large fireplace and chimney breast.  The rest of the room is filled with two sofas, two armchairs and a lot of brown, antique furniture.  On the surface of the furniture there are countless family heirlooms:  silver cigarette boxes, cigar boxes, cigarette lighters and ashtrays; an inkwell; lady’s glove stretchers made of ivory; some Herand rabbits and a large ceramic Buddha.  Nothing has moved from its place since the room was refurbished in 1975.  Paintings by mother’s artistic ancestors grace the walls. The room is timeless, warm, and home.

In the side drawer of the large gate-leg table along the windowless and doorless western wall bordering the kitchen, there is the original family home photograph album.  The drawer is a pig to open, and the floppy album is stuck together with fractured layers of dried Sellotape.  Inside the album are several pages of photographs of the house, garden and barns taken in the Spring and Summer of 1971. 

Then there are some photographs of my mother and father with her parents next to a newspaper clipping announcing their engagement in the Daily Telegraph.  After that there are pictures of me, baby Toby, and later my younger sister; then a never-ending procession of my mother’s former London friends and their children on Westward Ho! beach in full, glorious technicolour.

As a late teenager and early twenty something, I was always fascinated by this photograph album: extracting it carefully from its drawer, delicately unfolding its heavy, faded pages and showing friends of mine from boarding school who’d come to stay, and later, a girlfriend or two – down for the weekend.  By the late eighties and early nineties the house and garden had changed immensely from those old photos from the early 1970s. 

It was around this time, into early adulthood, that I noticed something else.  I noticed that my parents’ engagement announcement had been doctored.  An indelible black ‘1’ had been etched above the newsprint ‘2’ below it.  My parents did not announce their engagement in April 1971, but in April 1972.  They married on 3^rd August 1972, three weeks before I was born.  I have some vague recollection of my mother – Dad was no longer with us – sheepishly explaining this heinous crime against morality to me in the early 1990s.  I couldn’t understand the fuss, yet obviously delighted in winding my mother up by overstating my mortification that I was so nearly born a bastard.

This huge cover up is indicative of the paradoxical traits of my dear mother.  On one hand she was deeply unconventional: spontaneously moving out of London and terminating a long affair with a married man to start a family with my father, a man twenty-four years her senior, with five grown up children and a self-contained desire to remain in the environs of sleepy, rural North Devon for the rest of his days.  On the other hand, she was strongly guided by the book of etiquette and correct form (published 1923); seemingly fearful of revealing to me that I was so nearly born out of wedlock.

3) Genealogy, my mother and a long lost country estate in Gloucestershire.

So, I had officially begun.  In the physical, cultural sense.  At twenty past three in the morning, on my birth day.  Fortunately, I don’t remember any of this; nor what followed for about another four or five years.  I’m fascinated by this; by the primitive nature of new born human babies.  A calf, foal or lamb can walk within minutes of birth.  Yet all we can do is scream, poo, piss and suck.   We don’t walk until we’re around one, and not proficiently until eighteen months or so.  Yet, by the age of two we start to talk.  And then those pernicious artefacts of culture take over: family, education, work, finding meaning where there is none, art, literature, science, joy, despair; mortality.

I am frequently bewildered by our obsession with age appropriate and understandable vocabulary in our education system, when we learnt to speak our mother tongue by silently absorbing a plethora of sounds, their associated facial expressions and radiated mood from our mothers, parents, carers, grandparents or elder siblings.  What happens inside our brains between 0 and 2 is nothing less than a miracle.  It is almost impossible to fathom how it happens and neuroscientists and neurogeneticists are only beginning to figure it all out.  For most of the last one hundred years or so, our attempts to understand our exponential cognitive, emotional and social development have resided within the field of psychology. 

I am far more interested in the human condition from a psychological and philosophical perspective than from a purely chemical, genetic and evolutionary basis.  I delight in shades of speculative grey; subjectivity; opinion and experience despite having trained my brain scientifically, logically and rationally in the pure, black and white world of science.  Simplistically, psychology is akin to nurture while pure science is akin to nature.  The nature Vs nurture debate is petering out as we learn more about the dark, twisted and wonderful complexity of the human brain; understanding that both are incredibly important, and complementary.

It is interesting watching this false dichotomy unfold and rupture in the most vociferous and passionate corners of the teaching profession.  Since the 1960s there has been a mainstream subtext of nurture and psychology to the way we educate our children.  The idea that nurture and experience can make anything possible for all of us.  This belief sits uncomfortably beneath the noisy Govist and Gibbesque neo-traditionalism, which places greater emphasis on purely cognitive development, of imparting knowledge and cultural capital as a foundational template for all from which to prosper in a modern, economically driven society.

Whatever one’s educational beliefs, none of us can deny the mounting evidence that it is a combination of our genetic inheritance (established upon the formation of our zygote approximately nine months before our birth) and our intense emotional inheritance from our pre-school years of life outside the womb which make up the largest part of who or what we become.  I’m not suggesting that what happens to us, and what we experience from the age of six or seven onwards doesn’t play a part in influencing our future choices and decisions in friendships, education, relationships and work, but I’m fairly sure that our characters, capabilities and complex psychologies are borne, and largely unchanged, from the myriad interactions of our genome (genetic template) with the intensive nurture of our early childhoods.

Yet, none of us can remember much of what the hell happened in those early years.  From later evidence, I know that my mother loved me very much; perhaps too much.  And she would have spoken to me incessantly.  She likes to talk.  I like to talk.  We both talk far too much.  Neither of us appear to be able to do much about this debilitating malaise.

Those months and early years in close proximity to our primary carer – in my case, indubitably my mother, leave an indelible impression upon us.  In comparison with my younger sister, who spent a lot more time with our father in our childhood than I did, I am similar to my mother, in character and personality. 

We both have astonishingly good memories for facts, dates, events and people.  We are both extremely gregarious yet very content in our own company and greatly appreciate solitude and freedom.  We are verbose and give the impression of being terrible listeners because our minds are racing at three hundred miles an hour.  We probably both have an undiagnosed form of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) which we’ve developed various coping strategies for throughout our lives, to varying degrees of success.  I’d also suggest we’re fringe bi-polar, not in a hugely debilitating way – more of a mild cyclothymia – where we get huge rushes of energy, intensity and dynamism, offset with bouts of mild withdrawal and low mood, or cynicism and obfuscation.   And we love to shock.  To be outrageous; to push the boundaries of socially acceptable language and behaviour, at times.  We both find a great many people – frankly – rather dull and we’re often rather transparent, or brutally honest, about it.

So, once I developed my own voice and opinions, we have had a fun, fiery and oft infuriating relationship.  We have argued like cats and dogs and minutes later moved on like nothing had happened.  I am deeply interested in the psychology of early childhood, and I’m very happy to navel gaze at my own rather unconventional formative years but this is a taboo subject for my Mum, and consequently one that I’m rather fascinated by.

While I’m interested in the psychology of childhood and our emotional inheritances, my Mum is not outwardly interested in this – indeed when I recently quoted Philip Larkin* at her, she was mortally offended and took it personally rather than in the more general, broader, deeper societal malaise sense.  But Mum is much more interested in genealogy than me.  I have a sense that it defines who she perceives herself to be much more than I do.  I mean, I’m not, not interested.  I do love a family tree.  But my resemblance to Great Grandpa, or what my Great Great Great Grandfather did or didn’t do in the Crimean war doesn’t feel particularly consequential or relevant to whatever I do or don’t achieve in the twenty first century.  Our sociocultural and socioeconomic backgrounds can flip in a generation now, whereas we were – generally – entrenched ‘in our place’ generation after generation prior to the second world war.

Shortly after my maternal grandfather died in 1993, my mother compiled a huge collage of black and white family photographs.  The photographs range from the 1870s (my mother’s maternal grandmother as a young child) to the early 1980s (my childhood).  My mother had gleaned a few photographs from my Dad’s side of the family but most people in the faded pictures were Notts (my mother’s maiden name) or Francis’ (her mother’s maiden name). 

The male Notts had a distinguished, British empire and military infused history and my Grandad had the middle name Kandahar, which has passed – pompously in my opinion – down through my Uncle, cousin and his son as a family name.  There was a General Sir William Nott who led the march on Kandahar way back in the middle of the 19^th century (1800s).  A statue of him, which I’ve visited with my mother, stands in Nott Square in Carmarthen, in South Wales.   She isn’t outwardly celebratory about the Nott family history, but she is very proud of her brother’s success in politics and banking. 

My uncle is Sir John Nott who was Conservative MP for St Ives and the Isles of Scilly from 1966 – 1983 and was most prominent as Minister for Defence in Thatcher’s cabinet during the Falkland’s war of 1982.  He also famously stormed out of an interview with Sir Robin Day on Newsnight, when Day accused him of being a ‘Hear Today, Gone Tomorrow’ politician.  After politics he returned to the city and made stupid amounts of money as Chairman of Lazard bros, and then Hillsdown Holdings.  My mother constantly compares my restless mind to his.  For several years, I felt a certain inadequacy that I’d not climbed to the upper echelons of politics, banking or commerce that my rather lovable, very affable and incredibly impatient Uncle did but as I will explore in later memories, my mind is a contusion of Nott restlessness and a more earthy, creative Payne Cook dreaminess, with an absence of shrewdness and virtually zero interest in the mechanics of the financial world.  Also, I’m not sure genealogical ‘greatness’ is so relevant – or indeed possible (quite rightly, in my opinion) – in the twenty first century.

My mother appears to have a far greater affinity for her maternal line – The Francis family – than the Notts.  My Mum has always been scathing about her father.  Consequently, she has ruled that all Scorpions (my mother is obsessed with Astrology) are flawed at best, evil at worst.   Unfortunately, both her son-in-law and daughter-in-law are Scorpions!  I’ve never got to the bottom of the flaws in her father, other than the generic, ‘he didn’t treat my mother very well.’  The Grandad I knew until I was twenty-one was quite a character: a charmer and raconteur.  I wasn’t especially close to him, but he seemed harmless enough.  My mother, and father described him as being a bit of ‘a Jekyll and Hyde.’

My mother was exceptionally close to her mother and is very protective of her memory.  Granny had a stroke before I was three and was paralysed on one side of her body, affecting her speech and mobility.  She died seven years later following another stroke, not long before I turned ten.  We visited her regularly, but I had no deep emotional bond with her.   Maybe this is why I’m not especially interested in genealogy, because I only had a deep emotional bond with my parents.  My paternal grandparents were both dead before I was born and I had no strong connection or regular contact with either of my maternal grandparents. 

My mother talks a lot about her Francis grandparents.  Her Great Great Grandfather Francis was vicar of St Giles in the Heath, near Great Torrington and Monkokehampton, near Hatherleigh in Devon; her Great Grandfather was vicar of Bridestowe, on the northern edge of Dartmoor and Grandfather Francis (my great grandfather) was Doctor in Northam, near Bideford, in the early part of the 20^th century (1900s) at exactly the same time as my father’s father – my paternal grandfather – was vicar in Northam.   My mother – when she was a young girl – remembers accompanying her Granny Francis (the Northam Doctor’s wife) for tea at the vicarage with my paternal grandmother, Getrude Payne Cook (the Northam Rector’s wife).  So, the Francis family sired several generations of rural pastors and then a doctor, all residing in the bucolic paradise of rural North Devon.   This aspect of ancestral genealogy deeply resonates.

In the mid 1990s, when I was in my mid-twenties, I particularly enjoyed a visit to Bridestowe with my mother.  We ambled through the village and churchyard and bumped into a church warden.  She invited us in for tea and spoke engagingly about the past and then she took us along the road, into another cottage and introduced us to an even older lady, in her mid-nineties who remembered my Great Great Grandfather well.

The ancestors my mother is most interested in are the Stephens family, her paternal grandmother’s line.  They had a large family seat in Gloucestershire which left the family in the mid 1800s.  This is where it all goes a bit Downton Abbey and I lose interest!  Family heritage and social class boundaries are of great, subliminal, importance to my Mum.  A large part of her values and social hierarchy appear to be influenced by this heritage.  She’s an upper middle class Victorian with a potty mouth, born in 1941!

Mum was the youngest of three children. John is nearly ten years her senior and a sister Jill is seven years older than her.  John and Jill were off at boarding school from the age of seven, so my mother almost grew up as an only child, possibly mollycoddled and over-protected by her mother.  Her early years during the war were spent in Devon with her grandparents but she returned to Shortlands, nr Bromley in Kent aged four.  At twelve, her parents moved to Westerham, on the rural fringe of South East London.  Her father commuted into the city as a commodity broker, and they retired down to Devon in the late 1960s.  Also aged twelve my mother went to Lillesden girls’ school as a boarder in Hawkhurst in Kent.  She misbehaved, didn’t do any work, enjoyed sport and left at sixteen with a solitary O level in French. 

My mother has a ridiculous capacity for facts and oozes quick-minded intelligence, so when I quiz her about her less than glorious school career, she – somewhat bitterly – says that her education didn’t matter because she was a girl.  She claims that girls’ private schools in the 1950s had no academic aspirations for their charges and that the schoolmistresses were all ‘lesbian spinsters’ and awful teachers.   I’m not entirely clear what or where my mother drifted amongst in her late teens but by 1959 she was in London.  Her longest job was being responsible for wedding gift lists at the General Trading Company, on Sloane Street, just off Sloane Square.  She lived in a shared flat on Radnor Walk, off the King’s Road.  She was a Chelsea girl in London’s vibrant ‘swinging’ sixties.

In 1971, she was twenty-nine and her biological clock was undoubtedly ticking.  She’d been having a long affair with a married man, then married to his second wife and she had no intent of becoming his third wife.  She went to stay with her parents in Westward Ho! in North Devon for the Easter weekend.  The Royal North Devon Golf Club (the oldest links course in England) was a mainstay of Devon visits, where she encountered my father, then fifty-three.   She’d had a crush on him when she was fifteen and he was thirty-nine.  There’d always been a Devon connection between the two families. 

What happened next remains completely unfathomable to me, but both my parents were at a crossroads in their lives.  Dad was secretary at the golf club, separated from his second wife and living in an apartment in Westward Ho! with his mistress (my mother’s description, not mine).  Mum was twenty-four years his junior, living and working in London and perhaps a little bored at the waning end of a long affair. 

They chatted one evening in the golf club bar.  She still called him Mr Payne Cook.  The next day, my mother was playing mixed foursomes with a friend, who would become my Godfather.  They were doing rather well.  Then my father walked out across the course, to the fifteenth green and handed my mother a letter.  She fluffed the last three holes, much to the chagrin of my competitive Godfather to be. 

After that, my mother terminated her affair and her frenetic London life, moved to Devon and planned to marry my father.  I only exist because of this bizarre and spontaneous whim.      

We all start the same way.  The precise circumstances can differ greatly, but somewhere a sperm cell meets an egg cell, they fuse and each of their twenty-three chromosomes combine to form a fertilised egg cell containing forty-six chromosomes made of very thin and extremely long, microscopic strands of de-oxyribonucleic acid – better known as DNA.  Encrypted on those two metres of DNA (if it were unravelled) in the nucleus of most of my approximately thirty trillion cells is the Toby code. 

In that original zygote (a fertilised ovum or egg cell), inside the fallopian tube of my mother, at some imprecise moment during November 1971, in the downstairs flat of my maternal grandmother’s house in Westward Ho! near Bideford in North Devon, was the biological recipe to make me.  The cell multiplied, specialised and grew into an embryo which by eight or nine weeks later grew into a thumb sized fetus of me, now recognisable as yet another specimen of Homo Sapiens.

We are biology. 

Animals.

Mammals.

Primates.

Apes.

Humans.

Until I started reading books on evolution and genetics in my thirties and forties, after the painstaking research of the Human Genome Project was complete in 2003, I had never considered how I am virtually identical to you, in biological terms.  I now know that somewhere between 96% and 99% of my approximately 22,000 genes, stored on my DNA are precisely the same as yours.  Genetically, we are only between 1% and 4% different. 

Our self-obsession with the ingenuity of our species, coupled to the genetics I was taught in Biology A level from 1989 – 1991 and the residue of religious faith and teaching which permeated into my adult life, led me to believe that it was our genes that made us different.  Whereas I now know that it’s our genes that make us – largely – the same.

Our genes provide the instructions for the membrane bound microscopic chemical processing factories we call our cells.  Simplistically, each different gene codes for a different protein which has a specific function within that cell.  That protein may be a digestive enzyme called amylase, found in saliva which breaks down starch – found in wheat, maize, rice and potatoes – into smaller sugar molecules.  Or it could be a small protein called Insulin, produced by pancreatic cells to regulate our blood glucose concentration.  Or myoglobin, the complex which stores oxygen inside muscle cells; or a monoclonal antibody integral to our immune system; or maybe it is a protein – coded for by a single gene which determines whether we have blue eyes or brown eyes.

Anyway, before I digress further into my amateur and likely inaccurate biochemical ramblings (I recommend What is life? by Paul Nurse; The incredible unlikeliness of being by Alice Roberts, Genome by Matt Ridley and Innate by Kevin Mitchell if you want to understand the wondrous biology inside all of us in more detail), let me pause to introduce this collection of reflections on fifty years of me.

            I’ve started with fertilisation because we have to start somewhere, and – for me – it is a more honest starting place than the day we immerse our mothers in pain by forcing our heads through their dilated cervix and slipping out, caked in blood and gore, through the soft and oft severed tissue of her vagina.

            It will be fifty years from that messy, joyful day on 24^th August 2022.  So, writing me has made a list of forty-nine key moments, people, places, events, experiences, stories and reflections which have infused with my genetic template to make me, me.  I hope to write them all by the end of August and certainly by the end of this calendar year.  I will present them here in chronological order: the number of each essay, story or reflection closely yet imperfectly correlating to the year of my life.   I probably won’t write them in order.  And I hope that the style of some pieces may vary too.  It will be – inevitably – heavy on biography, but I hope I will veer away from my analytical style to write descriptively and lucidly about trees, fields, the coast, tractors, music, festivals, family, friends, colleagues, science, teaching, writing, minor regrets, mistakes, lust, unrequited love, marriage, parenting, divorce and self-deprecation too.

            I can’t imagine such an indulgent and personal project to be of much interest to anyone else, but I am hopeful that my exploration of the people, places and experiences that have sculpted me enables you to get deeper inside yourself too.  I’m inclined to agree with Socrates’ famous assertion that the life which is unexamined is not worth living.

            As I write, I’m looking forward to reflecting upon what it is that makes me, me.  Am I shaped by decisions – made by me, or more significantly others – and experiences  throughout my life?  Or would an approximate version of fifty-year-old me have occurred come what may?  Was the fertilised Toby egg, raised by my biological parents, in the precise conditions of my childhood home and various educational establishments always going to turn out this way?  These are virtually impossible questions to answer – scientifically, philosophically; psychologically – but I won’t feel fully alive if I don’t give it a good old forensic and fun-loving crack.  

2. Nearly born a bastard
3. Mum
4. Dad
5. The Chocolate Factory
6. The Beech Tree
7. Wheelies on the Silage Clamp
8. The Outsider Begins (at St Josephs and Buckland)
9. The Avalanches
10. Photography
11. Three Days with Dad
12. The Ploughing Match
13. Milk
14. Lamp posts and Gate posts
15. I should have kissed Jo Chamberlain (Three regrets: not going to the ploughing match with Dad, not forming a shambolic and angry punk band at university and its consequent summer tour around dodgy pubs in desolate British seaside towns, and not kissing Jo Chamberlain).
16. The Day that Dad Died
17. Verbosity and other frustrations
18. The Strangest Day of my Life
19. Explosion
20. Half siblings
21. The Accidental Scientist
22. The Vale of Avalon
23. Like a Hurricane
24. Football, Fungicides and the One Million Pound Failed Batch
25. Christmas in a Corner of England with Dirty Guitars
26. Two Weeks of Madness
27. The Old Me (Smeeton Party)
28. Horses, Swimming and Sleep Deprivation
29. Beyond Offa’s Dyke
30. The Amorphous State
31. The Day I became a Dad
32. Blood (Ollie H.U.S, blood transfusion etc)
33. Getting Home for Bath Time
34. The Battle of Tunbridge Wells
35. Why haven’t you tidied the dog’s room?
36. The 0724 from Marden
37. La Mer
38. Status, Identity and the end of Science
39. Non-smiling Sarah and the Long Summer
40. Don’t touch my Mug
41. Psychology, teaching and death
42. Science and How to Kill It
43. A maths lesson drenched in anger and Brexit
44. Escape to the Country on Ancient Byways
45. A Luddite Embraces Twitter
46. Hartland, Love and Existentialism
47. Preservers, Disrupters and Dreamers
48. The Decision
49. Annus Horribilis
50. The New, Old Me

by Toby Payne-Cook, 1st January 2022

It used to be Boxing Day. Well, that’s what my skewed, embellished memory tells me. Specifically, 1982. I was ten. I’d just received the best Christmas present of my childhood: A Praktica SLR camera. We went for a family walk; the only one I remember with Dad. Devon, of course. To the sea. Grey sands, between Appledore and Westward Ho! I remember the photos more than the walk itself. Six years later Dad was gone, but the Boxing Day tradition of a family walk on the coast continued.

Until the first dawn of the new millennium. Hartland, North Devon. My favourite place in the whole wide world. A backless bench on the top of the cliff near Damehole point, looking south west, just beyond Blegberry farm. I popped the question. The answer was affirmative. New Year’s Day has always involved a coast bound pilgrimage since then. When our children were young, it was typically Hythe, in Kent. Along the promenade. With bikes, scooters and all-in-one multicoloured jumpsuits.

Twenty-two years later, this is my second New Year’s Day alone. This isn’t sad, it’s just life, and I’m okay. Thanks for asking. So many of you have been very kind this last year. The children are 18, 16 and 14 now; all nearer to their next birthday. We had a lovely early Christmas together and they joined me at my sister’s on Boxing Day for a couple of nights. The girls are back with me for a bit tomorrow and I’m taking my son back to University next weekend.

Since returning from a very happy and social Christmas with my sister, Mum and other family on 28th December, I’ve drifted a little. I’ve enjoyed the solitude, and re-starting my novel about Mary, the ageing hippy and reclusive ‘witch’ of the woods whom Luke unearths, via his late mother’s estranged family. I’ve been a bit lazy about walking, no dogs or wife nagging me to go out. I love walking, but mud and rain aren’t especially inviting.

So, yesterday, on New Year’s Eve, I checked the weather forecast and tide times and vowed to go for a long beach walk on New Year’s Day. I spent last night alone too, but it was great. After too much time on Twitter, impulsively engaging with some peculiarly territorial and aggressive types and spurting forth on the unfathomable highly speculative machinations of the human mind, I indulged in some port and too much cheese and re-acquainted myself with When Harry Met Sally to see the New Year in. Throughout the evening I sent messages of gratitude and love to family and close friends via WhatsApp; enjoyed some virtual mutual appreciation on my mostly happy, funny and kind little corner of Twitter and managed to speak to two drunken children via Face Time shortly after midnight. A couple of enchanting episodes of the Detectorists, then bed.

A leisurely start to the day; shower; coffee; fry up; dipping onto the Twits to observe the great and never-ending metaphor, model and mind philosophico-narcissisico-dog-with-a-bonio debate still raging. Thankfully, I summoned up the strength of mind not to dive back in, thinking that the morning of the first day of a New Year didn’t need my amateur existentialist contributions. So, around midday, I headed twenty miles south, around the fringes of Tenterden and Rye towards Camber Sands in East Sussex to blow out the cobwebs of 2021, my second consecutive annus horribilis.

It was a sunny, mild and beautiful morning. So, I wasn’t the only person thinking a New Years Day walk at Camber was a good idea. The whole of Kent and Sussex seemed to agree with me. As I drove through Camber, every morsel of tarmac, verge, carpark and kerb was coated in cars. I smugly assumed that the carpark at Broomhill sands, a mile further on towards the Lydd peninsula would be a relatively well kept secret. I was wrong, but a patient ten minutes yielded a space right at the Eastern end of the car park.

The promenade and distant sands were filled with ants. Far more than I’d ever seen before on this beach in Winter. People were huddled along the upper section of the beach, between the high tide line and sand dunes, so I headed towards the shoreline where there were fewer people. As I started walking, it was clear that a New Years Day walk on the beach is a THING. But it also became clear that a New Years Day walk ALONE is NOT a thing. And this got me thinking.

I wondered if I would see any other people walking alone. And then I wondered what their stories would be. The idea for a future novel danced between my synapses. What four people could there be? A version of me, obviously: male, middle-aged, teenage kids, soon to be a divorcee. Then a recent widow: a charming and worldly wise elderly woman who’d always walked alone without her husband, with her dog, throughout her long retirement. But this year, despite that it was the same day and the same walk and the same dog, she felt bereft. Because her husband wouldn’t be back at home to extract himself from his optimally placed armchair in front of the telly; to greet her with a slice of cake and a cup of tea. Then an outsider: a lonely man in his forties, who still lived at home with Mum, had no friends, no work, no money. But he had a solitary hobby: with his metal detector, he hunted for the accidentally discarded coins from other people’s happier lives. Then number four: a woman in her early fifties, walking alone, with a dog. She walks past the male divorcee; they both notice they are alone; a subtle smile, perhaps even the briefest of twinkles of their eyes. The moment passes. They may or may not extrapolate a meeting of minds, a breaking of loneliness, a fresh start.

Then they walk past each other again. An hour later. The same warm smile and a definite twinkle of eyes. Typically, this would all be ignored for a second time. Two strangers, in similar circumstances, not looking for love, or anything, not dating anyone else; quite content in their new found freedoms but one of them impulsively stops and turns and says, “Hi…I was just wondering if – if – if I could – if I could walk with you for a little while…”

In reality, none of this happened. But it was fun thinking about it.

What actually happened?

On my outbound walk, along the edge of the soporific hiss of the shoreline, I was virtually alone; away from all the other ants. Initially, I found myself thinking whether anyone else on the beach was thinking the same thoughts as me. Was anyone else writing a story in their mind? Or wondering why I was alone on a beach, on New Years Day. Was anyone on the beach an actual writer. A published, practicing novelist. Surely, they walked on beaches on New Years Day. The people in my phone were with me at the start of my walk too. I took a couple of film clips and shared these thoughts on Twitter. Some responded. Likes and brief replies.

Then, I was overcome with warmth and love for my family. So I took another film clip and some photographs and posted them on WhatsApp. I adore my children. I feel guilty for the all the uncertainty, the tension, and the suboptimal accommodation, logistics and cashflow. They are imperfect and adolescent and moody and hedonistic and rude and self-obsessed (this may be genetic!) but they are cool and funny and fun to be with and seemingly fairly stable and they love me and that’s all I need. Inevitably, my mind flips to being on this beach with them recently and then to all the other beaches we’ve been on together: the sandcastles; the body surfing; the kayaking; the cave exploring; the rock climbing; the games of cricket; the shrimping and winkling and the giggles and big grinning when they first swam out of their depth into the comfort and safety of my loving arms.

I put my phone away. The sound of the sea soothes me. The glimmering sunlight dancing on the water, trying to escape the clouds. The slosh of the shallows around my wellies. I look up and out. Four horse riders are having a wonderful time galloping across the sand and then cooling off in the sea; waves tickling their underbellies. As I move closer to the mouth of the River Rother at the end of the beach, I get closer to people. There are a lot of family groups walking – with late teenage or early twenty-something children (early teenagers don’t walk, I don’t see many of them). They smile and some say happy new year.

Most of the young adults I encounter – whether siblings, lovers or offspring radiate warmth and joy. They look happy. I conclude that their lives have been easy, their responsibilities light, their beauty untarnished by the multifaceted stresses of our thirties and forties. Their parents or uncles or aunts or family friends look happy too. Perhaps, into their fifties, they are all more comfortable in their skin, the insecurities, self-obsession and self-doubt of youth and early mid-life behind them. I nod and say hello to a ridiculously tall, arty looking Dad with his bearded, pierced and edgy-cool looking mid twenty-something son. I wonder how much booze or mild narcotics they’d indulged in together over Christmas.

I walk up to the sand dunes and past a few more couples now. At least half of the couples I walk past are walking in silence. And half of them (a quarter of the total) are looking miserable. The unspoken and unwritten stories of their pasts and futures intrigue me. I used to walk a lot with my wife. We had some lovely walks together, in beautiful places. But we rarely talked. Not properly anyway. And I suspect we’d have looked like some of those unhappy looking couples today, for quite some time.

I do see some happy, joyful and very beautiful couples too. People are more beautiful when they’re happy. They all smile at me, and some say happy new year. One young couple are sitting at the foot of the sand dunes, in each other’s arms, drinking shots of something. The freedom and simplicity of youth. It never makes me angry or jealous seeing couples happy together. It is delightful. Love. It’s good. And if it happens again, then wonderful. But being alone – and free – is a risk I’ve been prepared to take. Being lonely in a relationship, oh man – that’s hard. I can’t be sure but, I saw quite a lot of that today.

Further into the sand dunes there are some early teenage, or pre-teen, boys playing. Jumping off turrets of marram grass and having fun. I remember doing that a lot in Northam Burrows, nr Westward Ho! but I also remember being fairly crap at being a boy. I was gangly and timid and highly strung. I don’t miss the innocence of youth, nor the cruelty of other children; all the pecking order crap. You still see it on Twitter, the my gang, your gang, competitive trying to prove yourself right or others wrong bullshit.

The more I walk, the more content I feel in my skin. Walking is good for the mind, or the soul if you prefer. It is also good for writing. The rhythm of my legs, the slightly raised heart rate and consequent endorphins, the wide open space, the fresh winter air: it all calms and focuses the mind. I’ve made all the most important decisions of my life walking alone by the sea. It is hard to explain but I’m suddenly awash with greater clarity and purpose. It’s where I feel a sense of self most keenly. Dark, sad or depressive thoughts soon disperse when I walk alone by the sea. There’s a raw, therapeutic power to it which I rarely feel anywhere else.

I feel invincible. And put things in perspective. But I also dream.

I dream of being a writer full time. To walk and explore our fair isle and beyond, meeting people, researching places, and then write about it or fictionalise it. To properly describe something, or to delve deep into the human condition. While I love friends and family and food and booze and talking complete bollocks, being alone with my thoughts and walking alone by the sea is arguably when I feel most alive – though watching live music brilliantly performed by an artist or band with a compelling muse comes a close second.

I will do this but life is full of compromise. For the time being there are still children to parent, children to teach, colleagues to collaborate with and conventions to adhere to, but there is nothing better – for me – than wallowing in thought, brimful of ideas and abstraction, alone, on a windy beach in Winter.

By the time I returned to my car, nearly three hours later, I felt a deep sense of connection to both place and people. I’d been smiled at, nodded at, and ‘happy new yeared’ at by about fifty people; I’d seen several hundred people, maybe a thousand mingling with their friends, parents, children and lovers and it made me happy to be there. I only saw three other people alone, and I can’t be sure if they were alone. The first was an older lady betwixt car park and beach – perhaps waiting for a friend or partner to park a car. The second was a young female jogger, jogging. The third was a woman, perhaps a little older than me, walking briskly with a dog, who turned back to say hello. I wonder what her story was as she walked alone on a beach, on New Year’s Day.

Happy New Year everyone and thanks for reading.

This whole story is written in my head and has been written before but this is a fresh start…as it’s still Christmas, I thought I’d tantalise you with its mysterious beginning…

Beautiful

People

A novel

by

Toby Cook

For my Mum, the hippy that never was.

Mary, April 2016

The uneven stairs creak as my decrepit frame tentatively stretches downwards.  There will come a morning soon, when I can no longer descend them, and Zoe will have to bring me my meals upstairs.  The overflowing ashtray amongst the strewn chaos of my desk distracts me from my path into the parlour and onto the kitchen.  I pick it up and notice the letter.  I put down the ashtray, re-read the letter but its contents are familiar, having read it over and over, so I fold it back into its handwritten envelope, running my wrinkled finger over the artistic scrawl and place it at the bottom of the pile, in the middle, right hand drawer of my bureau.

I draw back the curtains to reveal the uninspiring grey mizzle of an April morning.  Unmoved, I grapple with the wooden latch on the stable door into the parlour and shuffle into the kitchen.  To my surprise Zoe is already here so I say, “You’re an hour early, my dear,”

“Two actually, Mary.”

“What on Earth for?”

“We’re going to London.”

“London?  But I haven’t left this cottage for years.”

“Thirty, you keep telling me.”

“It only seems like yesterday that she was here, naked, flowers in her hair; the most ethereal creature I’ve ever seen.”

Zoe ignores me and asks another question, distracting me from the images in my mind, “Maybe it’s too much for you, maybe we shouldn’t go.”

“Go where, dear?”

“London.”

“London?”

“Yes, we talked about it yesterday.  And the day before.  And all last week too.  Do you still want to go?” responded Zoe patiently.

“I don’t think so.”

“But you were adamant, you told me about the letter and…”

“Yes, yes.  I remember now.”

“So, we’re going?”

“Yes, of course we’re going,” I asserted.

*   *   *

            “We’re fifteen minutes away,” mumbled Zoe softly, disturbing me from my sleep.

            “Have I missed Stonehenge?”

            “Yes, Mary!  We passed it nearly two hours ago.”

            “Oh, you should have woken me.  We used to celebrate the solstice there.  A long time ago now.”

            “Over thirty years ago, probably.”

            “What makes you say that dear?”

            “Well, you told me earlier – before you fell asleep – that you’d not left the cottage since 1986 – and it’s 2016 now.”

            “Yes, exactly.  I better put some lipstick on then.”  I started to shake in trepidation.  I felt safe with Zoe.  The thought of seeing people again terrified me.  I was confused and wasn’t sure why I was here, wherever that was, wearing a floral dress and a black fur coat, in a car, putting on lipstick.

*   *   *

            “I’ll pick you up here at a quarter to three.”

            “Are you not joining me?”

            “I can’t, Mary.  I don’t want Micky knowing that I’ve brought you here.”

            “Oh, darling.  Won’t you come in.  Come and meet her?” asked Mary nervously; quivering.

            “You’ll be fine, Mary.  Just walk in, sit down, then walk out.  You don’t have to speak to anyone.”

            “Who’s Micky?”

            “Don’t worry, Mary.  Just wait here, afterwards.  I’ll find you.”

Luke, April 2016, the same day.

            I stood down from the lectern, choking back my tears.  The church was packed.  Knowing she was so loved by so many was both a comfort and an act of cruelty.  Sixty-two was too young these days.  ‘He’ takes the best ones first, they say.  Well fuck ‘you’, I reply. 

            Mark, dishevelled, overweight and still sporting his late nineties hair, fucking kills me with his song, ‘Mellow Sun’ followed by Melanie’s ‘Beautiful People.’  I crack.  In the absence of a comforting hand from Sonia, I squeeze her thigh, just above the knee: an unmet cry for help.  Becca notices the absence of affection from her mother towards me, so she stretches past Sonz to comfort me.

            After the service, Mum’s eccentric, arty friends smother me in hugs.   Sonia goes to find Soph, my sister, both contenders for the cold-hearted businesswoman of the year award.  Becca and Emily – our girls – follow her to say hello to their posh, country cousins.  Mark and Tara, with baby Florence in arms, have sparked up a joint already.  I look around to see if Dad bothered to show up but there’s no sign of him.  He pissed off to the States thirty years ago, when I was six, so it’s no great surprise that he didn’t show, though I’m surprised Soph didn’t coax him over.  In my numb, addled state I feel myself rise above the scene afore me.   Ageing hippies, English teachers and local artists mingle in the early Spring light; shrivelling daffodils and tulips protruding in pots adjacent to the church path.  I notice some of Mum’s friends swarming towards Mark’s fading rock star flame.  I recognise the majority of the assembled throng but observe a hunched and frail old lady in a floral dress and black fur coat, much older than everyone else, whom I’ve never seen before.

            A tall and rugged man; wearing a tweed jacket approaches the tiny woman.  They are over twenty metres from me, close to the church gate on to the road.  He strides towards her aggressively and starts shouting at her.  Before I have a chance to intervene, a younger woman in jeans and sleeveless vest top with pink spiky hair and a thick layer of purple eyeliner, jumps out of a red mini and rushes towards the old lady, wraps her heavily tattooed arm around her and bungles her into the car.  As the younger woman walks around the car to the driver’s seat the man is ranting at her, facing away from me.  The punky female mouths a brisk, “Oh fuck off, Micky!” back at him and screeches off; accelerating fast.  I have no idea who this man is and decide to ignore his burly, red-faced rage.  Tara, my elder brother Mark’s partner, comes over to me, passes the remains of her joint which I take a small lug of, as she asks, “Are you okay, Lukey?”

            I hold the smoke in my lungs for a soothing few seconds before exhaling, “Uh huh.  Not sure what was going on over there, but yeah, I’m okay.”

            Tara and I walked along the road while puffing on another joint, to the pub in Strand on the Green, where Mum’s wake was being held.   

Luke, April 2016, later the same day.

“You’re drunk.  At your own mother’s funeral.”

I look over to the bar, notice Mark glugging back shot after shot of Whisky, and reply to Sonia, “Not in comparison to Mark, I’m not.”

“Mark is an ageing rock star, alcoholic and waster.  It’s not a good look, Luke.”

“Mum would have wanted a party.   And would have had one too many herself.  It’s a celebration of her life.”

“Well, are you coming home now?  The girls are bored senseless now that Sophie, Ed and their kids have left.”

“No, I think I’ll stay.”

“How are you going to get home?”

“Not sure. I’ll get a cab or something.”

“Fine, you can sleep in the spare room.  Again.”

“Okay.”  I peck Sonia insincerely on the cheek.  She cold twists away.  “Night, night then,” I mumbled as she walked away. 

Sonia is pretty smart and must have known that Mum couldn’t stand her.  In some ways life is going to be easier without Mum’s constant briefing against her; I won’t have to split my allegiances anymore, but in recent years, I tended to pop and see Mum – normally with our girls in tow – without Sonz.  The unspoken tension when we were altogether was insufferable.  As the girls get older and become more independent, I’m beginning to wonder if Mum was right about her.  Anyway, today is about Mum and I’m going to get wrecked to numb the pain. 

It was great catching up with Sue and Linda, Mum’s oldest friends and mingling with a room full of her teaching, art and book-club friends.  They’ve always been an antidote to mine and Sonia’s scientific worlds.  Most chemists and pharmacists, while super bright are – generally – cultural Philistines.   

I walk over to the bar where Sue is slurring her words and flirting with Mark.  Tara has taken Florence back to Mum’s and everyone else has dispersed.  Mark orders me a double Whisky and says, “So, I see the cat’s gone home, then Lukey boy!”

We knock back a couple more glasses: wincing, reminiscing and laughing.  Then, a red-faced man who’d been sitting conspicuously watching us from the public section of the pub, across the other side of the bar shouted over to us, “You three seem to be having fun, mind if I join you?”

“Sure, no problem,” I reply. 

As he walked into the empty private function room, with his tweed jacket over his shoulder, he looked vaguely familiar.  He headed towards Mark first and shook his hand, “Hello Mark, I’m your Uncle Micky.”

Mark looked dumfounded but I couldn’t contain my impulsivity, “Fuck me, didn’t I spot you earlier outside the church?  Shouting at an old lady.”

“Yer, that were me,” replied Micky in a soft West Country burr, “us weren’t too happy to see the old witch come back to haunt my big sister’s funeral.”

My mind went fuzzy. 

“Uncle?” clarified Mark, “Mum never mentioned you.”

“No, us don’t suppose she did,” replied Micky.

“So how do we know you’re for real?” I asked suspiciously.

“You don’t, I suppose.  So, Diana never mentioned me then?”

“Nope.”

“Do you know her maiden name?”

“Poole, I think.  Diana Poole.”

“Yes, that’s it,” agreed Mark.

“Well, I’m Micky Poole.”

“Fairly common surname, I imagine.”

“Yep, there was a Brian Poole in the Tremeloes,” cackled Mark.

“Look us aren’t after anything.  I’m just a Devon farmer who’s come to say goodbye to he’s long lost sister…”

“Farmer?” I ask, in shock.

“Yer.  Your Mum, our sister Lizzie and us grew up on a farm in North Devon.”

“Look, man.  I gotta go outside,” declared Mark, clamping his hands around the sides of his head, while staring enigmatically straight through Micky, “For a smoke.  This is a complete mindfuck.”

Mum’s friend Sue followed Mark, leaving me at the bar with Uncle Micky.

“He’s a bit of a headcase, ‘int he?” queried Micky as his eyes followed Mark outside.

“Well, he is – or was – a rock musician.”

 “Well, I’ll be darned.  That’s what we always thought your Mum was going to be.  She were a right old hippy.”

“Forgive me, Micky, but this is all a bit much to take in right now.  It is lovely to meet you, but it’s a surprise, you know.  Mum never spoke of any family.  And, regretfully, we never asked.”

“It’s all that fucking witch’s fault.  She’s what poisoned Mum against father.”

My head was spinning.  Micky did look a bit like Mum but was an alien creature.  Mum was urban, cool, and a voracious intellect.  Micky was a red-faced and apparently fairly simple farmer.  “Look, I’m sorry, Uncle,” I slurred as I placed my arm on to his shoulder, “but I’m not sure I can do this now, but if I decide to research Mum’s family history, now that she’s gone, and I’m interested – you know – but just, right now I need to lie down and catch up with my brother – he lives in California and I don’t see him very often – and we – need – to – reminisce about the Mum we knew – not her mysterious – past we don’t yet know.”  I felt unsteady on my bar stool, so tightened my shoulder grip on Micky before continuing to ramble, “I really don’t want to be rude, but it’s been a long…emotional day…I’m very drunk and can’t take this in…”

“No, no, us understands completely.  Us didn’t know you’m existed until Jenny saw it in the paper and told us.”

“Who’s Jenny?”

“The wicked stepmother.  Your grandfer’s widow.”

“Right.  Carry on…” I urged, swaying.

“Look, it was very spontaneous.  Me coming today.  Your Mum were lovely to me.  I just came to say goodbye, as us didn’t get the chance all those years ago.   Us ain’t seen Diana in over forty-three year.” 

Micky started weeping as he mumbled that last sentence, which triggered my waterworks as well.  As I quenched back the tears, I said, “I’d like to know more…but not today, can I have your number?”

“Of course.  I’d love to show he round the farm.  You’ve got two girls, I think – us spotted them in church.  Reckons they’d love it.  There’s a girt big sandy beach right next to the farm.  Special place.  Come and stay in the summer.”

“I’d like that.  I’d like that very much.”

“Look, you’m take care.  ‘Tis been good to meet he.  You go and see if your brother’s alright.   Stay in touch.”

“I will.”   

Luke, April 2016, later, the same evening.

Tara had settled Florence to bed and was rolling a couple of joints on the large coffee table in Mum’s living room.  Mark was glugging his way through a bottle of single malt.  I was daydreaming in a semi-drunken, mildly stoned haze.  Sue, who’d studied English Literature with Mum at Royal Holloway back in the early seventies was talking too much, endlessly waxing Mark’s ego and probing his musical career.  I could tell that Mark was getting bored with her badgering, his answers increasingly aloof and guarded.  He stood up, his broad, tall frame and long, curly locks filling half the room.  He flicked through Mum’s records, the roots of his inspiration, and put on the Original Soundtrack from the Woodstock festival in 1969.

With Canned Heat’s Going Up the Country playing loud in the background, Mark grunted, “Mum used to love all this hippy shit, man!”

I sat grinning inanely.  I loved it too.  I drifted back to 1999, after my first year at Imperial.  Sitting in this same chair, skinning up, surrounded by mates.  Listening to Let it Bleed.  Mum was toking with us.  Then we all hopped on the tube, up to Wembley to see the Stones.  The explosion of Britpop in my teens first took me back to the Kinks and the Small Faces; the swinging sixties, and it was only a small leap to the Summer of Love in ’67: The Beatles, The Stones; Cream; Hendrix.  I gorged on that stuff as an undergrad.  Mum loved it.  My mates and I spent a lot of time here.  Listening to records.  Off our heads.  Mum floating ethereally amongst us.  She was a free spirit.  Wild, wonderful and full of love.

She was captivating and made our lives joyful.  Poets and artists came to stay, sometimes for weeks on end.  When we could afford a holiday, we visited cities and sought out culture: Florence, Rome, Paris, Barcelona; Amsterdam.  When Dad left, Mum blossomed and life was full.  Dad’s family were over on the East Coast of the US.  I remember visiting once.  Soph has stayed in touch with our paternal line.  Which is probably why I haven’t.   I honestly never considered the absence of Grandparents, Uncles or Aunts from my childhood.  You can’t miss what you don’t know.  Particularly, if all your needs are met.  Yet, I suppose Mum had to come from somewhere.  But the surprise arrival of Uncle Micky was a curveball:  a farmer’s daughter from Devon?  A country girl?  There was literally no trail of breadcrumbs which could have led me to this conclusion.

Tara passed me the joint and I inhaled deeply.  As I exhaled, I spluttered like a lawnmower.  I’d last smoked weed with Mum when she was first diagnosed with lymphoma.  Nine months ago.  And before that, it was my thirtieth birthday.  Sonia caught me.  Gave me a lecture.  I think that’s what Sonz found hardest about Mum.  Her floaty, wordy, liberal, shades of greyness.  Everything is black and white to Sonz; clinical, pure; logical.  Right or wrong.  No doubt, only certainty.  It’s boring.

Mark necked another glass of whisky and clamped his empty tumbler down on to the table, grabbing the joint from Tara.  “So, Lukey.  Whaddya going to do about Uncle Micky?”

   “I’ve got his number.  He’s suggested I take the family down to Devon in the summer.”

“And will you?” asked Tara, openly.

“Yeah.  I’m intrigued.”

“About Micky, or Mum?”

“Mum.  I mean, when you think about it, why don’t we know anything about her past?”

“Be careful what you wish for Lukey, there must be some dark shit lurking back there,” replied Mark menacingly.

“Gee, I don’t suppose it’s that bad,” chipped in Tara, “Diana was lovely.  And not screwed up at all.  Like – really fucking balanced – maybe she wasn’t interested in farming or the country.  Maybe life was just a bit too slow down there, you know?”

“Yeah.  That’s plausible.  But it doesn’t explain the lack of contact; the estrangement.”

“Well, it’s kinda exciting…” smiled elegantly wasted Tara.

“Yeah, I guess it is…”

Mary, April 2016, the next afternoon.

            I couldn’t sleep last night.  Nights are increasingly fitful these days, but last night was more agitated than usual.  My rhythm was disturbed.  In and out of dreams.  What was fucking Micky Poole doing there?  Rotten to the core, that lot.  Then I was back on the beach, with her, but she was angry.  Screaming at me.  Tormenting me.  Then, it was milking time.   The cows were mooing.  Then light, flickering light.

“Mary?”

I can’t write today.

“Mary, you awake?”

Too tired.

“Mary?”

What’s that?  “Is that you, dear?”

“Yes Mary, it’s me, Zoe.  Are you coming down?

“Give me a few minutes.”

“It’s two o’clock Mary.”

“Two o’clock?  Oh my gosh, I must have overslept.  The Chickens!”

“I’ve done them.  Don’t worry.  I’ll put the kettle on.”

Do stop shouting, dear.  I can’t hear you through the parlour door, I thought to myself.

  I twist my saggy, wrinkled flesh out of bed, wrap my dressing gown around me and move gingerly down the stairs.  I unlock the stable door between my study and the parlour.  Zoe, my angel, has laid the breakfast table and made coffee and toast.

“How are you feeling today, Mary?  It was quite an adventure for you yesterday.”

“My rhythms have been disturbed.”

“Well, you’ve had a long lie in.”

“I didn’t sleep at all.  I couldn’t get that blasted man out of my head.”

“Who, Micky?”

“Yes, the wretched man.  He torments me.”

“He means no harm, really.  Though, I’m not looking forward to his return.”

“I’m sorry.  He won’t hurt you, will he?”

“Oh no.  He’s a gentle giant.  He might not speak to me for days, but he won’t hurt me.  He can’t hurt me.”

“I should have never let you take me.  It was a terrible mistake.”

“That’s not what you said driving me home last night.”

“Really?  What did I say?”

“You said how beautifully Diana’s son read the lesson – Luke, I think you said…”

“Yes, Luke, seemed like a sensitive soul.  And lovely words.  I remember them from my mother’s funeral.  I think I’d maybe like them read at my funeral, but the vicar will have to read them as there’ll be no one else there.”

“Nonsense, Mary.  I’ll be there.  I’ll read it for you.”

“Oh my dear, would you?”

“Of course, but I don’t think we need worry about all that yet, you’re tough as old boots.”

 “Well, I don’t feel it today.  It was too much yesterday.  You’re not allowed to let me persuade you to take me on any other trips again.”

“Well, that depends if you’ve got any more mysteries…” I drift off while Zoe is still speaking, not paying attention to her soft Devonian tones.  “…lurking in the closet, Mary.  You were quite adamant.”

“I think I’ll write to him.”

“Sorry, Mary…write to who?”

“To Luke.  Such a lovely boy.  Just like his mother.”

Essay 2 of 12…to solve anything, we first have to understand the problem.

My 12 Christmas thought pieces – NOT definitive guides or authoritative wisdom – attempt to highlight the complexity and deep-rooted nature of most of the problems we are trying to solve with, or in, education.

1. Society 2. Family 3. Education 4. School 5. Curriculum 6. Assessment 7. English 8. Maths 9. Science 10. Teaching 11. Learning 12. Research

In political, economic and social terms, family has become the base unit of society. It was a simple leap of rhetoric from David Cameron when the ‘Big Society’ mutated into the equally meaningless, ‘hard-working families.’ The family is a hot topic in politics, and an even hotter one in economics. You only have to re-watch all the supermarket, high street chemists and department store adverts for Christmas to realise quite how deeply engrained the family has become as an easily manipulated, marketed at, and probably – if we’re really honest – slightly contrived entity.

It would be churlish of me to suggest that family is just another imagined reality; that it doesn’t exist. Clearly, it exists. And it matters too. In my first Christmas essay, I suggested that society is a politically expedient myth. In my second reflection here – on concepts or matters which are embroiled with the challenge, purpose and function of education – on family, I’m going to suggest that the nuclear, modern family is perhaps an invention of recent date.

This may be a bitter pill to swallow after a merry little Christmas with your nearest and dearest. I hope your Christmas was happy and that your immediate family were happy too. I am rather dependent upon family at the moment, as I am separated and my twenty-one year marriage rumbles to its climatic legal close. My adolescent kids are great, my little – forty-seven year old – sister and her family have just given me the most wonderful Christmas. Mum was there, in body, in anger, in torment and confusion too. We shared some snatched moments of joy; where she hummed Beatles songs: giggling and indecipherable. My elder half-siblings have been there for me this year too, our deep family ties curated as adults beyond the estrangements of yesteryear. I need my family more than they need me right now. Family is the rope which tethers us to the Earth.

Yet, it fucks us up too. Larkin called it. Man hands on misery to man. There is no such thing as a normal family, some are more normal than others, but humans are flawed and parenting is hard and the pressures to be the perfect, happy family unit are huge. We make mistakes, our parents made mistakes and their parents did too.

From the outside, other families; perhaps the families of our childhood friends, seem more normal, more fun, more loving, more chaotic, more broken, more perfect than ours but we only really scratch the surface of their lives. We are entrenched in our nurtured genealogy. All humans are between 96 and 99% identical genetically but the differences in our DNA are even smaller between siblings, offspring and our direct ancestral lineage. This is something most of us care little about in our youth but as we age and our short-term memory fades our family histories and the places associated with them deepen.

While our genealogy fascinates and is collected and shared via photographs and stories, it is our inherited nurture which embeds our psychological profiles and our emotional intelligence, hang ups and future life successes or failures. We are our own selves but the love, the neglect, the disparagement, the encouragement, the acceptance, the criticism, the competition, the cultural enrichment, the indulgence and the mollycoddling which occurs shapes us deeply. We know the criticality of our parents or carers to our future mental health, yet we so rarely discuss it and – as parents – we are left, often with little tangible support and guidance, to work out how best to do it on the hoof. There are too many conflicting self-help guides; too many do-gooding and close but not immediate relatives quick with a patronising soundbite but the fact that we – as a ‘society’ are still learning this most fundamental role on the job is almost as daft as development chemists and engineers re-discovering the laws of thermodynamics each generation.

I will elaborate upon the disproportionate emphasis upon getting good grades, getting a good job, earning money, becoming successful, being good at Maths, or English, or both as opposed to fathoming our emotions, developing manners, confidence, empathy, tolerance in my next thought piece on education but the societal pressure to churn out competent, competitive children into the workplace seems rather unhealthy to me.

This is the fundamental problem with family in my opinion. There is too much (sometimes self-imposed) pressure on parents to be absolutely brilliant. Pressure not only to not screw up their kids but to – somehow – make them better than they were and to groom them for success in an economically driven society, rather than grooming them for success and happiness in a fulfilment and purpose driven world.

This is a problem of recent date. The family didn’t really exist as single entity in pre-history. In our communities or tribes of approximately 150 people, we’d have had parents and siblings but family groups would have been much more interdependent and intermingled. If a young mother was struggling with tiredness a slightly older mother, or elder daughter would be on hand to help. The village or tribal elders would have seen it all before and be on hand to offer their sage like wisdom. Fifteen year olds having experienced something just once, and then declaring themselves world experts on this topic wouldn’t have been a thing 10,000 years ago. Probably not even a thing much more than 100 years ago. Wisdom, knowledge and support would have flowed through those communities like water.

With the exception of the aristocracy, the landed gentry and the affluent upper middle classes, people in Victorian times and up to the 1950s (before the invention of the contraceptive pill and the commonplace application of modern medicine, most notably antibiotics) families would have been larger and lived in smaller houses with a great many people sleeping in one room. Elder siblings would have helped out more, lightening the parenting load and local communities were more closely networked via local churches or community groups.

From the 1920s and particularly 1950s onwards the number of people per household started to decrease. The insularity of the household and evolution of the nuclear family unit, with 2.4 children developed further through the 1980s and 1990s as we transitioned towards a more equal, but also a more consumerist and materialist society.

By the late 1990s house prices necessitated a dual income; we became a more secular society; positive changes in society encouraged greater co-parenting and consumerism, and therefore envy – the ‘keep up with the Jones’ mentality – increased. While we have more labour saving devices and appliances than our parents and grandparents did, the pressures on the nuclear family have undoubtedly increased, frequently juxtaposed with a significant reduction in the availability of or involvement with a local support network.

The insularity, isolation and pressures on modern families (exacerbated by the relentless marketing and advertising to this demographic; also the tiresome political rhetoric of ‘hard working families’) may have increased freedom from irritating, old-fashioned, judgemental and bigoted relatives but it has made us less tolerant and less connected – on a local level.

While the freedom to move and work and live all over the country, continent or world has greatly increased, this means that our friends and wider families – the people who could support us when life gets tough as it inevitably does from time to time – are inaccessible to us. Couple this to our increased secularity and lack of involvement in local community groups means that we are lonelier and more cut off than we’ve ever been before.

While it is great that we can find our tribe and find our friends, they all lead busy lives – like you and me and however lovely they are, they cannot always be relied upon outside the good times. This modern unit of immediate family accidentally drives families apart too, reduces our tolerance and acceptance of in laws leading to intolerance, impatience, resentment and conflict. The unspoken tension when families came together at Christmas will have been unbearable for many – as brilliantly brought to life in @joon_of fictional 12 days of Christmas.

I fully realise that I am a hypocritical romantic. I appreciate being free of the shackles of family politics both geographically and culturally much of the time, but I have an inkling that we were happier when our lives were simpler and less global; when we lived and worked and socialised and familied and worshipped and communitied all within a ten or fifteen mile radius. Yes, our lives may have been less exotic back then, but they’d have been more real and – arguably – had more meaning. And in that romantic, lost world our immediate families would have mattered but they wouldn’t have been the be all and end all social, political and economic group they have become.

So, the problem of the modern family unit is its insularity, its quest for perfection, its envy and endless comparison with others and its lack of available (local community) support system.

This very modern problem has a knock effect on to education, which will be the feature of my next thought piece. Put simply, there are probably too many families who don’t care enough about their children’s education – let’s say 25%; maybe a relatively balanced central section of about 50% and then a further 25% who care too much: the over-protective (helicopter parents), the pushy (tiger parents) and the academically or socially elitist – those who ‘want the best for their kids’ and to hell with everyone else.

Essay one of twelve, as part of my twelve blog posts of Christmas challenge.

By Toby Payne-Cook

Before we can talk about education, or improving our experience of life here on planet Earth, we first need to consider society, and what is society?

There is no such thing, according to Margaret Thatcher. I have been considering this of late, and I’m starting to see her perspective. (Maggie went on to apply her assertion by spearheading a step change towards a more individualistic, free market economy; powered by entrepreneurism and extrapolated towards greed and selfishness). Under Thatcher, and notably all Prime Ministers since her, we have undoubtedly become a more materialistic and economically driven society.

Yet, we weren’t exactly a commune of harmonious hippies, or radical Marxists, before she came along and purged the Earth of collective human decency. Three decades after Maggie, a less principled man with weaker convictions called David Cameron blabbered on about the Big Society and it began to grate.

I, too, refer to society rather a lot in passing, and it is endearingly naive of me and huge swathes of my teaching contemporaries to suggest that we – via the medium of the classroom – can improve society with the blunt tool of education. This doesn’t mean we should stop trying but a little reflection on the nebulous, abstract concept of society is required before considering the slightly more accessible problems with schools, curricula, assessment and teaching.

Before I explain why I broadly agree with Maggie’s assertion, let’s briefly race through a potted and inaccurate history of human society.

We now know that the myriad and complex riches of life on Earth have evolved over a turbulent 3.8 billion years (there are approximately 1 billion seconds in 32 years, and 1 million seconds in 11.5 days), – so, compressing 1 year to 1 second, then 3.8 billion seconds is about 120 years ago. The first mammals evolved just over 100 million years ago (3 years ago) and modern humans last common ape ancestor existed about 6 million years ago, (70 days ago). It is thought that Homo Sapiens, our species of human (and the only remaining hominid species on Earth, and in the known Universe) first ‘appeared’ 300,000 years ago (just 4 days ago), by which time there is evidence of the daily use of fire.

It is possible to argue that the daily use of fire was humans first of many sequential steps in removing ourselves (subconsciously) from the then unwritten laws and interdependence of nature; though the gradual movement from being hunter-gatherers living in small tribes, probably of no more than 150 – 200 people, into becoming farmers, and then traders, between 10 and 12,000 years ago (about 3 hours ago in seconds).

Whatever happened in those approximately 288,000 years from 300,000 years ago (4 days ago, if each year were a second) to 12,000 years ago (3 hours ago) is remarkable. The daily use of fire enabled us not only to heat our simple shelters and fend off predators, but also to cook food. The cooking of food (we are the only species who does this) enabled far greater efficiency of calorie intake, thus enabling the “faster rate of nutrition” available to our glucose hungry brain cells and the gradual development of our massive pre-frontal cortex at the front of the human brain. Advanced communication (speech and language) evolved during this time window; sometimes described as the cognitive revolution – where our ‘minds’ exploded into our heightened state of consciousness, the awareness of ‘self’ and the ‘I think, therefore I am’ of Rene Descartes’ big philosophical idea.

Back then, in those dark, challenging times Homo Sapiens lived, largely, in harmony with wider nature. We were infused with it, and of it. As our nebulous minds developed between the physical substrate of our brains, senses and our environments we learnt how to communicate effectively within our small tribes. We would, I’m sure have been wary and fearful of any nearby, infringing tribe and the human (and animal) tendency to compete for territory and resources would have been instinctive. Beyond the inevitable territorial conflict, our social instincts, language and cognitively induced ingenuity led us to develop highly skilled, knowledgable and harmonious social groups. Those social groups, then as now, would have been anchored by gossip and stories; wonder too. Myths developed which later seeded religion to help try and make sense of it all. We, homo sapiens, lived this way for the vast majority of our history.

Then, farming: producing food for people beyond our immediate social groupings. Consequently, trading. Bartering and then the invention of money. Learning to co-operate with neighbouring tribes. Larger tribes, more competition; more conflict; war and now – specialisation: tool and weapon makers; farmers and growers; animal carers and handlers; shelter builders and craftspeople; cooks and potters. You know the drill.

We built bridges and the first cities; walls, boundaries, borders; nations and empires. Social and military hierarchies evolved. The history of human civilisation, and by extrapolation the concept of society adorns many a more authoritative and comprehensive book or documentary than I can do justice here.

In Britain, we are steeped in the rich and powerful culture and history of empire. There is some cancelling going on at the moment, and the desire from many – but no means all – to renounce some of the uglier, elitist stories from our past. And as we enter 2022, we are all at sea. Our current tide of bombastic politicians trade on the gory, brutal glories of our past while others, like me, wish we could be a little more consensual and collaborative in our politics, a little more, ‘that was then, this is now and this is where we should be heading.’

Over the last two hundred years, and particularly the last fifty, the structure and demographic of society has changed dramatically – since the dawn of the industrial revolution and the urbanisation of Britain. Human inventiveness and innovation has brought us electricity, motorised vehicles, international air travel, television, computers, the internet and social media. We are globally connected on a massive scale. Much good has come of this – we are more tolerant and accepting of cultural and religious differences; sexual preferences too. Archaic rituals are largely a thing of the past, and while there is still far too much poverty, extreme poverty is diminishing globally.

In the last 150 years we have become better, via schooling, social services and the NHS at looking after the most vunerable and oppressed in society. There is a very strong argument that things have improved, and continue to do so. And yet, we are divided: politically, educationally, religiously, ethnically. Social media, that great connector, is a mirage. It suggests that we are better connected and have more contacts than ever before, yet many people feel lost; cut adrift and a sense of foreboding at the world.

We have globalised the world in two words: economic growth. This is – quite wrongly in my view, but it’s a hard habit to kick – what drives the vast majority of political, business, family and individual decisions.

I was thinking about this in church this Christmas – I don’t normally go to church – but I’ve been staying with my sister and brother-in-law, who is a vicar. I was thinking about how the vast majority of people don’t go to church anymore, in our largely secular society; thinking about how the only thing which now unites us as a people at Christmas, is the heavily marketed consumerism. The feasting and the wine; the presents and the plastic; the decorations and the cards. Football, or Strictly or Gary Barlow being the most irritating and insipid ‘pop star’ on the planet, or moaning about the government, or thinking Boris Johnson is a self-serving, narcissistic, morally defunct plonker, or fearing Covid, or being nonchalant about Covid or denying Covid unites quite a lot of us, but not all of us. We have our tribes, our friends and our families and it can feel like we are part of a far larger whole but most of those wholes are fragile, or fake or – increasingly – fake or grossly exaggerated.

This is the inherent problem with society. We want to belong. But belonging is so much easier in our known, comfortable, trusted niches. Maggie was right: for all our goodwill, for all our global connectedness; for all our civility, society doesn’t really exist. Society is abstract, intangible and ultimately just another imagined reality – like money, like corporations, like religion and like nations.

Society is something well-meaning teachers like me or you; or politicians trying to win us over, bang on about. But, I wonder, if we’d be better focussing on our local communities, our immediate work colleagues, our strong but small network of friends and our families – and to stop pretending to care about everyone else. We are largely out for ourselves, and our nearest and dearest, and we are deeply distrusting of those whom we perceive we have little in common.

It pains me to admit it, but I think old Maggie T was right – the problem with society is that it doesn’t really exist.

The key to building a better society – that nebulous, vacuous concept so beloved of politicians – is bottom up, in small communities of people and it is the base unit of those communities that I turn my attention to next – that of the family. And there’s a problem with them too.