A Somerset Lad

Maigret entered the interview room where the person being questioned sat with Janvier. Maigret looked at the frightened young man sat opposite Janvier. ‘Why don’t you talk to me and let Janvier go to terrorise someone else?’

Sometime later, Maigret returned to the room. The young man had a bloodied nose. Janvier looked at his superior officer, apologetically. ‘He fell over and hit his face on the floor.’

Maigret glared. ‘I would prefer that he didn’t fall over again. He’s a human being.’

Maigret seems a reassuring character. Georges Simemon had a grasp of human nature, an understanding of the reality of post-war Parisian life.

Simenon’s stories come with a mood of justice. Amidst the seaminess and violence of life in Maigret’s Paris, there is a sense that the police judicaire will bring about a satisfactory resolution of cases. Villains will be apprehended and subject to due process. Maigret does not shy from telling the ruthless and the unpenitent that the guillotine awaits them.

Maigret’s justice is about people getting what they deserve. Working people can have confidence in the police. Criminals cannot hide behind expensive lawyers. There is an equality in the system which was probably far removed from the realities of the society in which Simenon lived.

I like Maigret. I like stories that are fair. I like the thought that ordinary people don’t get trodden on, I especially like the thought that thugs and bullies end up in the cage in the basement of the préfecture de police and will never again have the opportunity to cause misery.

With the passing years, I have found the Christian ideas of forgiveness increasingly difficult. Notions of ‘grace’, that you can do what you like and then say ‘sorry’ at the end and be forgiven for everything, seem fundamentally unjust.

Jewish teachings have become much more attractive. The Yimakh Shemo, the Hebrew curse, ‘May his name and his memory be erased’ seems more closely to correspond with the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, than does the easy forgiveness proposed by Paul.

Jews have no concept of hell, instead a year after the death of a person the person is allowed into the world to come, or they are destroyed forever.

The obliteration of names from memory seems a just reward. Maigret tells one prisoner that they will not be remembered for their crimes, instead they will be executed and they will soon be forgotten forever.

Maigret understood justice.

The evening news has become annoying.

Each night this week the bulletins have included the fortunes of the England women’s football team among the headlines. This evening no superlatives were spared in describing the victory of the women’s team over the Swedish women’s team. To listen to the vocabulary used  one might have imagined that the game was a watershed in the history of art or science. ‘Gravity-defying’ was the term used to describe the scoring of one goal.

‘Nine million viewers,’ said the presenter. Well, yes. It was at peak viewing time on the BBC, is that a great deal different than it would be for any programme that had been hyped for days.

Were I a woman, I would have been embarrassed at the ridiculous boosterism of the television reporters. I grew up in a community where there was no need for people to seek equality, it was assumed. Women in that community would have felt no need for anyone to talk them up.

Farm life demanded the efforts of all who could participate. My grandmother owned her own fields and had her own income. A diminutive figure of four feet ten inches, she was mother to seven, grandmother to twenty, and a woman with an extraordinary capacity for work.

Men assumed an equality without it needing to be discussed. Children would be as likely seen perched on the footplates of tractors or sat smiling on open trailers as being pushed in prams (of course, once a child reached twelve or thirteen years of age, they might be found driving the tractors themselves).

The working equality of farms meant boundless opportunities to be outside, and to wonder at the misfortune of those who had to endure life in towns and cities.

Perhaps it was the nature of country life that led to an assumption that all people were equal. Equestrian sports arose from country life.  Show jumping, dressage, cross-country had their roots in hunting, and woe betide anyone who might suggest a woman coukldn’t ride to hounds. It is some fifty years since Princess Anne rode in the Great Britain equestrian team in the Olympic Games.

When Margaret Thatcher became Conservative leader in 1975, no-one in our community thought it odd. Mrs Thatcher would have made a formidable figure riding a fifteen hands hunter.

Perhaps the notable story behind the football competition is that they have taken five decades to reach a point that women on horses passed almost unnoticed.

Chief Inspector Lewis asks pathologist Dr Dobson what her specialist subject would be if she were to appear on Mastermind. ‘Corpses,’ she answers.

Lewis smiles, observing that the subject might not be a barrel of laughs.

Dobson then turns to Lewis. ‘What would your subject be?’

‘Apart from work and the kids, I haven’t got one’.

‘What about loneliness?’ asks Dobson.

He turns and looks at her. ‘Pass’.

Of course, Lewis is a fictional character, a spin off from Morse. Kevin Whately, the person behind the persona, is undoubtedly a person very different from Chief Inspector Lewis.

So, if Laura Dobson is correct and Robbie Lewis is in the Mastermind class for loneliness, then he is the one with whom I would identify.

My supervisor writes books on solitude, considers the advantages of times of solitariness, but there is a difference being solitary and being lonely.

Solitude is something chosen, it is presumably something enjoyed in some way. Loneliness is more to be endured than to be enjoyed. What enjoyment is there in being alone without an option to be otherwise?

Accused of being narcissistic in an exchange on a social media platform in the springtime, an online search for narcissistic personality traits produced a list with which I could identify.

The traits, though, were not marks of narcissism, but of echoism. When I pointed out that these were the traits with which I identified, I was told that it was simply my version of narcissism, that I was like an alcoholic who refused to admit that the problem lay with me.

The exchange proved to be the last I would have with the person who had spent the previous five years pointing out to me all of my obvious failings, together with some I had never even imagined. I was told that I lacked the emotional intelligence to recognize what was wrong with me.

Perhaps it is such interactions that have made the loneliness, no matter how unhappy it may be, a least worst option.

Perhaps Lee Marvin’s lines in Paint my wagon represent not misanthropic sentiments, but an accurate assessment of a situation:

Do I know where hell is?
Hell is in hello
Heaven is goodbye for ever, it’s time for me to go.

’Only people make you cry,’ captures a lived reality.

Perhaps loneliness is just something that you get used to, like grief it doesn’t go away, but changes.

Were it to be a Mastermind subject, I could do well.