All the best (and regards to Barry),

Danny Mulberry

RICH T.

Dear Mr Danny Mulberry, I write in the hope that this letter will somehow reach you via the newspaper you appeared in. I’m crossing my fingers but not holding my breath, as it were, because I’ve been around long enough to know that expectation invariably leads to disappointment. Nevertheless, I shall press on.

I am a very infrequent reader of the Double, just once every four weeks when I get a haircut. Old Tom used to get the Guardian in especially for me, but since he handed over to his nephew and Tom’s Barbershop became the Man Event, it seems the young fellow doesn’t go in for the more highbrow broadsheets.

I was drawn to your picture in the paper, Mr Mulberry, because I see in your face a great friendliness and a very specific kind of wisdom. The willingness to stand behind your beliefs and espouse them in such an open forum is, in my humble opinion, extremely brave, if a little unwise. (I speak from great experience when I say that things spoken in public haste can very rarely be repented at leisure.)

My own life is in its twilight now, a fact I’m trying gracefully to accept. I have no significant other, no children, no ‘special friend’. I did find love – great love – once, but a man of my generation and persuasion was never, shall we say, encouraged in my flamboyance – much more neat and convenient to appearances that I remain ostensibly single. And so I learned great love can be lost as well.

I was married for all intents and purposes to my career, anyway – and what a career it was. Regional Manager of the Year in 1997, and what I don’t know about plumbing ring fittings you could write on the head of a capillary connector. That’s a plumbing in-joke, but I hope you’ll indulge me.

The thing is, my life is entirely solitary these days and that’s something I never considered – what it would be like when I retired. But the days are long and the nights are short in the twilight of life, Mr Mulberry, and sometimes I lie in bed for several turns of the sun without knowing the difference, and there’s not a soul to notice. I’ve been retired for seventeen years this November and a lonely man for just slightly less. I never thought I’d miss those capillary connectors so much.

A couple of years ago I started to write letters to the papers, just for some kind of human contact, I suppose. I’ve had a small measure of success in print – not in The Times or the Guardian (although I was once quoted in the latter in a story about the upgrading of the Hounslow public toilets), but in the Ealing & Acton Gazette.

I have adopted a nom de plume, which I fancy gives me a certain standing amongst lettered men, but also the truth of it is that I’m rather reluctant to reveal myself lest it be discovered that not only are my neighbourhood gripes fictional, I don’t even live in the same borough. But it makes me feel a part of something bigger than my own small existence and so I continue, while remaining cowardly incognito, as I have always done in my life. Unlike you.