Me? This isn’t the place to go too deeply into my story. I was still toying with the idea of university back in 1993, but it never happened, and I’ve done a lot of different jobs you could probably think of since then, and a lot you couldn’t. I no longer play golf: partly because I have long since lost the motivation, but partly because doing so would feel like a vote for a lot of what I am against politically. I painted houses. I delivered cakes. I half-completed a driving instructor training course. I acted as a dogsbody for a wealthy fleecer of the oppressed. I wanted to be a writer, and then a musician, and then an artist, but never really gave any of them a proper go. At a party on Millennium Eve I got talking to a girl called Rebecca who’d lived two roads from me for most of my childhood without either of us ever realising, and a year later we were married. We’ve had our hard times, like most couples I know, and even broke up for two whole years, when I was having a minor crisis about various small ways in which I’d decided I had spurned my life. In 2016 I was involved in quite a significant car crash, which I feel ecstatically lucky to have walked away from with a largely functioning body, and that year I sold the taxi I had been driving, Rebecca quit her job as deputy head of a coastal school with an insalubrious reputation and we opened a zero waste shop in the closest village to us, which we are never sure is going to survive for another year then does, just about, and hopefully will continue to do so. One Sunday every month we arrange a town litter pick, which has now got so popular that some of the regular attendees have started hosting their own subsidiary midweek litter pick. Life is… slightly fulfilling, fast, slow, small, comfortable, numb, scary. Rebecca and I are very similar in many ways and very not-similar in others. Rebecca likes whenever possible to see every event or incident in the present, purely as an isolated event or incident, whereas I cannot separate anything from the past and the queue of other incidents that influence it. We have learned ways to surmount this ideological disagreement, but it has taken time. We still live within a twenty-minute car ride of Underhill and when I see the tor as I drive by, I always think of Mark and wonder how he is doing. I think of how brilliant he was at striking the ball, where he could have taken that talent and the way he looked it straight in the face and rejected it. And I think of me, a person who has never been brilliant at anything, just a person who is sort of OK at a lot of things. And then I wonder if Mark going with that brilliance I witnessed in him, letting it play out to its natural conclusion, would have truly made him happy, and find myself wondering if being brilliant at something is perhaps a little overrated, as a way to live.