The Peripatetic Philosopher - Dream Baby Dream

 

The Peripatetic Philosopher

On Sunday 26th December 2021 – Boxing Day – moving toward dusk I took a walk from our flat on Spylaw Road Edinburgh. Darkness was rapidly descending. The air was cool with no wind, not even a breeze. My route took me along Balcarres Street. It’s a long somewhat soulless road, badly exposed to the elements, a wind tunnel. As I walked along, I reflected upon the years and the decades in-between, when on such days half a century before aged between 16 and 18 back in 1972, 1973 and 1974 I walked daily along the street, going to and from work. 

I had no qualifications to my name, only two O Grades in Arithmetic and History. I had no job prospects whatsoever. I was working at Thomas Graham & Sons Ltd. Builders & Plumbers Merchants as a junior cost clerk for the princely sum of £9 a week, £8.47 after paying my National Insurance stamp. A month or so earlier I had been thrown out of the family home at Oxgangs on St. Andrew’s night 1972. 

Two months prior I had essentially been coerced by the geography teacher, a Mr Brown, to leave Boroughmuir Senior Secondary School in early September 1972. 

I had gone to live on the other side of town, no longer in the lea of the Pentland Hills on the south of the capital, but the seven miles away to Portobello by the Sea on the east coast. I was therefore removed from all the people that I knew and had grown up with in one swell swoop to go to live at Durham Road with my grandparents and maiden aunt. Essentially, I knew no-one there apart from one or two elderly people in the street. I had no one of my own age there to be friendly with. 

As I continued on my slow reflective walk along Balcarres Street I strolled past the former work premises, now demolished and replaced with new flat developments. I reflected upon those lonely and despairing years with no prospects whatsoever. I was in a dead-end job. How I felt for my young self. Oh, how I would have liked to travel back in time in the arms of The Ghost of Christmas Past to place a comforting arm around young James's shoulders and quote Julian of Norwich’s words: All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.  

And yet, all the while I marvelled at him too, and the direction that life thereafter took. As with each and every one of us life could so very easily have gone in a completely different direction altogether: but of course, for much of the time we’re mostly unaware of what every choice in life could potentially mean. But essentially, I was a man alone, nay a boy alone. I had always been and remain thus, the peripatetic philosopher. But my heart went out to that younger self, that former version of me. 

When I reflect upon the road taken, it seems to me there’s a Dickensian quality to it, from an older Edinburgh to all the roads taken and the happenings and the changes in my small world in the five decades in between, now 50 years and half a century later. In some respects, I’ve no idea how that younger version of James got to where he sits today, but in other aspects I do. All that I know is that having to endure an 8 to 5 o’clock mundane job in a converted windowless office in a warehouse that was frozen in winter and warm in summer was the biggest and harshest lesson of my life. 

In the book A Life in A Day in A Year - A Postcard from Meadowbank I sometimes compare it to Charles Dickens's blacking factory period. But what the job did provide was that it gave me long hours to begin a period of self-reflection as to where I was in life and where I wanted to be, to identify for the first time in life where I wanted to be, to begin to gradually articulate what was really important to me in life, rather than fumbling about in the darkness. And I guess there were three things that bubbled to the surface. Firstly, I wanted to get some qualifications. I wanted to become a full-time student. Secondly, I wanted to explore my potential in athletics to see what I might achieve. And thirdly, I wanted to find love. All I knew was that instinctively I didn’t wish to be alone in life. I wanted a girlfriend. And alongside those three things I also wanted to have good friends in life, allies by my side to make the journey more fun. 

But those were the days when knowledge came slowly and it would take me a while to discover a route forward, for there would be many mistaken pathways, cul-de-sacs and hard lessons learnt. But in a-stumbling and a-finding a way forward in life, on looking back to this period, there is something very significant. I start my first athletics training diary in a small A5 size notebook on Christmas Eve 1972 allied to keeping the full personal journal (a Letts Schoolboys Diary) since the 1st January 1971 aged 14. And therefore, without quite realising its full implications in that first entry on the last Sunday before Christmas of 1972, having been in my first job for three months,  I unknowingly began the process of creating both a manifesto and a statement of intent and purpose when I record:

Morning 4 x 600 metres 4-minute interval (1) 107 secs (2) 102 secs (3) 96 secs (4) 108 secs.

Afternoon Weight Training 4 x 4 x 60 metre sprints 2-minute recoveries between the sets. 40 sit-ups.

I was on my way. And from the view in winter if there is a moral to the story it might be Dream baby dream. And articulate your dreams, by committing them to paper. Writing something down is a very powerful tool and can be quite potent. Sometimes there can be magic in words.

Note: This is an extract, the first vignette in the first volume of Peter Hoffmann's 70th year memoir.