A Woke Dating Guide

By Max Dunbar

Photography  by Sarandy Westfall, Paulette Wooten and Taylor Davidson, via Unsplash 

I was afraid and ashamed. I rented an apartment in the Eldon block on Woodhouse Lane, and each late morning I went for a long run around the Moor, had an enormous lunch at the Clock or the Mediterranean place across the junction, and then I’d get back to the flat for a nap – said ‘naps’ lasting for three or four hours at a time. Then, thank god, the sun would be down, and it would be cocktail hour.

I wasn’t accustomed to being alone. For fifteen years I was in a life with someone else. Being on my own now was scary. I’d suffered depression on and off for years but this wasn’t it. I had plenty of energy, no desire to harm or kill myself, I just felt ashamed and afraid. The feeling of my own breath through my body scared me.

To take me out of myself I’d watch Netflix and listen to the radio well into the night. The Eldon block was noisy, it was the prosperous student drag, and the darkness rang with laughter and scuffles and conversations. The noise helped me sleep. But the radio songs never stayed in my head, the only song I heard in my head while running or walking or cleaning the apartment was by Marcus Intalex, and it was called ‘Regrets’, the earworm of my new life: This nightmare never ends… because I know I’ve been here before…

Radio is how I made my living, but it’s like, who the fuck listens to the radio now? Everyone does podcasts these days. There was one I came across called ‘Lady Liberals’. A couple of young, sophisticated women, talking politics. They had guests on, and they sang. The good humour and self assurance in their voices appealed to me and whenever there was a new Lady Liberals podcast, I’d be sure to download it and listen to the whole thing with a bottle of red at the hour of winter sundown.

Anyway, that was January. The locality filled up and the walls sang harder through the night. With the students back, the evenings kicked off. There was even a ‘Lady Liberals’ live night coming up. I stared at the flyer for about ten minutes debating whether to go. I hadn’t lived in LS6 for a decade and a half, I didn’t know anyone and wouldn’t it be the creepiest thing ever, a single man (and significantly older) going to a podcast night alone, having listened to the podcast alone in rented accommodation for a solid month?

I still hadn’t sorted out the conundrum on the afternoon of the night itself. I had a gin and tonic to think it over.

 

Being outside after dark was scary and enervating at the same time. After years of the restaurant scene and narrow crystal streets of Harrogate, the wilderness of Hyde Park threw me, yards of night-blue grass and woodland between the drinking promenades.

The event itself was at the Book Club. I was there early enough to grab a table, but it quickly filled up with other bodies. The proximity to others made me self conscious; even getting to the bar posed some difficulty. I only started to relax once the Lady Liberals took the stage. I had no idea what they looked like, but recognised them by their voices alone. They sat on high stools in a cleared area, slightly bewildered and amused by the strength of the crowd and the universal absurdity of public speaking.

‘Let’s talk about the male gaze.’ Wendy was the tall woman in the camo jacket. ‘The male gaze is a phrase maybe you’ve heard of before and you associate it with being groped or leered at in clubs or on public transport, and that’s a huge part of it. But the male gaze is also subtle and insidious. It’s a field of compulsion that only women see. Men pass you, stare at you, check you out, and all you can do is give them the weak smile –‘ and at this point the other Lady Liberal, her name was Megan, she held a flashlight to her face and gave this awful, exaggerated reedy smile, to general laughter. ‘Hoping they’re gonna move on. Like an animal, presenting the belly. It’s the men who strike up conversations and you can see the gaze in their eyes. You know there’s the gaze and the agenda. Even relationships, friendships, dialogue with men – and there are some of you worth talking to, believe it or not –‘

More laughter.

‘ – begin with difficulty, because first you have to get past that gaze and that agenda of fucking and wanting to fuck and dominate. You cannot flirt or give the slightest cue. You avoid certain people, certain places and certain streets. You now have a third eye in your head, a pineal eye – and it’s not a second-sight eye, but the eye of the male gaze, looking in.

‘I have to wear sunglasses in the evening, and it’s not because I’m pretentious. I love to read –‘ she brandished a book from her pocket, I think by Gloria Steinem – ‘but I can’t read in most pubs, because some asshole will sit down and then the interrogation begins: what are you doing here, who are you here with, do you have a boyfriend? This is freedom of movement, this is ownership, this is public space.’

Wendy talked on, and Megan sang songs, the old favourites I loved from the podcast: ‘The Brexit Song,’ ‘Fuck Mumsnet,’ ‘The Bad Sex Olympics’. After less than an hour the set was finished.

I then expected some horrendous open mic session but it seemed the rest of the night would be about networking. Megan sat behind a decks and played Soulstice’s ‘Love Cliché’. There was a rush of activity as various people set up stalls and hustled chapbooks, CDs, journals and indie novels. I kept thinking I should leave, bought another drink, then got into an inadvertent conversation with Megan in the car park outside where a clump of people were smoking. Megan was laughing insanely at a jingle on her iPad. She kept playing it and replaying it as a clutch of people gathered around.

‘I keep thinking I should incorporate parts of local radio into my electronic mixes,’ Megan said. ‘Wherever I drive, my DAB seems to autotune into local radio. Listen to this traffic one!’

‘Hey, I invented that,’ I said.

A couple of the men laughed, thinking I was joking. ‘I swear,’ I protested. ‘I was a producer for Harrogate local radio. I came up with a bunch of these jingles – they’re called straplines. You use them for intros, weather, traffic and travel. It’s a way of establishing a brand, filling dead air, creating a bridging element to -’

‘Oh my god, someone is mansplaining local radio to me.’ Megan shoved her hands into her leather jacket.

‘Oh my god, someone is mansplaining local radio to me.’ Megan shoved her hands into her leather jacket.

‘What a tragic way to make a living,’ said a tall man in a tweed jacket.

‘Hey, I’m a rich man,’ I said. ‘You can licence these things. My jingles sell to stations as far as Los Angeles. I would have been killed in my divorce, otherwise.’

People seemed to be drifting away and Megan grabbed my arm. ‘Come back to the house. We should talk.’

I had a dim memory of Hyde Park in the pitch night. Many of the streetlights were out, and the streets seemed to cant at crazy angles. Meg’s red leather jacket bobbed like a beacon in the darkness.

When we got to the house Wendy was already there, making cocktails with rhubarb gin and what looked like a pile of iron filings on a small tray. A couple of the others from the Book Club were with her.

‘Meg, who the fuck’s this? Flac will go crazy if any more strange men are brought back to the house.’

‘This is Martin. He does jingles for the radio. He’s copyrighted all the best jingles.’

‘Yeah? Any ideas for our podcast?’

‘None whatsoever,’ I said.

‘Fat lot of fucking use you are.’ Wendy sprinkled some iron filings into her glass, dumped the lot into the cocktail shaker, then shook it. Her phone chimed. ‘Fuck!’

‘Oh god,’ said Megan. ‘Is the landlord coming?’

‘The Flac’s coming. We need to move to the boy’s place.’ Wendy gathered up cigarettes, bottles, mixers, devices with dispatch.

‘I’m not going over there,’ said someone else, Bozeda I think her name was, a tallish dark haired woman in a denim shirt and beanie hat. ‘Your boyfriend is a creep, he’s been trying to fuck me for weeks.’

‘He’s not really my boyfriend,’ said Wendy, ‘and I’ll protect you from him.’

We were chivvied back out into the cold night – but not for long, for Wendy just led us across the road to bang on the door of another one of those tall crumbly Hyde Park HMOs I remembered from my student days. The man in the tweed jacket answered the door.

This new house was familiar too – a lads’ houseshare with that old atmosphere of thick must and deodorant tang and the illusion or hope of something accomplished, sharp clean surfaces and wide thick screens. Wendy was apparently coupled up with the tweed man, scissoring her legs in his lap. Other men nodded at us as we walked in.

‘The Flac drive you out?’

‘We ran, pre emptively,’ said Megan.

The tweed man laughed. ‘The Flac must be the only person Wendy’s afraid of.’

‘She’s an old friend,’ Wendy said, ‘and sometimes she’s still cool to be around. But like, now she’s our landlord. I mean, look at this text: Wendy I am coming back now with Dan please have house reasonably quiet Dan working tmrw hope you enjoyed your night sorry to miss it. What a text! She must have worked at it all evening to give exactly the right tone.’

‘We’re lucky she didn’t call,’ Megan said. ‘The Flac will actually phone you. Can you imagine getting a phone call in this day and age!’

I was identifying with the millennials more and more. The idea of answering a phone filled me with a grim terror.

‘Who the bloody hell’s this, anyway?’ said the tweed man.

‘This is Martin, the guy who invented all the jingles?’

Wendy laughed. ‘She thinks Martin’s jingle millions will finally make the podcast profitable.’

I took a can from a cardboard box and drank it as Wendy and the tweed man wound each other up. ‘Sorry, but there’s no way you can make fourth wave feminism profitable. Anyway, I was expecting the lovely Bozeda here.’

‘There’s no way she’s going to fuck you,’ Wendy said, ‘even if I would allow an open relationship.’

‘There’s no way she’s going to fuck you,’ Wendy said, ‘even if I would allow an open relationship.’

The tweed man shook his head. ‘This is what I don’t get about you. You want open markets, open borders, but you don’t want an open relationship? What kind of feminist are you?’

‘You can have an open relationship,’ Wendy said, sweetly. ‘Just not with me.’

‘She’s got a furry face,’ said Megan. ‘She’s super embarrassed about it. Hirsutism, they call it. She has a private dermatologist.’

‘You just have a furry face fetish,’ said Wendy.

‘Facial hirsutism is more common in Asian woman.’ The tweed man raised a single sententious finger. ‘If you mock it that means you are a bad racist.’

It’s always hard to work out other couples. There was an edge to their bickering, but Wendy and the tweed man – his name was ‘Aadam’, with two As, Megan told me – seemed totally comfortable in each other’s space, there was a private glow of affection there. I walked home wondering about how little Ella and I had bickered like this and whether that had been a good thing.

*

I’d been out and it hadn’t been a total disaster. I started trying to go out more in the evenings. Music is my thing – it was the old pirate indie and electro stations that got me into the radio – and I went to gigs in the Fenton and the Social. One cold evening I was walking down from the Moor and something caught my eye. Someone’s front door had been vandalised. In industrial paint there was the legend AADAM KEENE IS A WHOREHOPPING DEGENERATE (AND HE HAS TOO MANY CONSONANTS IN HIS NAME).

Someone called me, I turned around and there was Megan, sitting on the front porch of her house. The terraces were narrow, with telephone and washing-wire strung between the rooftops, pairs of trainers dangled from the cables against the pale frozen sky, Megan looked like a young housewife waiting for the plants to close. ‘Trouble in paradise?’ I asked her.

‘Totally. You remember that Aadam was going on the other night, after the Book Club, about how he wanted to fuck Bozena? Winding Wendy up about that like he was joking but not really? Welll, Wends had warned him off so he decided to compromise by finding a girl off Tinder who kind of looked like Bozena. Wendy found his screen messages and finished it with him.’

She invited me to the Chemic to celebrate Wendy’s new single life, and I changed my plans without a thought. The Chemic had loads of gig flyers and posters but there didn’t seem to be a night on, the place was quiet. Wendy sat at a table with her laptop, microphone and books. She seemed to be taking the breakup okay.

‘I’m working on a new podcast. It will be called ‘The Single Life’,’ Wendy told me.

Maybe young people take relationship breakdown a lot easier, I had forgotten I was so much older than these guys. Wendy looked completely composed, all cheekbones and long shiny hair. There was another woman there, smaller, with flat brown hair and a sharp, quizzical face. ‘We’ll soon get you a new man,’ the new woman said. ‘You are a goddess, Dr Gold!’

‘No chance,’ said Wendy. ‘The only men who go for me are R Crumb types who fetishise tall women. I reckon ninety per cent of the reason I was with Aadam is because he was the only guy I could find taller than me. I mean –‘ she started laughing, ‘the reason Megs and I are such a good double act is because I’m really tall and she’s really small and round and busty. It’s a comedy juxtaposition.’

‘But it means that if we ever go out on the pull together,’ Megan said, ‘we just come back home dragging a tail of fetishists – Amazon fetishists and fat fetishists.’

The small woman was tapping into her phone, muttered I have to stop Dan from texting, I can see this is gonna get messy, and I realised this must be the Flac, the landlord. She seemed completely relaxed and in sync with the other two women, I wondered why Wendy had seemed so wary of her. The Flac turned her face to mine now. ‘Hey, didn’t you get out of a big relationship recently? Have any tips on re establishing yourself?’

‘It kind of depends on how long you were with the person.’ I took a long draught of my beer.

‘On and off for three years, we met in postgraduate class,’ Wendy said.

‘Well, I just got out of a fifteen year relationship and I have nothing to advise.’

‘Fifteen years?’ The Flac’s eyes widened.

‘Yeah, man, Martin’s old.’

‘I met my wife second year of university.’ Under the table, one leg was shaking. ‘She was focused, high powered, disciplined. We had careers, we owned a house, we were successful… it was cool.’ People were looking at me, and that January feeling of fear returning. ‘But she started seeing somebody else. She met someone, some guy in the anti Big Tech campaigns. Written a whole book about how Facebook is destroying the world. Which could have been managed, even though from all accounts the guy was a very annoying engineering student type who’s in love with his own idea of cleverness. But… she was a high profile person. She had enemies. She wasn’t corrupt, they knew they couldn’t get her on expenses or anything, so when the affair happened they jumped on it. It was crazy.’

Wendy took off her sunglasses. ‘Wait a moment! Your wife was Ella Wray Lewis?’

I nodded. ‘We had tabloid people camped on our lawn. I had to change my SIM card every two days.’

‘I thought she was like this cool feminist left wing MP,’ said the Flac.

‘She was. Is. I can’t believe we ever got together.’

‘That’s what people said about me and Aadam,’ said Wendy.

We drank hard and fast until the bar closed, Wendy trying to record a new podcast and tripping over her words and laughing, the Flac telling detailed hilarious stories about the college union where she worked and her crap boyfriend Dan, and it was a good night but I couldn’t help feeling bad about telling the table what had happened with Ella. But conversely that made the podcast crew intent on involving me in their social lives. They had a large, complex network, people who ran small presses and played live music and made art, and there was always some magazine launch or jazz night going on. I wondered how they were paying for this, no one in this scene seemed to work beyond bar shifts. The Flac answered my question.

We were at the Lady Liberals house eating carbonara from an earthenware pot on their dinette-style kitchen rail. The plan was to go to the lip-sync night at the Chemic, but the snow was coming down – the first of the big blizzards – and it didn’t look like we would make it. Wendy came through the door in a karate-style outfit under a long fur collar coat. ‘OMG that was a nightmare but it was totally worth it.’ She had taken up fencing, and swung an epee around.

Flac cried out aloud. ‘Be careful with that! You almost knocked the plate off the wall!’ She pointed to some hung treasure or keepsake. ‘Plus, your boots are dragging snow into the house.’

‘A hit, a palpable hit!’ Wendy said. Flac wasn’t amused at all. ‘How much did that thing even cost, anyway?’

Wendy’s reaction made me nervous. She lowered the sword and looked at Flac. But the Flac didn’t seem nervous at all. ‘I don’t see what business it is of yours. As long as the rent gets paid. That’s what you care about these days, right?’

Flac threw up her hands. ‘Forgive me for wanting to someday sell this house. You know, a lot of landlords wouldn’t take tenants as insecure as you. You give me money every month – I have no idea where it even comes from.’

‘Patreon, honey. I made four grand last month.’

‘You know most of that was from sweaty older men who want to get into your pants.’

‘I don’t care.’ Wendy sat on a high stool and poured herself some rum. ‘It’s not like I have to screendance for them. Let them have their comforting illusion.’

Flac moved over to her. ‘Illusions? You think your shit is real, all this stuff about podcasts and creative things? You have a doctorate, Wends – you could be teaching right now.’

‘I worked myself into the ground for that doctorate. Six years. I will not jump on the teaching treadmill now. You’re in UCU, you know how bad it is. I deserve some fucking leisure!’ Her head spun around like a velociraptor.

‘There’s no need to be aggressive.’ Flac was backpedalling. ‘This is what you do, every time I try have a real conversation, you just go into full rage mode.’

Wendy grabbed a bottle of tonic water without looking up. I saw then that she was pained, and hunched, like she was trying to disappear into her drink. ‘Flac, I can’t deal now. Please leave, I just can’t deal.’

I wanted to get out of there myself, but when I tried to stand up, Megan grabbed my arm – she was surprisingly strong. When we finally left for the Chemic, I saw that the house opposite had a banner hung on its terrace: FEAR THE COMING OF THE EDGE LORDS!

“FEAR THE COMING OF THE EDGE LORDS!”

Wendy saw me looking, and recovered herself a little. ‘That’s what Aadam’s new podcast is gonna me called. He sent me like a five thousand word Facebook message saying how good it was going to be.’

 

Then came the morning of the sonogram. It started well. The Moor was a white wasteland of crunchy snow. Traffic was either grounded or moved in slow and furtive deliberations. There were still a few of us out for the Moor Parkrun and we were the fastest things out there except for the birds in the sky. I hit the Mediterranean place for breakfast, checked my phone – I had so many notifications these days – and there it was.

I had only seen him in newspaper photographs, but now he was in my phone, arm around my ex wife, both of them grinning with unembarrassed pride outside a clinic somewhere. The post featured also a picture in grainy monochrome.

I can finally confirm verification of an unborn heartbeat and would like to take this opportunity to share that Ella Rose Lewis and I have created life! And my ex had written: SO PLEASED at this news after such a horrible time this year but for the first time in a long time I can see a new future and THANKYOU to all who have supported us during this difficult time. Alfred Kemp I love you more than words can say… BLESSINGS and it was all I could do, I swear, not to hurl the fucking phone across the room. It was like my past had become a lie.

I hit the gym on the other end of campus (which I never normally do) and worked it all out on the heavy bag. Every time I thought I had tired, I remembered Kemp’s status update, which read just like his unreadable articles in the tech press, superior in his own cleverness, even on becoming a father, which is like the most important thing in the world, and my wife, reciting these awful fucking clichés, and I kept on punching. On leaving the gym, crossing back into LS6 proper, I felt dizzy and there was something approaching in the sky, a depression, like the ones I used to get when we were married, that would knock me out for days at a time – thank god I worked in the media, no one expects set hours.

The blizzard came again, I heard moans and gasps, and I walked into the snow, feeling it accumulate in my hair, my face, my eyes and Peroni t shirt. Uphill to the Chemic was one long struggle, and it kicked the rage out of me, so that only the fear remained. The sky looked grey and wan but it was still afternoon, and only a few old regulars and dogs in the pub. I felt afraid and grabbed a book from the alcove, one of the Philip Kerr books. I’m not much of a reader, but the flow of a narrative plus an Irish coffee made me calmer, it didn’t drive the fear out, but it helped me take a step back from it, regard the fear objectively. I thought of what Wendy had said about the pineal eye and I realised where the fear had come from. I had done everything I was supposed to do, I got my degree, got married, stayed faithful, worked hard, got my name on a mortgage, stayed healthy – I looked good, I still had the blond in my hair, I dressed well, I wasn’t overweight. And still I’d been afraid, because someone had been watching me. Did everybody fear the pineal eye? But how could the fear have power, when we know so little about anybody else?

I had moved into the lounge by this time, and whilst I read and thought an event assembled around me. Guys plugged in microphones and amplifiers, unstacked chairs, carried out sound checks. Then Aadam the tweed man had bounced on stage and yelled out that this was the recording of the inaugural ‘Woke Lads’ podcast. I realised there was body heat all around me.

‘Now, you may know podcasts as silly liberal intellectual things where women talk boringly about feminism and things like that,’ Aadam said. ‘This is gonna be different and a lot more fun because we are –‘

‘WOKE!’ his housemates shouted out beside him.

‘That’s right, and not only are we WOKE but we are also –‘

‘LADS!’

‘We are the WOKE LADS!’

Most of the audience sitting around me were indeed lads and they were shouting along with the catchphrase. ‘We’re clear in what we want. We support JEREMY CORBYN.’ Aadam had a WOKE LADS t shirt under his tweed jacket. ‘We’re not a bunch of liberal melts begging to get back into the EU. Fuck the customs union and the single market and all that neoliberal shit! We’re better off without it!’

I raised a hand. ‘But isn’t there a risk that getting out of Europe like that could mean we have to fight it out on WTO trade rules and possibly have economic disaster?’

‘Oh, hello there, it’s Mr Jingles! Well, the answer to your question is this: WHO GIVES A FUCK.’ Aadam tossed the mic from hand to hand; his voice was so loud he didn’t need it. ‘We can have fun fighting over the ruins.’

 

This went on for a while, without an interval. I had finished my drink and couldn’t get to the bar. Aadam had set up some sort of audience participation game called ‘Woke or Broke’:

‘Making a list of centrist melt journalists,’ a fat man in glasses shouted out.

‘Broke!’ Aadam yelled.

A schoolteacher type in a short sleeved shirt found inspiration. ‘Doing a pie chart!’

‘Woke!’ Aadam yelled.

There surely had to be an interval soon. But still, what if there wasn’t? I got to my feet. The scrape of my chair felt very loud. ‘Radical feminists!’

‘Broke!’

‘Post-op transgenders!’

‘Woke!’

I managed to stumble through the ranked chairs, but blocking the bar was a phalanx of male drinkers, who didn’t make way as you should, as the pineal eye bid you, but simply looked past me at the stage, impassive. And then Megan was in front of me, with a furry hat and a puffa jacket sharded with snowfall, I had never been so pleased to see her. ‘Martin! Why aren’t you answering your phone?’

With her muscular bulk, and somewhat distracting décolletage, Megan managed to drag me out of the function room. I bought us drinks. ‘You gave us a fright, jingle man. Wendy saw Ella’s post, it must have devastated you.’

‘You came up here just to find me?’

‘Well, old people are at risk in this weather.’ An insouciant smile. ‘We don’t want the gas man to find you frozen in that absurd flat of yours.’

‘Ho ho.’

Wendy was apparently at the Social with her fencing class. Meg was supposed to meet her but it was almost a mile away, on the other side of the Moor, and yet another blizzard was spattering at the windows. We waited for it to die down and it didn’t but by then we were drunk enough to brave it. The fierce wind and black ice made a reckless comedy of our walk down to the main drag, supporting each other and slipping and laughing. ‘I can’t feel my fucking face,’ Megan gasped.

Finally we were walking across the park. Megan was gossiping. Wendy had apparently put a deposit down on a Victoria Park flat and the Flac was pissed off. ‘And the thing is, she’s right to be. Wends and Flic were such good friends back in the day. They met in Bod and were inseparable. But the Flac is very much into marriage, kids, home ownership and Wendy just isn’t. The Flac was very supportive of Wendy but she has a very clear idea of what she wants Wendy to be, Wends is more the free spirit type. The Flac’s lashing out, calling Wendy out for getting off with people, bringing strange men back to the house –‘ and to my look, Megan confirmed: ‘Oh yeah, it’s you, now. Mid life crisis jingle man. Trying to seduce younger women.’

We passed through the centre of the Moor, the woods almost covered the sky. ‘That’s not actually what –‘

She slapped my arm. ‘I know. We thought at first you were a creep but then we realised you were a genuine guy. Wends was saying, that night of your big confession, she was saying, anyone would have a right to be angry after what he’s been through, he could have become an MRA, turned to the bitter web, you could almost understand it. But you weren’t, and it’s not like there was even the sense you repressed anything. You were just devastated. It was like, fucking hell, that man is so sad. That’s the only thing that annoys me about you, you’re so self effacing. I mean, it’s okay to be selfish sometimes.’ The wind blew strands of hair across her wide red face. ‘It’s okay to be about you!’

 

Wendy’s fencing class were playing pool in the Social. ‘I have rescued jingle man from the Woke Lads,’ Meg announced.

‘It’s called the Edge Lords, right?’

‘No, man,’ I said. ‘It’s all about the Woke Lads now. Get with the times, Wendy?’

Wendy got out her iPad and tuned into the Chemic’s life feed. Aadam’s voice rose from the screen. ‘Ohmygod, he’s doing his Israel material now.’ She still had her epee crossed over her jeans. ‘This is hilaire.’

I ended up playing pool with the tutor from Wendy’s fencing class. She called herself Phill and spoke with an American accent. When we left she gave me her card. ‘Call me,’ she said.

‘Oh, I’m not sure I’m up for swordfights,’ I said.

‘Maybe not,’ she told me. ‘But we could still play pool.’

*

 

The next blizzard was so bad even ParkRun admitted defeat. But I loved to run too much. We were meeting for a pub lunch then Dee’s opening and I wanted a run beforehand. I sprinted around the Moor and caught my breath in the clearing. I had my hands on my knees and a rush went through my head, like I had taken a step back from the world and at the same time been drawn further into it. I started talking.

‘When I met Ella we were young, and neither of us wanted children,’ I told the trees. ‘She wanted to fight, change the world, and she even looked down a little on women who were into childbirth and family – breeder feminism, she called it. She wrote a blog post attacking second wave feminists who went on about the cost of childcare while girls were being stoned to death in Yemen, it got her into a bit of trouble, the papers dug it up when she had her affair.’

The snow settled in my hair, in my beard, the hair in my arms, and I was saying: ‘I never wanted children because, at the end of the day, I was selfish and I wanted to work on my music and relax at home. I also got these bad depressions. Periods of days when all I could do was sit in my studio playing comfort music. Engagements that were cancelled because I literally couldn’t get off the sofa. I thought, how could I look after a child? I can barely look after myself.’

I could hear movement, sense voices, but was that just my imagination? ‘But Ella changed her mind about having children and I knew she had, she didn’t have to say so, because when you’ve lived with someone for over ten years, you develop a mutual intuition, subtle and invasive. The affair did not surprise me. Instead of feeling anger I felt guilt, and I took ownership of the regret, buried myself in it, because I knew that for at least several years she had been wanting a baby, pining for one, and I had done nothing, because it would have been too difficult, and she had to face this sadness alone. Because she was alone, I had not known her, and maybe I never did. And I could potentially face the rest of my life alone if I had to, because perhaps I could not know anyone else.’

It should have destroyed me. But instead, and for a wonder, the pineal eye in my head winked shut. The trees watched over me, and I wondered why I had been talking like this to a tree, which lives for centuries, to which our little lives would seem like nothing, a flicker of light or a shot in the dark. Still, I was alive. I picked up the pace again and, across to where the Moor meets the promenade, slowed down to walk as I headed for the café bar to see my friends.