Contemplate the Hole

          About seventeen years ago, I managed to escape from the hole I had dug for myself – a manufacturing business that I had established, nurtured and eventually grown weary of. The subsequent euphoric feeling of freedom from responsibilities took me back to the prelapsarian era prior to my taking hold of the metaphorical shovel, when my horizons seemed to expand daily, and mortgaging was something other people did. Once out of the hole, I relished once more the luxury of being able to plan a day out according to the weather forecast, spend a morning at the cinema, or enjoy a night out without a looming ‘school day’ to inhibit the occasional excess to which I’m inclined.

          But I have been aware lately of being stalked by a low-level form of anxiety. It creeps up and questions whether I’m making best use of my time. Whence this spectre of my shovel-wielding past? Well, after giving it some thought, I’ve concluded that it’s because I have gradually accrued responsibilities – again! To be clear, I’m not talking about anything really burdensome – just, for example, volunteering to help a local charity. Still, such work involves meetings, deadlines, preparation, engagement with professionals and various other activities that demand entries in my otherwise ‘pencilled-in’ diary. Looking over my shoulder, I’ve had to remind myself that anxiety, in itself, is not a bad thing: though it can be overwhelming, it’s best utilised as a driving force, an antidote to complacency and lethargy – or so goes the therapeutic argument.

          When, in a recent surge of outrage, I signed up to join last week’s protest outside the Royal Courts of Justice*, I didn’t think about how the action might cause me to become anxious, but that was before I arrived and saw that the side streets were crammed with vans full of police officers ready to be deployed. “Don’t worry”, said the organisers, as a thousand of us sat down deliberately to block a road for an hour-and-a-half, “You have a legal right to protest peacefully”. What followed was akin to a performance imbued with an air of menace.

          The police adopted a tactic of polite, individual engagement, aimed at encouraging us to move to the designated protest area nearby (where our message to the world would have shrivelled and died of media under-exposure) and backing this up with the prospect of arrest, should a Section 14 order be imposed in the next hour, which was “very likely to happen”. We all knew it was unlikely, but I admit, nevertheless, to having been tempted to move on quietly. But my fortitude prevailed – largely because behind me was someone I knew to have been arrested more than once, to my left a stranger who told me she had been arrested four times and, to my right, another who had actually served time in prison for animal rights activism. What was I? A wimp?

          Well, not exactly. I may not have form, but I do have nice, middle-class manners and, when asked politely by the police to move on, I find myself inclined to oblige. But I gained strength from our number and my anxiety was laid to rest. A touch of humour also helped leaven the situation, when a very young policeman explained to me, seriously, that, were I to be arrested, I would acquire a criminal record, which could adversely affect my future career prospects.

          That evening, I celebrated my freedom (though not, I fear, that of those on whose behalf we had protested) with a friend, in Soho, where we ate and drank lavishly before descending to a cellar to jive it up to an excellent jazz band. It was well after midnight before I got home but, who cares? School days are most definitely a thing of the past.

*Bringing attention to the appeal for a reduction in the custodial sentences previously imposed on sixteen citizens currently serving time for non violent acts of protest.