I hope that life has settled down for you since you sent our man packing. It was good to see your wisdom and moderation back in action again in the background in some of those insightful tweets. May I, however, offer one tiny piece of advice.
It struck me at the time that your life is rather similar to mine, at least in some ways. We’re both a bit sensitive, and both use social media rather inexpertly. Just like your Mexican Wall, I planted a little yew hedge to keep our neighbour’s ground elder at bay, but, like your pesky Mexicans, the damn stuff still sneaks right back in at night when no one is looking. Taking a leaf out of your book, I have blamed this on everyone but myself, which seems to do the trick. My wife thinks I don’t listen to other people sometimes, as well, particularly vis-à-vis laundry stuff, and the washing up, but I tell her I’m busy draining the swamp.
But my point is this. We had someone rather like you at school. His dad was loaded and drove a Bentley, which gave him an admirable sense of entitlement, even at the age of nine. Nowadays we would say that he lacked emotional intelligence, but it didn’t look like it back then. He got a little gang of acolytes around him who, in return for their unquestioning support and feedback, he rewarded with scraps of tuck that Mummy sent in on a weekly basis, and with weekend trips to Drusilla’s Zoo to see the meerkat colony. He may have struggled a tad intellectually, but there was no question that he bossed us all when the staff had gone and the lights were out.
One summer term, I got on the receiving end of his anger. I’m not sure what I had done, but then anger, as I am sure you know from personal experience, has many parents. For a week or so, I was the focus of his ridicule which, being a bit of a sensitive soul myself, hurt. One day, he and his mates cornered me in an old disused squash court and, whilst they held me against the wall, he repeatedly punched his flabby hand into my stomach, which hurt even more. I had just enough childish self-respect to tide me over and take it on the chin until the next duty target took over from me, which it duly did, much like one foreign politician regularly takes over from another as chief irritant with you.
All us boys realised deep down that his dominance had something impermanent about it which, as if some fragile other-worldly force was all that was keeping him where he was, it did. Emperor’s new clothes, and all that. It may have all seemed crushingly unfair, but what he was providing was equally part of the rich tapestry of humiliation that it was the job of prep schools of the day to provide, at least my one. The headmaster was too busy tipping sweet sherry into selected parents each weekend to notice that some of us were no longer thriving. Thus the machine always swung round to protect him week after sun-kissed week, so you might readily understand my sense of deja-vu.
But here’s the thing. All things must pass, as the peerless George Harrison told us all those years ago, and our pampered friend’s writ ran dry, dramatically so, one gorgeous September afternoon in a geography lesson, when he shat himself. Yup, you heard it right: he shat himself right there on his wooden seat, among his acolytes and, more important, his victims. Turned out that he could control most things, but not his own health. And you know what? He cried like a baby, big bulbous tears of shame in front of us all. And in that one, glorious, biblical (albeit slightly smelly) moment, he was reduced to what he actually was, a miserably insecure, unloved and spoiled nine year old boy with a gastric disorder. And we let him have it, right there and then, unceasingly into the weeks that followed. It turned out that he was a one-trick pony whose one trick had evaporated before his eyes. Once his carapace was gone, so were his acolytes, and so was he.
Immodium. That’s the trick.
Kindest regards
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