Wilkins and the cleaner

Dear Diary,

On a few occaisions this week, now being one of them, I wonder if I am more an observer of people than an active participant. I observed the way that a member of staff at my local gym has been treated, for instance. My friends used to joke about this employee when we play badminton, they used to joke for instance about his high pitched and 'effeminate' voice, and in fairness I did laugh at their impersonation. Earlier this week my friends were joking about how badly he cleans the badminton court.

A colleague of his later came on and cleared up the court for us (with better precision), said colleague informed us that this cleaner whom we have laughed at has learning difficulties. I immediatley stopped laughing and so did my friends. We commited a serious faux pas and it totally changed the way that they looked at him. To me it clicked about how I've encountered him in the past, there was always something different about how he behaved, he seemed at times abrasive and other times had little regonition about male nudity in the showers and continued to clean the changing rooms despite (most cleaners, I suspect, would wait). Maybe I felt sorry for him, or maybe I felt bad about myself but my mood dropped quite a bit when I thought of the guys were laughing at him. As we left the leisure centre some of his colleagues were being unduly horrible to him, its the kind of thing which might be cute work teasing, but in this context it was them being cruel because they can get away with it. That's just not cricket. Seeing relationships like that where people are marginalised really gets to me. I was marginalised once, and to some extent, I still am as an underemployed graduate.

Another thing that I was reminded of, came through one of my favourite artists on twitter mentioned a tour going through a club in bristol that I once went to. I was then reminded of a friend who I used to hang with at the time. I called him Wilkins, it was sort of a reference to world war II movies where some generic british officer with a middle class background was named wilkins. Anyway, Wilkins and I used to hang out a lot. I really liked that he was an older guy and thought that I was cool, I thought that he was really cool, being a PhD student. When I was hospitalised for 'mental health issues', I told wilkins about it, and he said to me in honest terms: you know what you did was stupid. Wilkins gave it to me honestly and I liked that about him. After a while, my glaringly worshipful vision of him diminished and I saw him as a real person, and I also saw what attracted me to him. Wilkins was insecure just like me, Wilkins once had a psychotic experience which led to him being hospitalised for a few months. Wilks didn't really know how the episode started, and he told me that a lot of his life at this time he has very little memory except for what other people told him what happened.

Wilkins dropped out of his PhD after a while, and he didn't even leave a trace. That's the thing about friends you make at university: you assume you see them all the time and when you don't, nobody bothers to follow it up. Friends were transient except for the good few. I heard rumours about him. I heard he left his course due to 'health reasons'. I heard also that he joined some kind of IT company as a software engineer or some kind of role. The last time I saw him was during the 'limbo year' after my MA graduation, I wasn't really keen on seeing people from my student days (due to my embarrassment of what happened) and I just passed him on the street. I wasn't sure if it was him, and ifi t was him I wasn't sure to make eye contact. As I passed him he said in a muted voice, very much different to the voice I knew of his: "Hello Conatus", and we walked on. That was the last I ever heard of him. As I understand he dropped out of facebook and like so many people who used to be close to me, dropped out of existence.

I'm not sure why I am remembering this, maybe because I just saw that club name in passing, and remembered that time we had, and then remembered him. I didn't have many friends at university, and the ones I did mostly disappeared from contact. As an observer, I sure focus on the dark stuff, I guess because the happy stories aren't unique.