Our man is moderate in thought, deed and appearance; to a degree no more or less than – ‘just about right’. He has achieved a level of conformity in both dress and demeanour as to render him all but invisible to the commonalty. Grey suited, grey skinned, amiable and equable, he invites neither comment nor criticism. He has, over time, stepped back into life’s backcloth and taken refuge in the autumnal scenery of his own existence; passively assuming the role of silent witness to the closing melodrama of his own finality. Albeit inured to the subjection of his begetters, he has yet inherited the detritus of their overbearance. Forty years’ placating and mollifying their adjudications and castigations have left him bereft of hope, vitality and spirit; all now distant memories of his youth. In their place, he has become abstinent, considerate, modest and measured; middle-of-the-road, middle-of-life and middle-of-crisis. This aggregate of moderation has become his ‘safe place’, an obtundent shield of indemnity with which to shelter from life’s vitriol – a most costly and protracted insurance however, the transaction of which he only now begins to reconsider…

Our man sits, feet-off-ground, upright, shrouded from the neck down, his hands dovetailed in his lap; contemplative, relaxed, persuant not only of a hair cut but also of the welcome, if transient, exile into nugatory and inconsequential conversation. Always the same salon chair, always Marie and always the second friday of the month; a lifetime ritual of diversion and sublime indulgence; his monthly détente. Other calendaric reference points include the public library, Wilhelm’s Coffee House and Sammler’s – the stationers. But none are so fixed as this. He wears his hair short, to lend what he perceives as ‘credibility’ to his years. As a consequence, morning primping is kept to a minimum; it is an arrangement that appeals to his sense of efficiency. Old enough to remember a pre-decimilized Britain, he uses ‘2/6’ as a mnemonic to needlessly remind Marie of his cut – it is shortest at the sides. As the first grey precipitate begins its journey to the floor and as Marie opens with ‘the weather’, our man switches deflty to autopilot and settles in dualistic contemplation of himself.

Our man is momentarily lost in a reverie, he speaks with recourse only to evanescent and minor incursions into the focus of his introspection and smiles with affable beguilement only when it is necessary to do so. It is by means unknown to him, save for his fanciful suspicions with regard to the properties of the mirror whose aspect he now fully occupies, that he is invested, once a month, with powers of mental abstraction beyond any capacity he has experienced outside of his present location. The process by which he is thus transported is augmented by degree. He begins by comparing and contrasting the deviations and deteriorations manifest between the present embodiment of his 180-degree transposed self with each and every retrospective thirty-day snapshot of the last twenty years; always in painful deference to the past. Then it is that he consoles himself with reasoned ambiguity, of the justifications and rationale for such decline. With an inward smile he reminds himself, “I am not old, I have just lived a long time”. Thus is it that by increment he retraces a well-known path to some inner sanctum of his mind, a place where the perfidious, persistent and egregious baying of his familial antagonists cannot gain entry. They are kept fast in abeyance as he is free to wander those winsome and unadulterated byways of his own profundity that still remain open to his conscious sensibilities. All regret and antagonism fall from him and all that was anchored in moderation becomes as profound and palpable as wild spring blossom. It is as if the mere act of mental assuagement is sufficient to propel him, ‘Alice’ like to some other capricious and ethereal state of mind; a place of childhood wonder and naive love.

Our man is now stirred to his senses by the electric scissor action of the final razor trims. Returning gently, he is aware, just as one is aware when waking from a portentous dream, of the forlorn and fleeting imagery that pours ever and away from our grasping senses, forever washed downstream in the turbulence of lost thought. The tangible becomes at once the intangible, the natural becomes the supernatural and fantasy is transformed once more to stark reality; the grievous brutality of the return supplanting all traces of preceding imaginings. Bare necked, re-thatched and re-fringed; he inspects the latest pictorial instalment and commits it for future scrutiny. There remains however, some pleasant aspect to his wakened countenance that he is struggling to discover. Marie talks to him gently (as if aware of his travails) and in demonstrating the efficacy of her handiwork, by means of a hand-held mirror, he is briefly delivered, in a multiplicity of reflections, of an infinity of himself. The moment is but fleeting and conflation soon restores him of his singularity but in endorsing his approval with a particular word and a particular smile he is halted by a transient but most prominent glimpse into his past.

Perhaps it was something in the cut, or in the turn of his head, or the light – or perhaps the mirror’s trickery of transposition, but for a second our man finds himself sitting opposite his own departed grandfather; face to face with love unconditional and devoted, basking in the reflection of his living, loving smile. A million miles from moderation.

SitOnTheCat (9th February 2012)