sum total of whatever I had happened to pick up of Ed’s life away from the badminton court by the time of the Fall. Now that I come to write it down, the extent of it would surprise me were it not for the fact that I am a listener and a rememberer by training and habit.
He was one of two children born ten years apart into an old Methodist family of North Country miners. His grandfather had come over from Ireland in his twenties. When the mines closed, his dad became a merchant seaman:
Didn’t see a lot of him after that, not really. Came home and got cancer like it was waiting for him – Ed.
His father was also an old-style Communist who had burned his Party card in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. I suspect Ed nursed him on his deathbed.
After his father’s death the family moved to somewhere near Doncaster. Ed won a place at grammar school, don’t ask me which one. His mother spent whatever free time she had from work at adult education classes until they were cut:
Mum’s got more brain than what she was ever allowed to use, plus she’d got Laura to look after – Ed.
Laura being his younger sister who has learning difficulties and is partially disabled.
At the age of eighteen, he renounced his Christian faith in favour of what he called ‘all-inclusive humanism’ which I took to be Nonconformism without God, but out of tact I refrained from suggesting this to him.
From grammar school he went to a ‘new’ university, I am not sure which. Computer Sciences, German an optional extra. Class of degree not specified, so I suspect middling, new being his own disparaging term.
As regards girls – always a delicate area where Ed was concerned, and not one I would have entered uninvited – either they didn’t like him, or he didn’t like them. I suspect that his urgent preoccupation with world affairs and other mild eccentricities made a demanding life-companion of him. I also suspect he didn’t know his own attraction.
And of men friends, the people he should be hanging out with in the gym, or sorting the world with, or jogging, cycling, pubbing? Ed never mentioned a single such person to me, and I question whether they existed in his life. Deep down, I suspect, he wore his isolation as a badge of honour.
He had heard about me on the badminton grapevine and had secured me for his regular opponent. I was his prize. He had no wish to share me.
When I had reason to ask him what had prompted him to take a job in the media if he loathed it so much, he was at first evasive:
Saw an ad somewhere, interviewed for it. They set a sort of exam paper, said all right, come on in. That’s about it. Yeah – Ed.
But when I asked him whether he had congenial colleagues in his workplace he merely shook his head as if the question were irrelevant.
And the good news in Ed’s otherwise solitary universe as far as I could read it? Germany. And again Germany.
Ed had the German bug in a big way. I suppose I have it myself, if only from the reluctant German lurking in my mother. He’d spent a study year in Tübingen and two years in Berlin working for his media outfit. Germany was the cat’s whiskers. Its citizens were simply the best Europeans ever. No other nation holds a candle to Germans, not when it comes to understanding what European union is all about – Ed on his high horse. He’d considered chucking everything and making a new life there, but it hadn’t worked out with the girl, a research student at Berlin University. It was thanks to her, so far as I could gather, that he had made some sort of study of the rise of German nationalism in the nineteen twenties, which seems to have been her subject. What is certain is that on the strength of such arbitrary studies he felt empowered to draw disturbing parallels between the rise of Europe’s dictators and the rise of Donald Trump. Get him on this subject, and you got Ed at his most overbearing.
In Ed’s world there was no dividing line between Brexit fanatics and Trump fanatics. Both were racist and xenophobic. Both worshipped at the same shrine of nostalgic imperialism. Once embarked on this theme, he lost all objectivity. The Trumpists and the Brexiteers were