The Invisible Sun.

Life is well-nigh intolerable here in England.
So what do we do to tolerate the intolerable?

What keeps us going?

Well, I have mates at work; rough types, men and women who have served the cause of hard work and hard life beyond all calls of duty, hard people who do not see any need to pretend.

What the comfy types like to refer to as the 'salt of the Earth'.
Fact is they've been things and done places; you've never laughed until you've spent a night-shift with a hard-case from Glasgow who swaps stories about travelling, especially Israel, and the times a nut case friend of his was going to take on the 'Arab Street'(armed with AK-47s) all alone(armed with a knife).
They had to get out of town for a while after that one.

Or when I found a two-foot Machete in a Banana plantation(somebody had dropped it), and kept it; one Palestinian friend of mine asked to see it.
I gave it to him.
I was unarmed.
I could see his head ticking over with thoughts of killing me.
I smiled and prepared to take him on.
But he changed his mind and handed it back.

Scotty and I read the Early-Edition Financial Times (another company uses our depot)and drink coffee and then you notice something, which takes a little adjustment if you aren't used to it: when men like this swear, it's pure description.
Not like a vicious drunk.
Not vicious at all.Unless we're talking about someone we don't like.
It punctuates the conversation.

And it is amusing, another piece of 'Invisible Sun' from the Real World.

I certainly know that there are better places, and that they are the 'Real World' too; but wherever you are, whoever you are with, if you can carry a little piece of the Real World in your mind, it may strike sparks like Flint from others of the same species.

I went three months in Israel without meeting much reality, then one day I sat down in an old street of Tel Aviv on a bench and lit a cigarette.
An old man, older than Israel, older than the Holocaust, came up slowly. His eyes creased and he gestured for a cigarette. I smiled back at him and gave him a couple. He waved and wandered on towards his pensione.
That time the sparks were in the eyes.

And then we come to that commonplace, the punk.
Not the Punk, the punk.
He or she will try till they bust to project the bonhommie of the real, screaming a visible demand to be regarded, and yet all the while they will try to crush that last piece of self-worth out of our heads.

And this brings us back to my mates. They are rough. They are vulgar.
But they are all capable of remembering themselves when it matters.
And this is where the cuts, bruises and assorted dents, new and old, have come from.

Nobody bothers them when they are sober. More than the trouble's worth.
But then they go out on the town, and any metaphysical man like them who finds himself unable to fight for himself cause he's too drunk, will find his way back to the depot to cadge a lift from the night drivers, or else find himself on the wrong side of a punk fist or a police baton.

And that's why they have mates.