Ian is worried

 

It’s 6.30 in the morning. Ian is in a taxicab kind of car which is taking him to Wolverhampton to catch a train to London. He’s got an interview at Royal Holloway to do a history PHd. He’s had to get a taxi because the trains from Ludlow or Shrewsbury don’t start early enough in the morning to get him there on time and he doesn’t have any friends in London who he could stay with. As he is driven along through the early morning darkness Ian begins to worry. He begins to worry about how fragile the world is, how thin the veneer of civilisation is. He realises how easy it would be for the whole thing to collapse around his ears – not just his ears, everyone’s ears. This panic has been partly brought on by his current situation. He has realised that he placed his trust in Gordon the driver to get up early, make sure the car had fuel in, know which way to go and so on. What if Gordon had forgotten to set his alarm clock, or heard it go off and then though “Sod it, I can’t be arsed” and turned over to sleep? What if Gordon had forgotten to fill up, or not had his car serviced so that it didn’t start? What if the person who serviced Gordon’s car was an idiot or lazy or distracted and had botched the job? As lorries full of goods bound for factories and shops pass by he wonders what would happen if those drivers were too lazy to get up at 4 o’clock in the morning or the shopkeepers decided to get more interesting jobs or farmers decided it was too wet and cold to go out and plough or milk or sew seeds? How would we get food? Where would we buy clothes? And what if when he gets to the train station it’s closed because all the staff decided to have a day off, go to the seaside or for a walk in the park instead of getting up in the middle of the night to go to work?

This growing understanding of human interdependence is making  Ian nervous. He has realised that the smooth running of his life is down to other people, people he will never meet and don’t even know he exists. Why should they put themselves out for him? He also realised that his life is such that absolutely no-one relies on him getting up in the morning or doing his job properly.