There’s little point in arguing this point; the facts are quite clear. To a man or woman, the enquiring mind observes all around and questions his/her part in the play being acted out in this great theatre which we call the world. It’s a by-product, benefit, symptom if you like, of the human condition enjoyed by the sentient amongst us.

Variant degrees of experience and the effect which they have on the individual are dictated by that individual’s particular, how shall I put it, roundedness and particular maturity of emotional responses. As alike and production-lined as we are as humans, there is a uniqueness to every one of us, which a simple cocktail of nature and nurture hones to create the one.

As an instance. Take an 11 year-old boy on a sink estate in a post-industrial northern English town. He’s about to sit the exam to earn an assisted place at the local grammar school, a place which his teachers from his earliest days of state education have been saying was his due. It has to be an assisted place, as his father pisses most of his income up the wall on a weekly basis, with his mother sacrificing herself by regularly getting the shit kicked out of her by the very shoplifters that her employer pays her to apprehend.
Same boy currently plays rugby for his school, town and county, and has just broken both of his wrists at the same time in a match, thus prohibiting him from taking the aforementioned written exam. Failure to sit the test means following his two elder brothers to a school which is a monument to educational failure, in a complex of buildings which were architecturally dated before the last brick was set and who’s every corridor is filled with the stale waft of underachievement.
The human spirit in this boy immediately sensed the culture here and using wisdom beyond his years recognized that some or most would simply have rolled like a puppy and accepted a situation which they didn’t even comprehend. Our boy started kicking. Not against a system or authority, per-se, but against a tide of predictability assumed of those around him. The kicking was not always effective, indeed it was often pointless in the face of the tremendous odds of fate which had a cruel knack of dealing unexpected hands.

His story is as unusual as it is usual…and it must be told.