Meeting Neville.

I often find these little slices of life when getting the bus to and from work, and they do sometimes have the effect of recalibrating me and reminding me of the reality of day to day life for most of us and how it’s entirely at odds with how the media, in all its forms, likes to portray things. While I was waiting for the bus one morning, a guy walks towards my stop and starts waiting with me. I have my headphones on until I realise he’s attempting to talk to me.

It’s clear English isn’t his first language, and there is a little difficulty making ourselves understood, but we manage – not because I can speak his language, but because he can speak mine. It turns out he’s working nights at a factory somewhere. He’s knackered, but he’s working nights because the pay is good - £10 an hour. I haven’t the heart to tell him that £10 an hour isn’t really that much, because he seems impressed with it.

He’s come to our country for work – he needs to work, to earn, and he’s been unable to at home. He likes it here, except it’s too cold – this is during the summer. He’s lined up some work in Canada next, and I tell him it’s probably going to be quite a lot colder there. He’s disappointed at this news, not entirely convinced, but is still going to go.

I want to tell him how sorry I am that my country is turning into a place that is openly hostile towards him and others like him, how ashamed I am of the vicious bile our national press spit at people like him every day with no cause or provocation. I can’t fathom how anybody could possibly mistake him for an enemy. He’s not fucking us over to make billions all for himself, he’s not driving back decades of progress in service to a broken ideology hankering to return to a past that never really existed.

He strongly reminds me of someone, and eventually it hits me – he’s just Neville from Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. Some poor guy who’s had to travel to an unfamiliar country just to find work. I hope he’s not alone, that, like Neville, he’s got some friends to make the loneliness of being far from home bearable. I recognise that Auf Wiedersehen, Pet is a work of fiction, but it’s something the British working class have had to do in the past when the economy’s in the toilet. Lucky for them it was a simple matter due to us being a member of the EU, eh?