Welsh Man.
Tags: Depression, Mental Health, Masculinity, Wales

Welsh Man.

I’m middle class. Terribly middle class. I must be. I hardly have a penny in my bank account. I don’t own property. I will never retire. I work for not much more than minimum wage. Manual labour. If there is work. But I do like Scandinavian design, recycling and the Guardian. I’m well educated, partly because I come from a country that allows/expects any idiot with high enough grades to go to university, and partly because my parents thought so too. I’m in 35 grand’s worth of debt. I worry about money sometimes, but I’m never terrified. I’ve got that white male middle-class kind of confidence that makes all the difference. I’m middle class and I know it.



I was walking back down towards town when I met the Welsh Man. Dressed well enough, but nothing fancy. Sunnies and an expensive camera (I think). He said he had lived in Cwmbran all his life but he’d never been up here — a 40 minute stroll up from the outskirts. He had driven up here today out of boredom (and to test his camera?). Not out of any sort of curiosity, he stressed. In fact, he extolled the full extent of his lack of curiosity, in a one-sided game of whose-life-is-toughest. But his inverted one-upmanship missed the macho boast of the unsaid “yet here I stand, you spoon-fed princeling”. I’m not sure whose life had been toughest, but he sounded utterly depressed.



He hated the city he had never left. He’d never been abroad. He hated his job but didn’t see the point of holidays. He wanted to leave but didn’t think anywhere else would be any better, really. I couldn’t tell whether he fully believed all these statements, but he sounded convincing. Of course money was an issue, he kept stressing that. But also a profound lack of imagination. Of curiosity. Of hope.



I did my futile best to steer him towards some positives. He was here now, right? Was it that hard? What about the view? What about the light, the birds, the flowers? I told him I didn’t have much money either and I had come here from London on a 5 quid Megabus and had slept in the woods. I told him how I once found a job online, left Europe with 200 quid in my bank account and stayed away for nearly two years. He expertly parried all my suggestions and arguments, beating me at a game I know well. Beating himself at a game he knew well.



My ramblings may have sounded like privileged drivel, or a foreign language, to this browbeaten man. He stared at the only place he’d ever known: his shithole hometown of Poundland, charity shops and the generational poverty of the entire valley below. That was what divided us. But I also knew that no rational or factual argument about beating nature, nurture, the man, or the system, could ever mean anything if he did not believe. If you can’t feel hope, you can’t ever understand it. Numb and depressed, notions of love or curiosity are just words from a dictionary.



Welsh Man, I may be middle class, I may have taken a different route, but I have been there too. It’s a dark place and it’s just about impossible to see out. A terrible thing to have in common.



I’m sure driving up and standing on a windy hilltop doesn’t feel like it helps, rights now. But believe me, it’s a start.



Please believe me.