All the Lonely People

by Mike Gayle

When you don’t see someone regularly you imagine them carrying on their lives as they’d always done from one year to the next but the truth was things changed.

‘the eastern Europeans’ certain newspapers loved to complain about and his own situation all those years ago. It was the same story, only with a different cast of characters. People from one land coming to another because of the lack of opportunities in their own, working all the hours in the sort of backbreaking jobs the natives didn’t want to do. Day after day facing all manner of hostilities, wondering if they’d made a mistake leaving home.

But what if we stopped thinking about problems like loneliness as someone else’s thing to sort out and started taking responsibility for it ourselves?

Sometimes, thought Hubert, you have to try the impossible to work out whether it is impossible. Sometimes, as his Joyce used to say, instead of waiting around for somebody else to do something, you have to be that person. Sometimes you just have to go big or go home.

‘It’s easy to waste a lot of time trying to think of a perfect solution to a problem. But sometimes the only thing you can do is cross your fingers and have a go.’

Most striking of all, however, was the sheer scale and vastness of the outside world in stark contrast to the security and containment of the four walls of his home.

Had the world always been this big? Its sky so limitless? And if it had, then how had he forgotten so quickly?

You’ve got to refuse to give up on people, even if them given up on themselves.’

Extraordinary things can happen to ordinary people like you and me, but only if we open ourselves up enough to let them.’