We Need to Talk About Kevin
We need to talk about Kevin. I have wanted to talk about Kevin for some years now. I first met him about fifteen years ago and I have been thinking about him recently.
When my ex-wife and I first moved to The Big City we knew no-one, but as we were both in our twenties, we would soon meet lots of people about the same age and with the same (lack of) responsibilities. I am sure you know how this works : my ex-wife worked with people and some of them became friends as well as colleagues and then by extension I would find myself on nights out with them and they would be drawn into my circle of friends.
I never liked Kevin. He came from one of the towns in the Heads of the Valleys – possibly Tredegar, possibly Treorchy – and here was where the problem started. He used to go for a night out and then ‘realise he had missed his last train’. I knew then and I definitely know this now that I live a train ride from The Big City, but everyone knows the time of their last train. However much fun you are having, you know the cost of a taxi home or the hassle of trying to save money by fitting four of you into a room at Premier Inn to cut costs and you make sure that you are on that last train. The person who suddenly declares that they have somehow ‘forgotten’ their last train is angling for someone to put them up for the night.
Unfortunately, this was sometimes my house. Kevin was not a good houseguest. His activities ranged from filling my teapot with vodka to vomiting in the middle of the night and then leaving the next morning without mentioning it (always leave your hosts with a little reminder of your evening, eh?). Part of the problem was that he was a ‘Valleys boy’. Sadly in south Wales there is a stereotype of the ‘Valleys boy’ which some blokes like to live up to for the purposes of avoiding any responsibility and acting like an idiot. It is rather like those people who try to excuse their behaviour because ‘I was drunk’. If it is not acceptable when you are sober then being drunk does not make it any better.
I disliked Kevin but I often found him in the circle of people who I was out with for the night. We did have some conversations about football (he was a Manchester City fan) but I could not recall much else. What I do remember is how much amusement he took from giving people the wrong directions when they stopped him in the street to ask him where to go and I did say something to him when he shouted abuse at a woman waiting for a taxi (he claimed that taxis were sexist because they only stopped for single women and he was pointing this out. Either that or he was ‘just being a Valleys boy’).
I was out with other friends on two occasions when Kevin spotted me and came over to talk. On the first occasion, my friend assumed that Kevin was just some drunken idiot and reacted with amazement when I had to admit that I knew him. The second time, I was with a friend from London and she coined ‘The Kevin Factor’, not a low rent ITV singing contest, but a measurement of the likelihood of running into someone who you do not like on a night out. London, she explained, had a very low Kevin Factor but Cardiff had quite a high Kevin Factor. She now lives in rural Carmarthenshire, good luck with the Kevin Factor there!
The reason that I am thinking about Kevin at the moment is that I am in a new relationship and that involves introducing my new girlfriend to my friends. I have a real mixture of friends from different places and with different interests, but I think that I can say confidently that there is no-one who I would find embarrassing. I have friends from different parts of my life – school, university, work, evening classes, salsa dancing ... and I think that they are all great people. However, I only found that out because of how the Kevin story ended.
I used to be frustrated about Kevin. Once I had been part of quite a large group of people in a pub when Kevin announced that it was time to go to a local nightclub. Perhaps I was sharp enough to say ‘but surely you’ll miss your last train home?’ but perhaps I was too tired of it by then. I stayed behind in the pub and so did five or six other people. Fed up with Kevin’s nonsense, I said out loud how much I disliked him. I was expecting people to defend him, perhaps sensibly and perhaps with the ‘oh he’s just a valleys boy’ nonsense. However, to my amazement, one by one they all came out as people who disliked Kevin and were only part of the group because they felt that they had to be. By speaking up, I had finally given them permission to admit how much they resented Kevin. Oh my goodness, it was a therapy session. He had left a packet of cigarettes. We smoked them in tribute to our freedom. I hate cigarettes as they make me ill (even when other people smoke them - respiratory allergies) so this is a sign of what an extreme moment this was in my life.
Freed from having to pretend to like Kevin I might have been, but I knew that he would still be around me. I accepted to myself that my lot was probably going to be complaining about him to others. It is less frowned upon than punching people after all. I was working at Neway Training at the time and shared many walks back to the station at the end of the day with Jane Mason (shout out to Jane if she is reading this). I was once telling the story of how terrible it was to have Kevin in my life when she asked, “What does Kevin being your friend say about you?”
She was right, of course. The friends we choose say something about what we think is tolerable or acceptable. I pointed out to my ex-wife that when Kevin shouted abuse at a woman standing alone on a taxi rank, she did not turn around and think ‘There’s a threatening and abusive man but it does not matter because the people around him secretly dislike him and are only humouring him because they work with him’. There is a lot of pressure to keep friends – a pressure that has increased on social media where, laughably, unfriending someone is seen as some kind of sin – but our friends should only be the people we want to have around us.
This is not to say that we should choose friends who are carbon copies of ourselves. I have plenty of friends who disagree with me and sometimes I find those disagreements very useful. There is a blog coming about whether people ever change their minds and I have given the example in that of the two friends who have written passionately and informatively about assisted dying and made me question my own opinions on the subject. However, all the friends I have are respectful to other human beings and their right to live. None of them engage in the kind of anger and hatred that is the by-word of some sections of the media and the society that it helps to shape. I would not feel comfortable being the friend of someone who did engage in such things and though I would love to tell you that I could persuade anyone of my views, there is a point where you have to disengage from someone who hurts your soul.
There is a song by They Might Be Giants called ‘Your Racist Friend’. It nestles on the first side of the album ‘Flood’ amid all sorts of very silly songs. When I think of Kevin, I think of that song because it is a bit more subtle than it sounds at first. The lyric is ‘I feel like a hypocrite talking to you and your racist friend’. The point the singer is making is not that the racist friend is annoying but the person who tolerates them as a friend is annoying. Our friends reflect something of who we are.
What happened to Kevin? I think that he was eventually sacked from his workplace for homophobic bullying. For a while I saw him waiting for the train at the central station at the end of the day. It only took a conversation or two for me to decide that in future I could take a different train.
