But it’s ten years after that and I still stick to that not really knowing. To waiting and finding. I basically insist on it, whilst around (in the world) there are a lot of people who apparently know a lot of things for sure. Filling space (blocking it) with a lot of certainties. I think I like the space of not knowing. The space of (slowly) trying to figure something out, and (to a certain extent) the space of acknowledging that any solution or answer arrived at will in any case be temporary, a thing in time, in flux already, in process, more a process than a thing, a thing that will change. And already a question again.

Optimism might be a way to know this (what I wrote above) and (if possible) make use of it somehow.

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Optimism would also very likely be something small.

A gesture or an action made in face of an almost-impossibility, a crack or a rift in a surface that is otherwise (most probably) (perceived as) a situation of general bleakness.

*

We are flying to New York and for some reason (security) they are re-checking everyone at the gates - passport and boarding cards, just before entry to the plane. The usual blah blah, where you have cause to regret the world and be glad you do not look ‘Arab’.

As we reach the top of the line, the guy takes a look at my passport and the passports of my kids - M. (aged 15) and S. (aged 9).

'So…’ he says to them, checking details on the passports ‘…two Sheffield lads, eh?"

They nod yes, a little hesitant, not sure what this is all about. Then the guy bends down and asks S a direct question. "Which team do you support?” he wants to know, offering a choice of the two Sheffield teams - “Blades or Owls?"

S. looks at him for a few moments. In the silence I’m slightly tempted to intervene and explain to the guy that S. does not care about football, or that he only dimly cares about football or whatever, but instead I bite my tongue and watch, waiting to see how S. will deal with this inquisitive stranger.

In the end, after a short interval, he answers confidently – Blades. He knows this is the better one of Sheffield’s two teams, and knows too that it’s the one that his brother M. used to support, back in the days when he was (temporarily) really into football.

The security bloke smiles, then says emphatically, "Good answer". Then he turns to speak to the airline person stood next to him, "Let's sort them out some better seats..."

While new boarding cards are printing the guy turns back to S. and pulls his jumper up to show that beneath it, on his tie, he has a small Blades tie-pin. "They wont let me show this…” he says “They don’t let me wear it to work…" He’s looking around kind of mock-conspiratorial, "…all the rest of them here are from down South".

Then he gives us the new paperwork. I'm somehow unclear or confused what he's done re: our seats exactly, if anything, so I say thanks to him as we enter the walkway, but not anything excessive, just like "oh cheers..." or something like that. When we get to the door of the plane though, instead of right to the cramped space of Economy, they direct us left to Business Class with its lovely booths/folding couches, insanely comfortable with all the legroom in the world, and we're instantly being plied with champagne (I am at least, juice for the kids..) and people who want to hang our coats somewhere. S. has a sudden excited spike in his football-supporting enthusiasm and as the personal service continues, he whispers to me excitedly that "Now we have butlers..."

As we fly I keep thinking of the guy at the gate - wishing that I'd said thanks in a proper way - and wondering also about these kind of spaces inside jobs that allow you to subvert them by being randomly nice to people, about the importance of random-allegiance and temporary kinship afforded by geographical belonging or about the kinship generated by football, about North and South, about people working inside a system who might at the same time work against it, or work invisibly under it, with no great ambition or agenda to cause trouble perhaps, but with the effect to disperse or re-flow its purpose in small ways. Yes, and maybe he had to re-assign our seating anyhow, and all the rest is blah blah blah.

*

However minor.

I would want to name the pull, or the sensitivity to these kinds of moments as a kind of optimism – however minor. I’d want to celebrate here these small subversions, tactical performativities, cracks in what one might otherwise see as a flatness covering the whole fucking surface of the Earth.

*

Oh yes. And one more thing.

Months later. Back home. This picture:

as we stop in the shelter

of a doorway in the thunderstorm

S. holds out his hand to check the rain

Jacob and Pieter - I don’t know.

I don’t know what more to say about that picture. Perhaps to say nothing might be best but of course I can’t resist.

The hand. The flatness of it. The open-ness. The question of it. The directness. The simplicity. The pragmatism. The straightforwardness. The sunshine. And maybe just the repetition of this gesture, which must be as old as the hills, as old as the co-presence of hands and rain.

I could probably write about it – that picture – and about optimism, for the rest of my life. But maybe, like I said, silence now, might be better.

You are in Brussels I think and I am in the air between Manchester and Dusseldorf. This is a good place for optimism – flying. That thought is making me laugh. We are high up still, but the plane is dropping and we have come down through the clouds and now we can see the earth below us clearly. Sunny, laid out supremely flat in the sunshine, like a diagram of itself, like a map. (I say the land looks like a map but we all know that it’s the other way round – the map tries to look like the land – an optimist should know that). We are banking to the left; they are asking that we switch off the electronic items and such. I am glancing from the window again as the plane drops, writing fast in the other window, the closing window of time. I am thinking of you. And thanking you for writing to me and making me think about these things.

Good luck with your project.

Tim

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