UNTOUCHABLE
self portrait #5
VIDEO-GRAB (REFILMED HOME MOVIE) 2025
HIGHLEVER ROAD
My first job after university was working as a publisher in a large organisation, subject to mostly unwritten corporate rules. I daydreamed about leaving and somehow setting up on my own but when I actually left the job after an entire decade, it came as a shock how hard the separation was.
I met a former colleague on a bus a few months after my departure, someone I had always got on well with. When I said hello, he responded with unmistakable coldness. He didn’t exactly blank me but he put up a barrier. Suddenly I was aware of another side of the institutional rules, and later I thought about the creepy, powerful pressure of certain kinds of silence and conversational clampdown. There can be so much coercion and rejection in politely dismissive dialogue—such quiet violence—and all because of the demands of institutional loyalty.
In Suffolk I once walked by the sea with a friend, a writer, who later committed suicide. I remember I felt there was a barrier between us, though not like the one put up on the bus. I had the sensation again a couple of years later, while I was with someone else who would shortly afterwards take his own life. It was only after the second man’s death that I realised this was how I used to feel often when I was with my father, who didn’t kill himself, not directly anyway, and now I would say it is the feeling someone can get in the presence of a sadness which has managed to become a horrible surrounding—a force field—until, in the saddest cases of all, the person left or lost on the other side of it can no longer be reached.
untouchable
TEXT 2024
self portrait #6
VIDEO-GRAB (REFILMED HOME MOVIE) 2025
HIGHLEVER ROAD