Darryl

The community centre opened three hours early today, at 6am, because we’re being used as a polling station. Although people in the rest of the country are voting for their local political representatives, only two outlying ‘wards’ (areas) are up for re-election in our city and they’re both on the other side of town. Consequently most of the people coming in to the centre today are casting their votes for the city’s new Police & Crime Commissioner, also on the ballot, whose identity or political affiliation, most of us could care less about.

Nonetheless, the overall turnout is surprising. Every few minutes someone appears. An old person, a young person, a middle-aged man, a thirty-something mum. No discernable demographic, just random people for whom this kind of stuff is important. Still, even more interesting to me today is Darryl, the steward who has been employed by the city council to police the door.

The city has never employed stewards to police polling stations on voting days before, but this year they have outsourced a company based 168 miles away, who won the nationally-advertised contract tender to provide polling-station stewards, ensuring that no voting location in the city breaks current Covid restrictions (no more than three, masked, socially distanced voters are allowed into the voting space – already manned by three, masked, socially distanced, clerks – at any one time, ensuring an arbitrary, masked and socially distanced, ‘rule of six’ is complied with).

Darryl’s is not an especially skilled job. I’m sure there would have been hundreds of applicants from this city alone, but I have every faith that the city council’s choice of a Devon-based security company was in the nation and economy’s best interests, even if that decision might seem pretty oblique to the people who actually live in this city and would have jumped at such employment opportunity.

All of which detail is way beyond Darryl’s arena of concern, and nothing for him to concern himself with. Darryl is in a similar boat himself and has travelled all the way from Plymouth to be here today, a journey of 170 miles, for a 16 hour shift which he’s being paid £9 an hour for. The company he works for provided transit for its employees in the form of a minibus that left Devon just after midnight, so by the time I encounter Darryl at around 1pm, he’s already been going for 7 hours and has 9 more to go. He admits himself that by this point he’s having trouble staying awake, let alone attentive.

Darryl is a severely obese young man in his mid-twenties, wearing an orange steward’s jacket, crusty black ‘work trousers’, scuffed trainers and a turned-around baseball cap. He’s also emitting a low-key but noticable level of body odour. Nothing to recoil from, but enough to notice. He’s says he’s been working as a steward for his Devon based employer for about five years now. He tells me that he took an exam last year to gain a formal security qualification, which would enable him to earn more money, but he failed the test. He says that the only reason he failed the test was because he was told the wrong date for the assessment and so turned up on the wrong day. Surprisingly, he doesn’t seem bitter about this. He seems to take this injustice in his stride, as par for the course. In fact he seems to take every aspect of his job, the long hours, the bad pay and the tedium, equally as given and without complaint. Wistfully, he’s already looking forward to his next gig, next weekend; a football match at Torquay.

“It’s going to be on T. V,” he tells me, “SkyPlus.”

Darryl tells me how he’s been sent all over the country, to steward all kinds of events. I ask him what his favourite was.

“Dartmouth,” he says, without hesitation.

“What’s at Dartmouth?” I enquire.

“The regatta. It’s a week long. They’ve got bands and everything.”

“That must be a lot more interesting than this,” I suggest.

Darryl smiles and nods, goes to hold back a voter from entering the polling station until someone else comes out, diddles with his phone while waiting.

“My boss says everywhere else is even quieter than here,” he says, coming back to me.

“Wow.”

“My younger brother just got a new job,” Darryl informs me.

“Did he?”

Darryl’s younger brother is a surprising and unexpected character to bring into our conversation but I’m happy to include him. While convivial enough, Darryl’s interests and my own rarely intersect. When he asks me if I like football and I tell him “not really”, neither of us knows where to go next and a protracted silence ensues. Darrly’s younger brother’s new job is a welcome conversational turn.

“Yeah,” he says, “but it’s the other side of Exeter and he has to be there for 9.30 in the morning…so I can’t see that happening,” he says smugly.

“What’s the job?”

“He’s a ride operator. He’s tried to get me to do it but I told him, I’m not interested. He doesn’t listen. He never listens to me.” Darryl starts describing the train and bus journeys his younger brother will have to take to get him to work on time. “He’ll never make it,” he concludes.

“You know a lot about train times.”

“I’m into trains,” he says. “I’m a bit of a train geek. My brother’s into buses. I’m not into buses,” he screws up his face, “they’re too slow.” Darryl relays some more train facts to me and I’m truly now in awe.

Darryl’s most comfortable level of parsing the everyday world runs in at around 36 metres per second. When it comes to trains, Daryrl’s brain is Roadrunner while we’re all Wile E. Coyote, pathetically slapping ACME tunnels onto cliff faces. I would rather have Darryl driving a train that I had boarded than anyone else I have ever met. Why Darryl isn’t currently a train driver is truly a conspiracy of dunces.

I’d like to think that Darryl has many years left to realise his true potential. I’d like to think that everyone realises their true potential eventually, gets to enjoy it and live out their lives with a sense of satisfaction and deep fulfilment. But I’m also aware that this is little more than a well-wishing fantasy.

It thus occurs to me that if we don’t really believe this ideal to be likely, or even possible, for others let alone ourselves, no matter what we do, then what are we doing right now? And why? What’s the point of anything?

There’s a quote from a movie called ‘Eve’s Bayou’ that has been haunting me for months since I first heard it…

“Most people’s lives are a great disappointment to them…no one leaves this earth without feeling terrible pain, and if there’s no divine explanation at the end of it all…that’s sad.”

My perception is that Darryl has yet to feel terrible pain and thus, currently, has little need for divine explanation. I envy him, on both counts. In regard to the latter, I’d love a bit of divine explanation, but I’m not holding my breath.