At some time, everyone needs to walk away, break loose, light out for the territory. Maybe just metaphorically, deliberately failing to arrive for something important. Walking out on an obnoxious class, or people who hate you and have ingenious ways of showing it.
So, Raven's decision to drop into Wetherspoons can be rationalised. He was due in Jesus College at ten and left the station at nine. Typically for him, this made it just possible to consume a small breakfast and be on time, but introduced anxiety into an already toxic morning. Because he was always thinking of watches and time. His sight of the Vertex Dirty Dozen on the stinking man had both cheered and disturbed him. What its proud owner said - defiant but defeated.
Aeons ago he'd studied science at college and time's dimensionality had delighted him. He'd long felt some force communicating and weaving this narrative in more dimensions than could be comprehended, other than through feelings and beliefs. It was the nearest he got to anything spiritual, somehow linking the people and things he loved to something larger which could - maybe would - preserve them.
But there seemed no way of reconciling all this with society now. The bedrock feeling of permanence had gone. Previously, whatever the inevitable cascade of events, that feeling of solidity had existed, however illusorily. It was even true in the 1980s, when he'd been at Oxford. Then Blair arrived and the systematic destruction began. Degrees, doctorates and entire ideologies ‘justified’ this, in terms of historical wrongs - some of them partly true. But you can't destroy a country's past without destroying its people.
What a joy Wetherspoons pubs are! Such a horror to the middle classes, with their loathing for unabashed Englishness and boozy camaraderie. The last remnants of our 'chop houses' and market pubs, open for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and frequented by everyone except prim progressives. How relaxing to see pints of lager being unashamedly necked and even the occasional punch-up erupt.
Raven checked his Murph 38mm Hamilton. Of course no messages from the future - of planetary escape and rebirth - were moving its second hand. Yet the still-ticking beauty emboldened him.
He was off - after breakfast and a couple of pints. But not to some punishment meeting in his old college.