In the summer of 1954 every adult male on our estate had a job apart from the old man. A manager at the Derro Company had spoken to him in a manner which had offended his dignity.
Without cementing another furnace brick into place the old man picked up his bricklaying trowel and was off to Milan airport. "I have won a fortune of contracts for Derro and they talked to me like that!" he said as blew a breath of cool air over the plate of onion soup he had just brewed up. Another small footnote had been added to that massive tome Capital Versus Labour which drips from every pore with pain and hurt pride.
The old man's self-employed national insurance status meant that his eligibility for dole money was all but non-existent. In any case, claiming dole money had never been his style. So he battened down the hatches, dug deep into his financial reserves, sat in the armchair scratching the back of his head, and would stroll down to The Old Crown to work out how on earth he could make an egress from this perilous situation.
On Sunday evenings I would be taken to The Old Crown as well and sat down in the back room to study the stuffed fox in the glass box and listen to the ticks of the large black clock. The old man would ferry in supplies of ginger beer and cheddar cheese straws while engaging in scientific discussions with The Inventor. Despite being bald The Inventor managed to project the classic Albert Einstein wild hair look (he had lost his hair after an experiment had gone badly wrong.) Ever since 1945 The Inventor from Camelot Green had been battling away to get his invention patented. When drinkers in the saloon bar crowded around him and asked what this invention was he would first take them on a brisk e = mc squared theoretical detour. He would tell them that the universe is 14 billion years old, the solar system is five million years old, and that the galaxy measures 100,000 light years across ("with more stars than grains of sand.") He would point out that prior to the Cambrian Explosion of 536 million years ago our ancestors were "mere organisms in the sea." Pausing for a drink from his glass he would then point out that humans did not appear until two million years ago, and that our species' big breakthrough came 70,000 years ago with the invention of tools. The Inventor's introductory lecture would end with him saying: "And tools are my domain!"
The tool The Inventor had invented was an elastic device which stopped pyjama trousers from rolling up legs during the night. Most people were stunned and disappointed when they heard this. They felt it was something of a let-down. Yet The Inventor deserves some credit. Here was someone who refused to have his spirit crushed by the weight of all of the innovations and advances and works of genius and history-changing discoveries that had gone before him. Someone like Georg Simmel would have viewed his defiant never-say-die tenacity as somewhat
remarkable.

Georg Simmel (1858-1918):

"Here in buildings and in educational institutions, in the wonders and comforts of space-conquering technique, in the formations of social life and in the concrete institutions of the State is to be found such a richness of crystallizing, depersonalized cultural accomplishments that the personality can, so to speak, scarcely maintain itself in the face of it."