Apolcalypse from a distance

These are very strange times. Strange enough to justify a post, the first in a long time. I have arrived in Taiwan in a set of circumstances that feel like the start of a story of global dystopia. I’d brought my flight forward in the fast-changing situation, choosing to fly on Friday 13th in the hope that it might not be a popular one. In a virus panic you don’t want to be surrounded by crowds in a metal tubes for hours. That part of it didn’t work. It was almost a full flight, and the empty seat next to me was the only one I could see. Almost everybody wore a mask. Having promised I’d be scrupulously careful, I wore a mask myself. I also wiped down every surface with alcohol wipes, and then didn’t move from my seat for the twelve hours flying time. The airline staff disinfected the toilet after every visitor, but it still felt like the riskiest place. However, it was a good choice of flight, because while I was in the air Taiwan raised the threat level of arrivals from the UK from one straight to three, and so we were the last into the country before really stringent restrictions kicked in. Even as it was, having already filled out two entry forms on the plane, there was a new two-part form rushed around after landing. Then there was a long queue way before immigration, as we all had to pass through disease screening. Anyone with a Taiwan mobile number could be screened online after scanning a QR code, but the rest of us had to wait patiently for the manual version. They wanted to know where we’d recently been and where we’d be staying, a contact name and number for the next fourteen days, and for us to complete a health check every one of those days on the form provided. What was particularly impressive to me was that they actually called the number each person gave, live, to check it was valid. As a level one arrival, I am allowed to go out as long as I wear a face mask. If I’d arrived a day later I’d be obliged to stay indoors by myself, and I’d have a tracking app on my phone so officials knew where I was for the quarantine period. If I didn’t have a smartphone, they’d give me one. As it is, I have my form, take my temperature morning and evening and tick the boxes to say whether I have any symptoms, and get a text message every evening to check on me. I have to answer: 1 if I’m OK, 2 if I have any of the symptoms, or 3 if I have any other problem. If I don’t answer at all, they assume a 2, and someone gets in contact straight away. There’s a free phone number to call at any other time too. The clever thing about all this is that the Taiwan government knows the whereabouts of every possible source of virus infection, which means they haven’t had to shut the country down in other ways. I’m extremely happy to be restricted for two weeks if it keeps a whole country safer, and it feels like a much better solution than anything in Europe. But meanwhile I look at the news from Europe and the UK and that sense of dystopia grows and grows.

The cold world

"The World", for brethren, which is just the normal everyday world for everyone else, is a dark and scary place. It's held up as a warning of what the alternative to the brethren's life is. It's cold, and lonely, peopled with strangers who will never care about you, and to be cast out into it is to be deprived of all human warmth as well as to know that everybody you ever cared about feels you unfit for companionship. It isn't so, of course. People outside the brethren are pretty much like people inside the brethren, much as that may shock a few on each side. They aren't inherently more heartless, and come in enough varieties that pretty much everybody should be able to find some likeable ones. Having said that, though, I have to confess that after a few years of experience it does quite often feel effectively the same as the brethren claim. It can't really be otherwise. I left behind what was basically a huge family, where I was firmly plugged into a communal life where everybody was affected by everybody else's actions, and there is nothing to replace that. And yes, I mostly found it stifling at the time and couldn't face going back to it, but that doesn't mean its opposite is always ideal. The wind on a mountain top may be bracing and exhilarating, or it may be bitter, depending on one's condition and vulnerability. I guess there may well be people around, including ex-brethren, who enjoy a constant round of friendship and have daily social interaction. I don't. I don't much like group socialising, and if you don't like groups it's very hard to stumble across other people who feel the same way. I haven't cracked that conundrum yet. The people I met when I first left were either secondhand friends, who were taken back by their original owners when I parted ways with them, or were more interested in my ex-brethren condition, which has become normal. None have stayed friends as I would think of it. There isn't anybody who can talk or meet up at any time for no reason. That probably says more about me than about them, to be honest. I conclude most people's lives congeal over time. They set, not quite hard, but they set, and the friends and family in their lives at some point between youth and middle age become the ones they take through life with them. Everybody I meet has that kind of life, and since I cut mine off I'm without it. For them, I'm an extra, and they will think about me sometimes if the circumstances are right, but that's all. That doesn't mean the world is cold and pitiless, it just means that I've had a disconnection in my life which other people haven't. But at times the difference can be hard to spot.

At a distance of five years ...

I would hope that there is less of the Exclusive Brethren Survivor as part of who I am than there was for most of this blog. That hope is the main reason why there have been no updates. This feels like a good time to ponder in writing what does remain, though, and how some feelings have changed and clarified. Actually, it's been more than eight years since this all kicked off.

TV Quiz pt 1

Back at the beginning of the year, I did something a bit reckless. In my defence I didn't have much idea what I was doing. In response to "you should do that" while watching BBC Mastermind, I filled out an online application.

So yesterday I was in Manchester having my knowledge/ignorance quotient recorded for television.

Between the two events there were phone interviews and tests, a face-to-face audition and more phone consultations, during which time I repeatedly thought "why am I doing this?" and repeatedly teetered on the brink of pulling out. I don't like being the focus of attention, I avoid competitive situations (I'm not fond of losing, but I find winning embarrassing too), and I've spent a large majority of my life insulated from popular culture. Each time, though, I told myself that those were all very good reasons to go ahead. I'm not good at putting it into practice, but I firmly believe in the value of going beyond what I think I am capable of.

I also discovered one thing which showed how little I knew about popular culture: Mastermind seems to come packaged with a whole set of assumptions for everybody. They ALL know the format, most can name a previous winner, and all regard it as something that other people do. That may be because it still has a bit of prestige among the many quiz shows there are, or it may be a hangover from the days when there weren't so many, I'm not sure.

Needless to say I didn't cover myself with glory in the event, and I confess to feeling a bit deflated in spite of that being exactly in line with my expectations (don't we all dream of the perfect set of circumstances when we imagine a scenario, even we keep replacing it with realism). Still, I'm quietly proud too, mainly because I know I tend to avoid putting myself on the line in any way, and I know, even if nobody else does, how hard this was to do - effectively putting an aspect of myself out to be judged in as public a way as possible.

Probably the second hardest thing I've done, actually. And that's a good positive thing, and I'm glad I did it.

Tidying the straggles

I feel at a crossroads right now. Having said that, I've felt similarly for about three years ... which is how long it's been since I started to write down what I felt and thought about life among the brethren and in the process changed my life.

It feels a bit strange at this distance. I was quite worked up, and I can't recapture that. Not to mention that once I'd made my feelings public it became impossible for me to stay in the circumstances that were driving my writing, although the novelty of the change to "normal life" provided material for a while.

If I've learned anything on the journey, it's that there's nothing particularly remarkable about being in the brethren, nor about not being in the brethren, nor about having a past in the brethren. Human life is varied. Everybody has a story about where they came from and where they are now. Everybody has hopes, fears and ambitions. So do I, and my past still provides interest to people I meet if it happens to come up, but interesting is all it is. Nobody assumes it defines me, or that it explains anything, let alone provides an excuse for anything. I was once in this strange religious group that has plenty of quirks useful for small talk. Someone else lived for years in a third-world country. People are interesting.

I suspect that this is pretty much incomprehensible to those remaining in the brethren. The group is the centre of the universe, and the fact that they simply don't matter much is something they cannot grasp. They expect that anybody who isn't for them must be against them, and that anybody who's left must have very strong feelings because everything is black and white, especially about such a hugely significant thing as the existence of the brethren and their doings.

From my observation of many of us who have left, I think we tend to carry a lot of that with us. I spent a good while feeling as though my ex-brethren status defined me, even while trying to prove otherwise, and using it (mostly just to myself) as a reason for all sorts of things. "I'm new to this," I'd think, "I can't be expected to understand / succeed / react correctly." I've gradually realised that that is how most of the world feels most of the time, actually. Maybe it's the rigid boundaries of our old brethren life that makes us unusually conscious of the fluidity and unexpectedness of normal life - or maybe that's just another layer of the excuses that come so naturally. Anyway, I think it's a trap, moving subtly from thinking we're unique and different because we're part of the brethren to thinking we're unique and different because we used to be.

So as and when I find time, I'm going to try to note down my thoughts as they are now, three years from the start. I'd like to round this whole blog off neatly instead of letting it dribble away to nothing! Then perhaps I can move off into proper normality, leaving this phase as a properly-formed complete document of the experience.

My Lunch

Brief break in the busy-ness-induced silence to announce that my fifteen minutes of fame have arrived:

Monster Burger Lunch

Compassion

This seems very appropriate, somehow.

If God had wanted me to be compassionate ...