The old man has always been a shade wary of officials - and that is official! Not just income tax officials, Ministry of Labour officials/national insurance officials/council officials/passport officials/housing department officials/border control officials/rent collection officials/electoral registration officials/and medical officials, but the official officials as well.
Once he arrived in the early hours of a dark and dismal morning at Temple Meads station in Bristol, and found that the connecting train to Twiverton had left without him. As he set off on the ten mile walk home the heavens opened, torrents of rain poured down, and his travel bag with the prized furnace bricklayer's trowel inside became even more weighed down. Pausing for breath he noticed that a police car - an official official's car - was trailing him and tracking his every move. For the next three miles it was driven at a snail's pace, almost nudging sagging water-laden furnace bricklayer's trowel carrying bag. "You could at least offer me a lift!" the old man shouted at the two smirking official officials.
I am yet to see Copper Jones smirking. This is an official official who seems to perform the delicate task of putting the coercive arm of the state into the middle of our prefab estate with tact and some panache. "I am here to ensure that the police protects all sections of society" he says. (You half-expect him to add this caveat: "Although as presently constituted the State's police force tends to serve some sections of society rather more vigorously than others.")
It was not just a rain-drenched ten mile walk home from Temple Meads station that helped shape the old man's distrust of officials. Other layers of memory are also at work. These include tales of police conduct during strikes and lock-outs in the South Wales coalfield and the infamous
Judge Jefferies. Some of the old man's ancestors were Cornish horse traders. When the 1685 Monmouth rebellion failed Judge Jefferies ordered two hundred to be executed. Another eight hundred were transported into slavery in the Caribbean. I have a hunch that a few Cornish horse-traders were amongst them.
In 1688 a group of upper class plotters met up in a grand house in Chesterfield and set about accomplishing what the Duke of Monmouth and his followers had failed to accomplish. The Staurt Monarchy was overthrown and the 'Glorious Revolution' made. As Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic put it in his piece on regime change in the TLS: "what counts is not only what is done and how it is done but who does the done."