Wanted: DVD of The Remains of the Day – the 1993 movie starring Anthony Hopkins. Evening Echo
‘How will I know which house is yours?’ I ask the poster of the above advert, as he tried somewhat vaguely to give me directions. He’s clearly surprised to have received a phone call within a few days of the ad appearing. But having trawled the ads for close to a decade, sometimes I just know when there’s a story lying behind the few lines of text. Possibly it was the fact that The Remains of the Day wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea. It’s a beautiful film, and one of my favourites, with the two main characters’ unfulfilled love for each other mirroring the social repression of the time.
There’s a sadness in the ad, as there has been with some other ads like this I’ve followed up. The placing of the ad is an admission in itself – that the person doesn’t have a large circle of people to help locate the item, and perhaps doesn’t have the resources or ability to order it online as many of us would. These are often the people on the fringes of technology, of society and ultimately of life.
‘I’ll place a used orange Calor gas cylinder outside the front wall of the house,’ he tells me. An hour later, I find myself brushing past the cylinder and knocking on his front door. The front garden is unkempt and bare, and there are three painted concrete blocks on one side of the garden – perhaps a feature started a long time before but never fully realised.
The man meeting me has a baseball cap half on and half off his forehead as he guides me to a dusted-down chair in the middle of a cluttered sitting room. Every available seat is piled high with old newspapers and ring-stained coffee mugs. The walls are adorned with crumbling newspaper cuttings, mainly about George Best and Pelé, while dotted around the floor are two-litre Diet Coke bottles, some full, many half or fully empty. Needless to say, Francis Brennan would be horrified.
When the man speaks, he pauses for up to 30 seconds before saying something. Aside from the condition of their house, this is one of the first things I notice. It’s almost as though he has to remember how to converse, what the protocol is and how to connect his thoughts with his words. I wonder when he last had a visitor. If he had not pulled a seat into the sitting room for me, there would have been nowhere to sit. It’s not a room that is often shared.
He reaches for a pile of newspapers, pulls out a padded envelope and opens it. Inside is a well preserved second-hand copy of The Remains of the Day. It had arrived that morning. He already had it on VHS, and had worn it out because he watched it so often. The connection for him is with Anthony Hopkins and it was forged when he first saw the actor starring in The Elephant Man in a local cinema in 1980.
He tells me that he lives in this house with his brother, who is out, and that they grew up here and stayed on after their parents died. He doesn’t have any friends. Aside from his brother, there is no one he is close to. He had spent three days on a training course decades earlier and that was the extent of his attempt to engage with getting a job. It wasn’t for him. He has his obsessions: Hopkins, George Best, Pelé, New Order, Diet Coke.
He has never got beyond a cursory hello with a woman, and since his late teens he has constructed a world for himself which he has largely retreated into – a world he is both content with and trapped in.
We begin talking about the film. ‘Remains of the Day is one of my favourite films,’ he tells me. ‘Anthony Hopkins is my all-time favourite film actor and has been for a long number of years. My other favourite pastimes are music – listening to the popular music and the rock music. That film though I have watched many many times. Of the 35 films he was in from 1968 to 2005, made for cinema, I have learned the character names and lines of all of them. You see, Brian, I can have the way for retaining information all right.’
There are things he tells me he remembers that no one else does, such as dates. When he mentions a former priest in the area, he tells me not only how many years he lived locally, but the date he left, the dates he started his next post, how many years he has spent in his current parish and what date he started there. Dates are to his sanity what fixed rope points are to mountaineers. The other fixture in his life is his brother, with whom he has lived his entire life. Both of them were born in this house and continue to live in it beyond middle age.
‘We get on very very well altogether, Brian. With our entire lives living here, we certainly didn’t have any major bother between the two of us anyhow. There hasn’t been a single bit of hassle in any way whatsoever.’ He is lucid and speaks in a way that’s genuine. He really only falters and stumbles when I ask whether he was ever tempted to marry.
‘Well, ah.’ Long pause. ‘Sure, ah.’ Another 30-second pause. He looks down at the stained carpet, then out the window and he’s waiting for me to help him out with the question. I stay quiet. Eventually he says: ‘I’ve never married, Brian, sure.’
‘Did you come close to it?’
‘Not really ... There’s, ah ... Ah ... Well, how can I say it? For most of my life, Brian, there’s never really been an interest. I can get along fine like. I get out to attend Mass, though I may not be perfectly pious. I know people to see them. I don’t know people interpersonally. I don’t have those kinds of relationships with people like that. I know them to say hello to them. But it stops there.’
He has never gone to a pub to have a drink with a friend in his life. He’s been in them of course, but he never goes out of his way to go into them. ‘’Tis only just the one day in the entire year that I take a drink and that’s on Christmas Day. I take a drink of Guinness. Just the one 500ml can.’
As for some other people I’ve come across who live isolated lives, the act of putting an ad in the newspaper with a phone number attached is quite a public one, and somewhat at odds with their otherwise detached existence. At least that’s what it looks like on the face of it. But as I spend more time with him, it becomes clear that the DVD request was his limited way of reaching out and feeling the embrace of society, albeit fleetingly. And it turns out that this isn’t the first time he has used the small ads.
‘The last time I used the free ads was in 2014, and what was I looking for? Only the DVD of another film with Anthony Hopkins!’ he says. ‘It was a copy of Amistad, the film based around the lead up to the abolition of slavery. I got a reply and came across it on DVD so it was great. And then I did have an ad in the Echo free ads in 2005 as well. That was just looking for a video cassette copy of a music title by the rock group New Order. My three favourites in popular music were New Order, Rush and Bowie. I didn’t get a single reply to that ad in 2005 though.’
Three times in the space of two decades he has reached out for some kind of human contact. Twice that has been successful, allowing him to continue with his preoccupations. He could have got the DVDs or the VHS tapes online, or asked his brother to pick them up on his way home. But that would have meant he was unlikely to have engaged with another human being during the process. It strikes me that while he was genuinely looking for a DVD when he placed his ad, he was also seeking to momentarily offset loneliness.
He leaves the house for Mass and the odd table quiz. That’s it. Aside from some immediate family, he has no other connection with anyone outside these walls. He tells me that after I leave he will sit down and watch his new Remains of the Day DVD. He’s comfortable answering my questions, although I sense there’s a definite limit to how long he wants me to share his world. In total, I spend about 45 minutes with him before he decides it’s time for me to go.
His face is beaming as we both inspect and approve the quality of the second-hand DVD that arrived in the post for him that morning courtesy of an Echo reader. Today’s viewing will be the first of many he tells me proudly as I walk towards the door.
‘It’s a pity they never got together at the end,’ he says, referring to the characters of Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, who are clearly in love with each other but cannot express it. They’re both trapped by convention, destined to live out occasionally contented but ultimately lonely and isolated lives, bound together in the shadows of fulfilment by their intimate detachment.
I reach out my hand to shake his and he thanks me for meeting him. As I walk away, I can hear him dragging the gas cylinder back to its position at the side of the house, where a large circular indentation in the grass, years in the making, was waiting for it.