5:43-48

 Jerry had never really liked his English teacher at primary school. Her name was Mrs. Mary Madeleine Grace but she expected her pupils to call her just Adele.

 After leaving primary school, he had realized he really hated her looking back. Once, at the age of twelve and while walking home from John Worthington Middle school, this girl from another class told him that her aunt - Adele - had told her that Jerry was a prick. "What a nice thing to say about a primary school student" he had told himself sarcastically. This last episode had just contributed to worsening his awful memory of Adele.

There were countless episodes that he could associate with guilt, fear, anger. Not exactly life-enhancing feelings that boost your confidence.

He recalled how one day, during an afternoon P.E. class (she also taught P.E. in fact), during circle time moment with everyone sitting on the floor, she had put him in the spotlight telling him loudly "That's disgusting, You make my stomach queasy! I just saw you picking your nose".

Jerry's immediate reaction had been to hide his bogey by...eating it! That had a disastrous effect. She had expressed her disgust further, and all the other kids had laughed their heads off.

Another time, Jerry's mum Liz had gone to pick him up and stopped for a quick talk with Adele outside the school entrance. Liz wanted to talk about Jerry's low grades in English, and Adele had replied with a textbook teacher's answer "Jerry's got the brains, but he needs to be more committed. What do you think Jerry?" He had replied with an imperceptible shrug of the shoulders. He actually thought she was biased and that he was already working hard, but that was not enough for her obviously.

The following day, Ms Adele asked him at school- with a clearly annoyed tone - "Why on earth did you not agree with me in front of your mum yesterday?". 

Then there had been other things. Jerry had, unfortunately, a bad habit of coming up with loads of nicknames for his classmate: there was Del, the Blue Hippo, Roxette, Little Matthew, just to name a few of them. There were exceptions, but most of his mates quite liked these nicknames and didn't mind at all. But the teachers did, especially Adele. She thought this confirmed all her negative views of him being an arrogant bully. 

She wouldn't let him be like that so one day she called him out in front of the whole class and started questioning him, like a real Stasi officer, asking very peculiar questions and in the end making him cry (he even started hitting himself, and she seemed to find this all the more annoying: he could not, by all means, be a victim, not even of his own self. He was a villain. He had to be, end of the discussion.

It finally had dawned on him one morning at the age of thirty-six and a half, when he bumped into his classmate Anne Winterbottom.

She had told him how her mum had moved; this had given her time to go through old school exercise books and she had found this book with all the transcripts of the assemblies she had. Jerry had even been secretary of the assembly sometimes, writing and signing the final report. He had totally forgotten about all that.

Maybe Adele wasn't so bad in some way. Maybe, if she hadn't been so unpleasantly critical and negative, he would have been a less resilient person, less adaptable, less... himself.

So, in the end... he started seeing things under a rather different light.

Jerry wasn't very religious. He considered himself an agnostic or an atheist. In spite of this, the sentence that he had overheard whilst watching a film about St Francis's life seemed particularly fitting.

" love your enemy and pray for the ones who persecute you..." or something like that. And Jerry didn't consider Mrs. Adele an enemy; just someone who hadn't brought the best out of him. At least, this is what he had thought until that sunny Winter morning.

Alistair medium-guy

Alistair didn't usually feel ill. Every year he would maybe stay in bed for a couple of days, with a mild temperature, reading magazines and watching old Only Fools and Horses episodes. That end of Summer though, he caught a bad cold and because he hadn't looked after it, it turned into laryngitis. This meant that he had to stay at home for a few days, with an awfully high temperature, taking pain killers and antibiotics.

During this period of illness, his friend Robin had called him to ask him to go and see their friend Jack in Derby. "Sorry mate, can't come because I'm ill.. got this flipping laryngitis." "You lucky bastard, I wish I was in your place".

Robin saw the practical side of it. With his bank clerk's job, being ill was a real bargain. You got to stay at home with a full salary. Problem was that Ali was working as a precarious part-time student part-time free lance copywriter. There wasn't much social security for this type of very common human being situation unfortunately.

Nevertheless, they agreed they'd go and see their mate at the end of the month and that way other members of the crew could join them: Simon, Frank, Andrew, perhaps Thomas.

On the Monday Alistair went back to work. It was his turn to cook lunch for everyone so he had spent the weekend making pasta à la Norma. Why on earth he had ventured cooking a complicated Sicilian dish didn't pass his mind. He hated cooking and his favourite meal was beans on toast, but to make his colleagues happy and get a better respected position at work, he wanted to test his chef skills and try and grab everyone literally by the stomach.

He had decided that he'd go to work even though he wasn't fit, because he hadn't got a temperature anymore, even if he still had a cold and sore throat, and because there were many things on his "to do list" but most of all because he didn't have a contract that said he could stay at home when he was ill. Actually he didn't have a contract at all. He was paid with food stamps and petrol vouchers and maybe a few hundred quid every now and then.

"Why are you here if you're on antibiotics, you must be contagious." His colleague Natalie knew how to go straight to the point without being too tactful and friendly. She was particularly concerned about her newborn baby and was afraid of catching something - she had spent three weeks at home in February, because of Bronchitis - so she couldn't care too much that Alistair had been ill. She didn't bother seeming too worried, because in their modern social media oriented business ethics it wasn't very important to show much human care towards your peers, especially when you were face to face or side to side in the same room. Even more so if there were lots of deadlines and unhappy customers.

That evening the council meeting about the building of a new supermarket in their borough had been shorter than usual so he managed to go to Ivan's, the Russian bar down the road, with his old friend from school Ted and watch almost the entire First Leg of Ajax vs Tottenham. While watching the game they chatted about what they'd done during the holidays. They had a lot to catch up with but were too tired to go through everything, so they focused only on the highlights.

Djing: medium. Football: medium. Downing pints: mediocre. Writing: medium. All through the conversation Alistair had kept thinking of how he wasn't particularly good at anything, even though he wasn't total crap overall. He liked to think of things in terms of cartoon characters It gave him a proper perspective. A week before he had watched the whole of Superman 3D with his oldest nephew, so Super-man was the first thing he could think of and this made him suddenly realize who he was and had always beem: indeed he was medium-man.