You Are Enough Zip Up Hoodie

I am 22 and I am doing a year of civic service at a youth centre. The teenagers there give you about four seconds before they decide what you are. Wearing this, those four seconds go differently. Two lads who had not said a word to me in a month asked me about it on the same afternoon.

I work on the front desk at the town hall. People come to me on the worst day of their lives to do paperwork about someone who has died. They stand there holding a folder and they read the front of this while I type. Four of them have said something to me about it this year.

I am 77 and I have walked the same beach in Brittany every morning for eleven years. In February there was a man sitting in the dunes in a suit, which is not something you see. He read the back as I went past. I did another lap and he had gone, but he was walking towards the town.

I am 71 and I do two car boot sales a year with the same trestle table. A woman went through my box of old plates for a very long time without actually looking at a single one. She read the back as she straightened up and asked whether she could sit down for a moment. She stayed two hours.

Fifty six, I run a school canteen and three hundred children walk past me every day. One boy in his last year of primary has eaten alone since September and answers nothing. He read the back on Tuesday and asked me whether the person in front knows who is behind them. I said probably not. He thought about that all week.