Rang the Unit this morning to see if LB wanted to come to town with us and have some nosh out. He’d been to the farm on Friday and had been quite chilled over the weekend.

“Maybe. Maybe not,” was the answer. This means no. I rang back a bit later to see if he wanted us to get him anything.

“No, thank you,” he said to the staff member relaying the question.

“Can you ask him if he wants a t-shirt or a dvd, or anything?”

The answer was “DVD please.”

Rich, Tom and I went into town. Tom started chatting about when we’d gone to watch Skyfall with LB. I’d forgotten, but Tom remembered how LB had sat patiently in the dark waiting for the bright daylight fight scenes so he could read his bus ticket. Hilarious. Kind of.

There’s something here about choice and constraint. But also about difference and tensions around making sense of our lives and the social world we live in. I still think of LB as an unlikely ethnographer, but that doesn’t help us understand how he makes sense of his life. This remains a mystery really.