The Unfinished Race: Part 2

Following on from my last post, I will set out a little more detail about "Alan" and in the next post the story I began to visualise.

Alan is one of society's outcasts. His days are spent walking the same route, hour upon hour (though it has to be said I once saw him way out of Taunton walking towards Bridgwater, a neighbouring town.) The majority of people, as I did, probably view him simply as a "psychiatric patient" and by medical standards that is what he is regarded as.

When the psychiatric hospital near my home town of Taunton closed down some years ago, many patients were "integrated" into the community. As far as I know, Alan was one of these. Now he is a lone, sorrowful figure, part of the everyday street scene. By now people must be used to him and for the most part ignore him. It was only after I heard a little bit about his background that I began to view Alan differently.

Some years ago, I was talking to a friend of mine, and somehow the conversation turned to Alan whom we both had observed on his daily wanderings. My friend informed me that Alan was a frequent visitor to the vicar who lived across the road from my friend's family. During a conversation, the vicar had told him a bit about Alan. The vicar was one of the only people Alan had any contact with and who showed him kindness. The vicar informed him that Alan in his younger years had been a keen runner and had apparently shown such promise that he had been shortlisted to compete in the Olympic Games. According to the vicar's account Alan had trained so hard that eventually something snapped inside resulting in a breakdown from which he never recovered.

A sad, moving and remarkable story and one which I felt I wanted to tell the world. Not only that, I would love to turn the story into a film, one that stimulates thought and reflection. I would not want to romanticize Alan's plight, rather put it in a new light. Perhaps as a result, people like Alan might start to be viewed with more understanding and treated with more dignity, kindness and respect.