The Loneliness of a Long-Distance Runner

"I could have chosen Saturday Night and Sunday Morning . But the image at the end of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner has been something that’s haunted me all my life. I was born in Nottingham. It’s all set in Nottingham where I grew up. It very much captured the world of the back-to-back housing. I was born in the St Anne’s district and the opening shot of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning , pans over towards that area. My dad worked at Raleigh for 40 years, my brother worked at Raleigh, so there was always the chance that I would work in Raleigh if I wasn’t clever enough to get a job in an office. So, that world was very much ingrained in me and was the world that I inhabited. The story of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, it could almost be the story of an autistic person if you think about it. The loneliness and the self-obsession within the piece. It is quite striking. I read it in my teens. It was one of the first books I bought, as with Small Dreams of a Scorpion . It wasn’t given to us in school. I went out and bought it. For me, at that time, to buy something that wasn’t a comedy book, was a big thing. “It’s an image that defines a working-class thought – that you’d sooner fail on your own terms than win on somebody else’s” There’s something about a vivid image that even within a couple of paragraphs, can stay with you for the rest of your life. So, the image at the end, of the central character deciding to walk instead of run, and therefore throw the race – therefore not do what everybody wants him to do – and do what he wants to do. I think it’s a universal image. It’s an image that defines a working-class thought – that you’d sooner fail on your own terms than win on somebody else’s. That one or two paragraphs has, I think, defined a lot of my decisions over the years. I think all Sillitoe’s work is radical, but he just managed to capture something with that story. And in a way, the whole of the story just leads up to that moment and to have envisaged that moment in such a way that it encapsulates a way of looking at life – it’s brilliant! If I could write two paragraphs like that, I’d be very happy. The whole book is about this runner. He is, by the standards of society, a failure. But, by his own thought process, he is going to win on his own terms. This idea of how do we define ourselves. Is it by others or is it by ourself? It’s quite a key question."