Nick had nothing to contribute to the world. He was unemployed and cronically lazy, he had not earned a days wages in almost a decade. After Nick lost his job he’d tried to stay positive, at first he had spent every day looking in the paper and at the job boards at the job centre, but his efforts were fruitless and pretty soon it started to wear. He still looked at the job boards, but blankly, the jobs meant nothing to him. Then he stopped going all together.

Nick had never had much of a stomach for a fight. He resigned himself to redundancy. The days and weeks started to merge. Without an income Nick had to lower his expectations, a walk in the park is a simple pleasure to most people, but when the park is the only place open to you life starts to feel like a prison. Nick’s prospects closed in on him. Sadness built up inside of him, clogging the arteries that fed his spirt. Soon Nick couldn’t even contribute a smile. His personality was in recession. People he’d known for a long time started to avoid him. He no longer liked himself, he wasn’t interesting, he wasn’t funny, his mind was full of torment. He started to get angry, then he stopped sleeping.

He lay awake at night thinking. How had he come to this. How, why, who was responsible for the malaise that enveloped his every waking moment. It hadn’t always been like this. Hate, malignant hatred, infected his thinking. The faces he saw while he was stalking the park during the day came back to him at night. The mums pushing prams, the children on their way home from school. They had a place in this world, something to contribute. Nick had no place, no friends, no community. Allot of the people in the park were Asian. The city in which Nick lived had a vibrant Asian community. Nick started to think that the Asians had taken away his community, taken away his job, taken away his friends and he hated them for it.

And that’s where racists come from.