WHEN THE DARKNESS COMES

One Man’s Journey Through the Rabbit Hole

Chapter 17

Collateral Damage

At Belrose, Kirsten had what she called her thinking rock. It was a large rock beside the driveway, nothing particularly remarkable to anybody else, but somewhere she liked to sit in the late afternoon and watch the sun go down while contemplating whatever needed contemplating in the complicated world of a young girl. One afternoon after school she was heading out there and asked me to join her, and I told her I would be there in a few minutes.

I meant it. There was no part of me making the calculation that a client was more important than my daughter, no conscious decision that business came first and certainly no intention to leave her sitting there on her own. I was going to finish whatever I was doing and walk outside to join Kirsten on her rock, which should have been well within the organisational capabilities of a bloke who made his living telling other people how to run businesses.

Then the telephone rang, and it was a client who needed something. I took the call, became involved in whatever the issue was and did what I had trained myself over decades to do: concentrate on the problem in front of me until we had dealt with it. Somewhere during that conversation the few minutes disappeared, followed by some more minutes, and outside the window the sun continued doing what the sun does without consulting either accountants or their clients.

Eventually Kirsten came back inside. The sun had gone down and she reminded me that I had said I would join her, at which point I realised what I had done and apologised profusely. I immediately offered the obvious remedy, because Logical Jeff has always been particularly good at remedies: we would do it tomorrow. Kirsten acknowledged that technically we could, then told me in effect that we didn’t need to and wouldn’t.

There was nothing dramatic about it. She didn’t throw anything, I didn’t yell, nobody slammed a door and there was no swelling orchestral soundtrack announcing that a Significant Parenting Moment had just occurred. A father had forgotten something he had promised his daughter because he became distracted by a telephone call from a client, and parents have probably been doing versions of that since somebody invented both children and work.

I have nevertheless carried that rock around with me ever since, although perhaps Kirsten forgot the incident long before I did. I have no right to decide what it meant to her then or what it means to her now, but my memory of that afternoon has become attached to a feeling that something was available before the sun went down that could not simply be rescheduled for four-thirty the following afternoon. I had approached it as though I had missed an appointment and could make another one, while Kirsten, even at that age, seemed to understand something the accountant didn’t: some moments don’t come with a replacement date.

In my darker interpretation of that afternoon, I lost a part of her that day. Logical Jeff immediately objects to the extravagance of that conclusion because one missed sunset does not define a father-daughter relationship, and the evidence of the decades since would make any attempt to prove such a proposition fairly difficult. The other Jeff doesn’t care much for the evidence because he can still see the rock, the driveway and a daughter coming back after the sun had gone down.

That may be one of the cruellest little efficiencies of depression. It doesn’t necessarily have to manufacture evidence when there is perfectly usable material lying around from decades of being human. Give it a forgotten promise, an argument, a marriage that failed, a photograph of a child standing slightly away from everybody else or an afternoon when work intruded where work should not have intruded, and it can open the file whenever required. The prosecution is rarely troubled by the existence of contrary evidence when the bloke conducting the prosecution is also selecting which evidence gets admitted.

That telephone call bothers me for another reason, because the client probably got exactly what the client was entitled to expect from me. Whatever else was happening that afternoon, when I answered the telephone I became the accountant. I listened to the problem, concentrated on it and dealt with the person at the other end in the manner I believed somebody dealing with Banks Consultancy had every right to expect.

We eventually formalised much of that expectation into the Four Pillars of Banks Consultancy. They weren’t advertising slogans dreamed up because somebody had told us businesses needed a mission statement, and they certainly weren’t negotiable according to whether I had slept well, was having a bad day or thought the client should have understood something the first three times I explained it. One of them was very simple: We will speak in your language.

That pillar placed the responsibility for understanding on us. If I had spent decades studying taxation and accounting and a client had spent those same decades building houses, repairing machinery, selling products or doing whatever else they did for a living, I could hardly become angry because they didn’t understand something that was obvious to me. My job was to find the language in which it became obvious to them, and my frustration was not something they had purchased as part of the engagement.

There were certainly occasions when the person sitting opposite me tested the structural integrity of that principle. Clients could ask the same question repeatedly, ignore advice, arrive without information we had requested several times and occasionally expect us to reconstruct twelve months of financial activity from a collection of documents that appeared to have been stored according to a filing system developed by a Labrador. None of that changed the pillar, because the pillars were the pillars and Banks Consultancy was Banks Consultancy.

The client therefore usually saw the veneer, and that veneer was remarkably durable. I could be frustrated underneath it, angry underneath it, tired underneath it or carrying something I couldn’t properly identify underneath it, and still answer the telephone with the professional voice and deal with the issue in front of me. It wasn’t necessarily dishonesty; it was the discipline of doing the job I had undertaken to do.

Staff sometimes saw a little more. They were close enough to recognise that the bloke behind the veneer wasn’t always travelling as smoothly as the bloke presented to the client, although I had another particularly unhelpful expression available whenever anything resembling stress threatened to enter the conversation: there was no such thing as stress. That was a wonderfully efficient way of disposing of the subject, particularly when the person making the declaration was quite possibly carrying enough stress around to require its own postcode.

At home, however, the veneer did not need to survive the journey through the front door. There is an old expression that familiarity breeds contempt, although contempt is not really the word I mean because what familiarity gave me was relaxation. The professional guard could come down because it no longer needed to be there, and the person waiting behind it was not necessarily the carefully controlled version everybody else had been dealing with all day.

With Robyn, I have never needed to audition for the position of her husband each morning or maintain the performance throughout the day in case my contract isn’t renewed. Robyn made her decision a long time ago, and one of her occasional ways of expressing the permanence of it is to tell me that I am stuck with her. I am very happy to be stuck with her, but the security of that arrangement has also given me a latitude that I probably haven’t always used particularly well.

When the person beside you is the one person you know will still be there tomorrow, it becomes very easy to allow tomorrow to carry some of the consequences of today. The veneer can come down completely, and whatever frustration, anxiety, anger or depression has been contained behind it suddenly has somewhere to go. Too often, that somewhere was Robyn, because she became the only receptacle available for whatever had been successfully contained everywhere else.

I don’t say that because Robyn has spent our marriage complaining about the burden of living with me. Quite the opposite, because her nature is to nurture and failure in a relationship doesn’t appear to be an option she keeps readily available. That doesn’t mean she accepts everything I do or agrees with everything I say, because anybody who knows Robyn would recognise the absurdity of that suggestion. The irresistible force has spent a considerable portion of its married life sharing a house with the immovable object, and both parties are perfectly capable of identifying which role the other one is playing.

That is also part of why it works. You generally know where you stand with Robyn, whether or not you particularly like the location she has selected for you, and underneath whatever disagreement might be occurring there remains the certainty that she is there. Perhaps that certainty has occasionally allowed me to be less careful with her than I would ever have permitted myself to be with somebody whose continued presence I could not take for granted.

There is no single dramatic incident that proves the point. Much of it is contained in little accommodations so ordinary that they can disappear into the furniture of a marriage unless somebody stops long enough to notice them. If I go to bed for a sleep in the middle of the day, Robyn will come in and ask whether I feel okay. If I lie back in the recliner while she is listening to the radio, she will offer to turn the television on for me.

“I can get you to turn the TV on if you want to,” is about the extent of the ceremony, and sometimes I wasn’t planning to watch television at all. I might simply have intended to recline the chair, close my eyes and disappear for a while, but her radio would go off because she had recognised that I might need something different from whatever she had been doing. There was no announcement that she was making a sacrifice and no entry made in a ledger for future recovery; she simply adjusted the room.

It is difficult to calculate how many times somebody can adjust the room before those adjustments become part of the cost of living with another person. It is equally difficult to know how many of those adjustments should properly be attributed to depression, because I would be doing Robyn a considerable disservice if I retrospectively converted our marriage into decades of her tiptoeing around the Black Dog.

We have had arguments because married people have arguments. I have been irritable because I was tired, angry because something genuinely made me angry and occasionally unreasonable because, despite decades of professional training, I remain inconveniently human. Depression explains some things and anxiety explains some things, but neither gets automatic ownership of everything unpleasant I have ever done.

That distinction matters because an explanation can become very seductive when it begins to resemble an excuse. If I was depressed when I snapped at somebody, there may be value in understanding why my fuse was shorter than usual, but the person standing at the other end of the explosion still experienced the explosion. Knowing where the fire started doesn’t unburn the furniture.

Banks Consultancy understood that distinction better than I sometimes did at home. A client wasn’t required to absorb my frustration merely because I could explain where the frustration came from, and “We will speak in your language” didn’t contain an exemption allowing me to abandon the principle on days when the Black Dog had followed me into the office. If anything, the pillar existed precisely because professionalism could not depend upon which version of Jeff happened to arrive that morning.

That creates an uncomfortable question I cannot entirely avoid: if I could maintain the veneer for the client, why couldn’t I always maintain it for Robyn? Part of the answer is that I shouldn’t have had to maintain a professional veneer in my own home. Nobody can live permanently behind armour without eventually needing somewhere to take it off, and home is supposed to be precisely that place. But removing the armour and firing the bloody cannon are two entirely different propositions, and the fact that Robyn was safe enough for me to be unguarded doesn’t mean she deserved to become the receptacle for everything I had successfully prevented from escaping elsewhere.

That is where explanation has to stop pretending it is acquittal. When I asked myself recently who, above everybody else, might be owed an apology for the periods when depression, anxiety, frustration and whatever else was happening inside me escaped their normal boundaries, the answer came surprisingly quickly: Robyn. I don’t mean an apology simply for having depression, because that would make about as much sense as apologising for needing glasses and would turn Robyn into somebody who had somehow been tricked into a life she didn’t choose.

She chose me, repeatedly as it happens, and participated fully in the peculiar life we built together. The apology is for what came with me: the peaks and drops, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and the occasions when we bounced off the walls of the tunnel while continuing to insist that the light at the end justified heading towards it.

It is for the uncertainty, the financial pressure, the businesses, the risks, the periods when my confidence was bounding ahead and the periods when it disappeared somewhere behind me. It is also for the rashes that are yet to exist, because after this many years together there is little reason to believe I have exhausted my capacity to develop entirely new ways of being difficult. Robyn has never needed the apology framed that way, and that may be part of why I need to acknowledge it.

The children complicate the accounting further because there isn’t one version of me as a father any more than there is one version of them as children. Justin, Julian and Kirsten are three very different people who grew up in different circumstances and encountered me at different stages of my life. Trying to bundle their experiences together under a convenient heading would probably tell me less than looking at the small things that continue to follow me around, and for Kirsten I have the thinking rock while for Julian I have a photograph.

The photograph hangs in my Man Cave and Julian isn’t even its subject. It is principally a photograph of Justin, with a very young Julian appearing in the bottom left-hand corner as an ancillary figure. There is an expression on Julian’s face that I now find difficult to look at without seeing a little boy who appears to be left out, although I have to be careful even writing that because a photograph does not tell me what Julian was thinking.

It captured a fraction of a second, and I am the one bringing everything that happened afterwards to the interpretation. The photograph doesn’t prove abandonment, unhappiness or anything else my head might like to enter into evidence, but it does remind me of the period that followed, when I wasn’t around for him all the time. That is enough for the photograph to keep doing its work without asking it to prove something it cannot prove.

The breakdown of a marriage doesn’t distribute its consequences neatly between the two adults whose names appear on the paperwork. Children don’t get to remain outside the transaction merely because they weren’t parties to the decision, and Julian is the one I have always felt missed out most. Whether he would calculate the loss the same way I do is another question, but my own ledger has carried a liability towards him for a very long time and perhaps that is why I still feel an urge to make things up to him.

Again, depression cannot conveniently claim responsibility for a marriage breakdown simply because depression existed somewhere in the landscape. Relationships are more complicated than that, and memory becomes particularly dangerous when a book needs themes and life stubbornly refuses to organise itself around them. What I can say is that broken relationships affected the boys, the consequences travelled forward, and because the boys remained part of my life those consequences eventually became part of Kirsten’s world as well.

I did some things differently from my own father, and I remain proud of that. I had drawn a very firm line around what I would allow him to do to my children because I knew what it was like to be on the receiving end of violence that had no reasonable boundary. When my own children were young, I told him that if he ever laid a hand on them he would never see them again, and there was no negotiation hidden inside that statement.

Corporal punishment did exist in our house, and I won’t rewrite history by pretending otherwise. It was nowhere near what I had experienced, and I was conscious of being careful in ways my father had not been careful with me, although consciousness and perfection are hardly the same thing. I cannot claim that I got fatherhood right simply because I avoided getting some of it as spectacularly wrong as the generation before me, but I can look at the three adults my children became and be enormously proud of them.

There are memories of the boys that contain no darkness at all. Sport was a substantial part of our lives, and eventually they became old enough to play in the same team as me. There were long innings where I could farm the strike while they kept their end up, which is perhaps as close as cricket ever comes to allowing a father to pretend he has devised a parenting philosophy while really just trying not to get his children out.

Those memories belong in the accounts as well, although depression has an irritating tendency to perform selective bookkeeping. It recognises liabilities immediately, creates provisions for disasters that haven’t happened and can write off goodwill without obtaining an independent valuation. Assets require considerably more documentation, particularly when the bloke preparing the accounts is already convinced there must be something wrong with them.

Justin presents a different problem because he is, in several uncomfortable respects, far too much like me. He is opinionated, capable of reaching a position and defending it with considerable enthusiasm, and we can clash vehemently over subjects on which his conclusions and mine occupy different planets. Some of his beliefs surrounding sovereign-citizen ideas beggar belief from my perspective, while from his perspective I imagine the old man is simply failing to appreciate whatever proposition he is advancing.

The subject matter itself isn’t important here, because I don’t need to prove that I am right about Justin’s arguments in order to recognise what happens to the people around us while we are having them. There are occasions when he will argue with Robyn, not vindictively as I see it but with an inability to recognise where the person on the other side is coming from. That becomes particularly difficult because some subjects press buttons in Robyn that lead back towards her sister and memories that carry a weight Justin may not fully appreciate.

Once the argument reaches that territory, lowering the temperature becomes extraordinarily difficult. At times I have asked Justin to leave the house, while at other times Robyn has stormed out, which achieves much the same physical result while leaving a completely different emotional mess behind. What bothers me afterwards is not simply that there was an argument, because families argue, fathers and sons disagree and two Banks men holding incompatible positions hardly qualifies as a previously undocumented natural phenomenon.

What can send me from anger towards the depths is the sense that I cannot make him understand that something has hurt. I can hear myself in that description, which doesn’t improve matters, because I can become angry at Justin for not recognising his opponent’s position while simultaneously knowing that I have spent a substantial portion of my own life being remarkably certain about mine.

Perhaps that is part of the collateral damage as well. Discovering traits in your children that resemble your own is delightful when the trait is determination, intelligence or independence and considerably less entertaining when you are standing in the middle of an argument watching the same immovable quality coming back towards you. Logical Jeff notices the irony eventually, although Angry Jeff is generally too busy at the time.

Then there is the larger landscape in which all of this happened, because our family life did not take place separately from work. Robyn and I have always had the mentality of self-employed people even during periods when she worked in the corporate world. We understood that there was a fundamental difference between occupying a job and producing the outcome for which the job existed, and that distinction shaped much of the way we lived.

For the self-employed person, the consequences become considerably sharper. If you don’t work, you don’t get paid. If cash flow is tight, you work seven days, and if the workload requires more hours, you find more hours somewhere because wishing the work away has never been a particularly effective business strategy. That shaped our family life rather than stopping it, and the distinction is important because I don’t remember us sitting around resenting the arrangement as though somebody else had imposed it upon us.

On our first trip around Australia with the caravan, we effectively took an office with us. There is an image of Robyn at Exmouth that captures the absurdity and normality of that arrangement better than any explanation I could offer. She was talking to a client on the telephone while looking out of the caravan window and was able to tell them that she was watching emus walk past, leaving our holiday and our working life occupying pretty much the same square metre.

It would be easy, particularly in a chapter called Collateral Damage, to rewrite that memory as evidence that work stole our trip around Australia. That isn’t how I remember it, because we went around Australia, saw the country, lived the experience and carried the business with us because that was what people like us did. The office in the caravan was not necessarily the price of the trip; in some respects, it was what allowed the trip to happen.

That is why trying to calculate collateral damage becomes so bloody difficult. The same drive that caused problems also created possibilities, while the business that interrupted Kirsten’s sunset helped support the family whose experiences I was working to provide. The willingness to work when work needed doing created financial security, and the inability to simply stop was also the inability to simply give up.

At thirty-one I was bankrupt, and there is probably no need to search too deeply for the origins of some of the financial drive that followed. When you have experienced the humiliation and uncertainty of bankruptcy at that age, financial security stops being an abstract concept and starts looking remarkably attractive. Somewhere around that period I established a fairly straightforward objective for myself: I was going to become a millionaire.

It wasn’t a particularly sophisticated financial plan, but the number represented something larger than the number itself. It represented recovery, proof that what had happened at thirty-one did not get to determine everything that followed, and perhaps some evidence to myself that I could rebuild what had disappeared. Like many objectives, however, it developed the unfortunate habit of moving once I got close enough to touch it.

We eventually accumulated considerably more than thirty-year-old Jeff had once imagined necessary. We built businesses, made investments, accumulated assets and ultimately placed ourselves in a financial position where professional advice tells us we don’t need to work anymore. The original objective has not merely been reached; it has ceased to be a particularly relevant measure of anything, yet we still work.

That is where the arithmetic stops helping. Have I done enough, is there enough, and can the car finally go into Park are questions for which I know the logical answers. I have people professionally qualified to answer them and they have answered them, while I am an accountant myself and should have at least a fighting chance of understanding what they are saying. Understanding isn’t the problem; accepting that the answer might genuinely mean I can stop is something else entirely.

There is still a drive that says keep going. It isn’t necessarily the Soft Shoulder, that old tendency to make myself available for other people to lean upon, although I can’t entirely dismiss its influence. This feels older and more deeply embedded than the need to be needed, because it says you work because work needs doing and you keep going because stopping has never been part of the process.

If cash flow is tight, work harder; if the business is under pressure, work longer; if bankruptcy knocks you down, rebuild. If the objective is a million, reach it, and if you reach it, establish enough security that it can never happen again. At some point nobody remembered to install the off switch, and the mechanism that helped me survive has continued running long after the emergency that created it.

There is a temptation to look backwards from where we are now and ask whether I would exchange some of what we accumulated for things I might have done differently along the way. I don’t find that question useful because Logical Jeff becomes irritated by a transaction that cannot exist, while the other Jeff gets dragged back through a collection of moments he cannot alter and is invited to place prices on them. One Jeff rejects the exercise as meaningless and the other one gets hurt by it, which makes it a particularly inefficient question from whichever side I approach it.

I can’t buy another sunset at Belrose, and even if I could somehow transport myself back to that afternoon there would be something obscene about arriving with the knowledge I have now and pretending I was still the father who simply answered a telephone. The point is not to rewrite the transaction. The point is to recognise that it happened and understand why, among thousands of afternoons with my daughter, that particular one still knows how to find me.

The same applies to Julian’s photograph. I cannot climb into the bottom left-hand corner and change whatever was happening around that little boy, and I don’t have the right to manufacture his thoughts simply because my own guilt wants an answer. I can only look at the adult he became, remain proud of him and recognise that some part of me still wants to compensate for a debt whose exact amount has never been established.

I cannot remove every argument with Justin either, and I am not even sure I would want to because disagreement is part of a relationship between adults. There would be something artificial about a family in which nobody ever challenged anybody else. What I would like to remove are some of the fragments that flew away from those arguments and struck people who weren’t supposed to be targets, particularly when Robyn became caught between two people who were both certain that continuing the argument was going to improve it.

Most of all, I cannot go backwards and give Robyn a different husband, so I can only look at the one she got. He has been successful by many of the measures he set for himself, recovering from bankruptcy, building businesses, helping clients, raising three children of whom he is enormously proud and eventually reaching the point where continuing to work became a choice rather than an economic necessity. He also carried depression through portions of that journey, sometimes knowingly and sometimes without having the language to recognise what was travelling beside him.

Robyn travelled beside both versions, although even that description is probably too neat because there have been considerably more than two versions of me over the years. She got Logical Jeff, who could analyse a problem until it surrendered, and the bloke capable of enormous enthusiasm for another project, another business, another idea or another ridiculous plan that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. She also got the bloke whose peaks could become exhausting and whose troughs could change the atmosphere of a room without asking anybody else’s permission.

Sometimes she got the leftovers after everybody else had received the veneer. That is difficult to write because it sounds uncomfortably close to ingratitude: the stranger on the telephone could receive patience because Banks Consultancy demanded professionalism, while the person who had spent years beside me could receive whatever remained once the professional performance was finished. Depression may help explain why the reserves were depleted, but Robyn was still the person standing there when they ran out.

I don’t know how to calculate that, and perhaps the accountant in me is uncomfortable precisely because there is no calculation available. Accountants are comfortable with costs that can be measured because we can identify the purchase price, calculate depreciation, provide for liabilities and reconcile what went out against what came in. Collateral damage refuses to cooperate because much of it never produces an invoice.

There is no accounting standard for a sunset you said you would watch with your daughter and didn’t. There is no reliable provision to raise against the expression of a little boy in the corner of a photograph when you don’t even know whether the expression means what you now think it means. Nor is there a neat figure to place beside the evenings when two stubborn men argued and Robyn became part of the blast radius, or beside all the occasions when she quietly adjusted the room because she sensed that I needed the room adjusted.

There is another danger in conducting this audit too aggressively, because if I add up only the damage I commit exactly the same accounting fraud that depression has occasionally committed against me. I recognise every liability while refusing to recognise the assets, and that would be no more accurate than pretending the liabilities didn’t exist. Robyn and I have had a life together, not merely survived one, and the distinction matters.

We have travelled, laughed, argued, worked, raised children, taken risks, built things, lost things, accumulated things and occasionally wondered what possessed us to start some of them in the first place. We have watched emus wander past the caravan while talking to clients, which is probably as good an illustration as any of our inability to keep work and life in separate filing cabinets. We have also reached a point that the younger versions of ourselves were working towards, even if those younger versions might be surprised to discover that arriving there didn’t automatically change who we were.

The darkness doesn’t get to retrospectively confiscate the light, but the existence of the light doesn’t erase what happened in the darker parts either. That is probably the balance I have struggled to find throughout this book, because depression has done things to me while there have also been times when the version of me experiencing depression has done things that affected somebody else. I can understand the cause without pretending the consequence disappeared because the cause had a medical name.

Nor do I need to flog myself for it. My father’s whip taught me enough about punishment to know that inflicting more of it does not automatically produce wisdom, and I have no desire to take the memories of every mistake I made as a husband or father and use them as another instrument with which to beat myself. Depression would probably volunteer to hold the other end, but it has had enough assistance over the years.

Responsibility is something different because it doesn’t require either acquittal or punishment. It allows me to look at Kirsten’s rock and admit that the client got time that belonged somewhere else that afternoon, while allowing me to look at Julian in the corner of the photograph without pretending I know what he was thinking. It allows me to argue with Justin and still recognise that being right, even on those occasions when I am absolutely convinced I am, doesn’t guarantee that everybody around the argument escapes unharmed.

Most importantly, responsibility allows me to look at Robyn without turning her into either a victim or a saint. She would probably reject much of the grand analysis anyway because that is not how she operates. She made her decision, and somewhere along the way the decision appears to have become that I am stuck with her. There are considerably worse sentences to have hanging over a marriage, particularly when I have no desire whatsoever to be released from mine.

These days the objective we spent so long pursuing has effectively been achieved. We have financial security, the children are adults, Banks Consultancy no longer needs to consume the same pieces of us it once did and there is no economic reason for me to behave as though thirty-one-year-old bankrupt Jeff is still standing immediately behind me waiting for everything to collapse. Sometimes I still behave as though he is, because knowing an emergency has ended and convincing whatever part of you learned to survive it are not necessarily the same thing.

Perhaps that is another form of collateral damage, although this time the damage is being inflicted by an old survival mechanism that doesn’t realise the emergency has ended. The drive that helped me get back on my feet doesn’t automatically know when its work is finished. The car is sitting somewhere near the destination, the engine is still running and I remain reluctant to move the gear lever into Park, even though every instrument on the dashboard is telling me that I can.

Robyn, meanwhile, continues doing what Robyn does. I can lie back in the recliner in the middle of the day while she has the radio on, and she will notice me settling back, recognise that perhaps I am tired or perhaps something else is happening, and offer to put the television on if I want it. There is no discussion about depression required, no accounting for what she was listening to, no debit against me for interrupting it and no speech about all the other occasions over the years when she has adjusted something because the man beside her needed the adjustment.

If I say yes, her radio goes off and the television goes on. Sometimes I watch it and sometimes I close my eyes, while Robyn simply gets on with whatever she was doing before I entered the room. After all the businesses, the children, the arguments, the peaks and troughs, the financial objectives and the years spent heading towards that light at the end of the tunnel, collateral damage may sometimes be no more dramatic than noticing whose radio keeps getting turned off.