On the very rare occasions that Simon came face-to-face with a person whom he felt it worth courting, he adopted a salf-of-the-earth bluff persona that made Andrew cringe. Simon would talk over them, crack clumsy jokes and often stepped, unwittingly, on all kinds of sensitivities, because he neither knew anything, nor care much, about the people with whom he was forced to converse. Lately, Andrew had asked himself whether Simon even saw other humans as real.

• 10 years ago