Pushed away: Olives (Green) (I)

It stays boyish and deferential, avoiding strength, authority and the exercise of its own force, and hands responsibility to anybody who looks more equipped to hold it. The household undermined its capacity to cope at every turn, so adulthood registers as a set of tools that were never issued rather than as a set of skills that could be picked up late. What it asks for is one adult task carried out badly and all the way through.

Grown-up things are for people who were taught how, and I wasn't.

It echoes Perceval, raised in the forest by a mother who kept all knowledge of arms and knighthood away from him for his own protection, so that he came out into the world knowing nothing and asking nobody. The form implies a task: to ask the question he was never taught to ask.