Essay

Culture

Doubt

Music

Psychology

24 March 2025

9 min read

What happens when perfect plans are outsmarted by the world?

There may be delight hiding in the doom.

Roger Bretherton

Roger is a Clinical and Coaching Psychologist.

Two people sit and stand next to a grand piano on a stage.

Striking the wrong note.

Polyfilm.

If I’ve learned anything at all from decades working with businesses, it’s that they love an acronym. For a while the acronym we loved was VUCA. Not a nuclear jet nor a foot wart, VUCA emerged from the leadership theories of Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus to reflect the Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity of contemporary leadership. Nothing gets a roomful of executives nodding sagely than the observation that we live in a VUCA world. For a while it felt almost sacrilegious not to evoke VUCA at some point when training leaders. It was comforting to tell people who were supposed to be shaping the world that everything was, well… a bit nuts.

But in the last few years VUCA has lost its shine. Things have started to get too crazy, a bit too VUCA for anyone’s liking. The wars, the plagues, the natural disasters, the political upheaval, the shaking of old certainties- it’s all gone a bit super-VUCA. The acronym that once reassured us that the world tends to resist our perfect plans has been outsmarted by the world it once captured. What are we to call this permacrisis, this omnishambles, this SNAFU, when super-mega-hyper-VUCA just sounds stupid? A new acronym was needed. Enter stage left- BANI, the invention of futurologist Jamias Cascio to designate the way things are now: Brittle, Anxious, Non-Linear, Incomprehensible. We’ve had a romantic breakup with the world- you’re not like it used to be, you used to be fun, you’ve changed!

In March, Seen & Unseen celebrates its second anniversary. We are two years old. Old enough to appreciate a birthday cake, too young not to burn our fingers on the candles. I’ve been writing for the site since the beginning and to this day feel surprised that this quirky mishmash of a brainfart I keep writing is still accepted for publication each month. Either the folks at Seen& Unseen are pathologically kind to their own detriment, or my monthly missive of misery is not quite as off the wall as I fear it might be.

When I look at the world, I feel like we’re in a football match with no referee. I keep shouting foul and looking for someone to blow the whistle. It feels like the Tower of Babel. Even the technologies we thought would unify us have made us incomprehensible to one another. Like the scene in That Hideous Strength (the third book in C.S. Lewis’ Cosmic Trilogy) where a roomful of people is magically befuddled. They can no longer understand each other, and anyone who rises to take charge of the situation speaks gibberish that only adds volume to the babble. We don’t need any more opinions. We certainly don’t need any more people with misplaced certainty they have the answer.

To be honest, I’ve just run out of ideas. I’m confused, baffled, clueless. But what embarrasses me most is not my helplessness, it’s my hope. For some reason, in jarring contrast to the circumstances, I can’t shake off the sense that ultimately all this will make sense, that breakdowns lead to breakthroughs. We’re in the unbearable part of the story where everything goes wrong, but if we put the book down now, we’ll think that was the end of it, when it was really just the set up. Pretty much everything I’ve written for Seen & Unseen over the last two years equates to: grief, this looks bad, but maybe there is more to it than it appears.

There is another anniversary being celebrated this year. This January marked the fiftieth year of a musical event so remarkable that a new dramatization of it premiered at the Berlin Film Festival to mark the occasion – the recording of The Köln Concert. (Watch the trailer of Köln 75.) If we are looking for a story of how beauty emerges from disaster, this one is worth telling. The event was organised by eighteen-year-old Vera Brandes, at that time the youngest concert promoter in Germany. She booked the Cologne Opera House, but given that it was a jazz concert, it was scheduled to begin at 11:30pm following an opera performance earlier that evening.

The performer, jazz pianist, Keith Garrett travelled to the concert from Zurich. But rather than flying, he sold his ticket for cash and opted to make the 350-mile trip north with his producer Manfred Eicher in a Renault 4. He had not slept well for several nights and arrived late afternoon in pain, wearing a back brace, only to discover that the opera house had messed up. The Bösendorfer 290 Imperial concert grand piano he had requested had been replaced by a much smaller Bösendorfer baby grand the staff had found backstage. The piano was intended for rehearsals only, in poor condition, out of tune, with broken keys and pedals. It was unplayable. Jarrett tried it briefly and refused to perform. But Vera Brandes had sold 1,400 tickets for the evening. So, while he headed out to eat, she promised to get him the piano he required.

But it was not to be. The piano tuner who arrived to fix the baby grand tells her a replacement is impossible. It was January in Northern Germany, the weather was wet and cold, and any grand piano transported in those conditions without specialist equipment would be damaged irreparably. They had to stick with the piano they had. Keith Jarrett’s meal didn’t go well either. There was a mix up at the restaurant and their food arrived late. They barely had chance to eat anything before returning to the venue. And when Garratt saw the tiny defective Bösendorfer still on the stage, he again refused to play, only changing his mind because Eicher’s sound-engineers were set up to record.

So the concert begins. A reluctant pianist – tired, hungry and in pain – sits at a ruined piano, and records the bestselling piano solo album and bestselling jazz album. Ever. He improvises for over an hour. Starting tentatively, exploring the contours, befriending the limitations of his damaged instrument – learning its capabilities as he plays. But soon Jarrett is whooping, yelling and humming with delight as he extracts beauty from the brokenness. The limited register forces him to play differently. The disconnected pedals become percussion. By the time he reaches the encore, the joy of his playing is irrepressible – it sends shivers down the spine. And when he finishes, the applause goes on. Forever.

Jarrett pulled off an impossible feat and sealed his reputation as one of the greatest pianists of his generation. And I take heart from the event, because when I face the world, I sometimes imagine I feel like he did facing that piano. Tired and pained and doubtful any good will come of playing. Can I order a new world, please? One more to my liking. One less likely to hurt. Yet I can’t quite shake off the intuition that there may be delight hiding in the doom, a treasure only unearthed by those willing to play.

I am drawn to Job. He is a hero to all those who are sick of the answers of others but have no answers themselves.

This year I celebrate my own anniversary. I was born seven months after that fateful night in Cologne, in the equally salubrious town of Birkenhead. This is my fiftieth year too. The 3:15pm of life: too early to clock off, too late to start anything new. If living is a race between maturity and senility – gaining the wisdom to live before losing our marbles – then I’m odds-on for a photo finish. The evidence accumulates daily that I am likely to live longer than most of my vocabulary.

Jung held a positive view of old age. He viewed it as the time for religion to ripen. And I can’t help agreeing with him. The older I get the closer God seems. As muscle mass thins the spirit deepens. Outwardly I’m fading away, inwardly I am being renewed day by day. This undoubtedly underlies my hope of beauty arising from our brokenness. In some small and barely noticeable way it is already happening in me. And I know I’m not alone in that.

Jung also wrote about Job- the Hebrew epic of suffering and restoration. Job’s life is like one of those old blues songs. He loses his wife, his kids, his home, his health. He’s left broken, infested with sores and sitting in the dust. If you’ve been in a situation like that, you’ll know that even the most well-meaning friends can respond with surprising incompetence. Job’s friends are no different. They are true believers in Just-World Theory, the universal human tendency to assume that if bad things happen to us we must deserve them, we must have been bad. They live in a world ultimately governed by the kind of instant karma that causes car crashes on YouTube, and they’re keen to teach Job the way the world really is.

But Job resists them at every turn. He may have a proverbial reputation for patience, but he is anything but patient. I used to think this was a story about a man defending his innocence, but it’s much more than that. It’s the story of a man who goes through a breakup with God. He once lived a life of goodness, abundance, and gratitude in which he knew God as attentive and lovingly present. His friends are not just arguing that he’s being punished for some undisclosed sin, but that he’d always been wrong about God. He’d never known God- not really. The God they knew was volatile, capricious, arbitrary, vicious - like a rescue dog, you never quite knew when he would turn. And Job’s suffering was the proof of it.

The problem for Job is that he has no clue why he is suffering, but he will not let his friends obliterate the history he has shared with heaven. He knows God to be utterly faithful, constantly present, sublimely attuned, hugging the contours of his life as the sea hugs the shore. He wants nothing to do with a fickle god who falls asleep on the job or flounces off the first time we let him down. He rejects the here-again gone-again god of his friends. Sometimes, to know God, we need to reject those who claim to speak for God.

The weird thing in Job’s story is that eventually God shows up. Over the course of the narrative, he has asked God 122 questions, and God responds with 61 of his own. The questions are rhetorical- they point to all the places God is present that Job isn’t, all the things that God knows that Job doesn’t, all the things God has done that Job hasn’t. And by the end, Job is satisfied, his friends are dismissed, and his life is restored. God is as Job expected, intimately present but ultimately mysterious. He was right to reject the obtuse certainties of his friends and face the pain of the world with a cultivated sense of unknowing.

When I ponder how best to bring beauty out of a BANI world, how best to play its brokenness like Jarret played his Bösendorfer, I am drawn to Job. He is a hero to all those who are sick of the answers of others but have no answers themselves. He is also a hero to those who, despite all evidence to the contrary, cannot smother their hope. Those who discern the leavening yeast sown in the hearts of humans across the planet; too inconspicuous to make the news, but destined to rise when the time is right.

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If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

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Watch the Köln 75 trailer

Article

Books

Culture

Original sin

Trust

22 July 2025

6 min read

When the penny drops, on the Salt Path or a London street

Being taken in unleashes dark, unpalatable emotions

Susan Gray

Susan is a writer specialising in visual arts and contributes to Art Quarterly, The Tablet, Church Times and Discover Britain.

A painting show Adam and Eve wide-eyed after the fall.

Paradise Lost, Emil Nolde, 1921.

Nolde Foundation Seebüll.

Doubts about the honesty of The Salt Path, Raynor Winn’s memoir of walking the Southwest coastal path with her ill husband Moth, have raged in the past weeks. Investigations revealing the duo’s real names, financial history and the medical unlikelihood of the reversals in Moth’s degenerative condition, as presented in the book, provoked thousands of readers to express anger and disappointment at being duped. But being taken in and learning from it is part of being human: a lesson in how to trust more wisely, rather than not trusting at all

Last summer I was scam mugged on my local high street. Passing a frail pensioner pulling loose notes from his pocket, I picked up his fallen tenners and returned them. Six steps later, a woman shrieking I’d thieved her “granddad’s” money grabbed my arm. Cue a few minutes of struggling and shouting, before I got away, bruised and humiliated, but still gripping my bag. Vowed afterwards to always walk on by if I saw someone needing help on London’s streets, as it could be a set up.
But this detachment didn’t last. Being a goodish Samaritan is hardwired, even on the capital’s occasionally mean streets. We want to support and connect with our brothers and sisters. Withdrawal from our fellow citizens makes us more unsafe, not less. As Kaya Comer-Schwartz, London’s Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime, said: “The safety of our town centres is more than just policing – it's about building stronger, more connected communities where everyone feels secure.”

Certainly, a police officer would have been a welcome sight while tussling with my would-be conwoman. But I was grateful to the handful of people who stopped, as they would be my witnesses if the assailant went full mugger, in frustration that the ploy for me to open my bag had gone awry.

Memoirs also entreat us to bear witness, explaining the betrayal felt by some of the Salt Path’s two million readers who invested emotion and empathy in its uplifting tale of a hard -done -by couple finding solace in nature. Identifying with the memoir’s midlife, everyman duo and believing a long trek through the Southwest is a silver bullet for homelessness, financial woes and degenerative medical conditions, does not make the Salt Path’s former fans saps, it makes them beautifully human.

Raynor and Moth’s unmasking as Sally and, still remarkably healthy, Tim Walker, who lost their Welsh farmhouse following accusations of embezzlement against Sally and owned a property in France when claiming to be homeless, has lifted the lid on the publishing industry’s hunger for real life stories, with morally simple, feelgood narrative arcs. Bonus points if the tale includes a “nature cure”, where nature is not just a balm for grief and pain, but somehow vanquishes it altogether. Fact checking takes a lower priority than shaping a story into a series of emotional hot button scenes, with a neat, satisfying ending. And publishers may be guilty of their own sleight-of-hand by incentivising booksellers to personally recommend to customers a list of predetermined titles, creating the aura of ‘word of mouth’ hits.

Mean Girls’ great line “Jealous much?” captures journalists’ enthusiasm, mine included, for the Salt Path scandal. How can bestseller success pass over writers with have spent decades crafting phrases like popular orange vegetable to avoid writing carrot twice, yet shine on Raynor/ Sally’s repetitive, clunky prose? ”We lost. Lost the case. Lost the house.” Her dizzying ascent from unknown debut non-fiction author, with only a piece in the Big Issue to her name, to a book deal with Penguin, seems to other writers a mystery as great as anything in her trekking tale.

Feeling deceived unleashes these dark, unpalatable emotions such as envy and desire for revenge. I long nourished fantasies of catching the scammers in action and deflecting their next victim by shouting “Look! Granddad’s dropping his money again,” before handily nearby forces of law and order brought them to book. Even if you lose little materially from a con, the loss of dignity and sense of agency from becoming a mark, a manipulated, dehumanised bit player in another’s exploitive narrative, takes time to get over.

Popular accounts of online romance fraud feel designed to give audiences a sense of superiority, ‘I’d see that coming a mile off’, over the victims, reinforcing their sense of shame. Yet evidently with many thousands being lured by romance fraud, the perpetrators use effective psychological coercion techniques. Omniscient superiority needs to be replaced with empathy and support for fleeced, broken-hearted victims.

Grifters are part of life, but their reductive, empathy-free, world view does not have to be. As singer Nick Cave’s counsels, cynicism is not the answer: "Cynicism is not a neutral position — and although it asks almost nothing of us, it is highly infectious and unbelievably destructive. In my view, it is the most common and easy of evils.”

Religious origin stories, including the Garden of Eden, contain an element of falling for a trick. Eve does the serpent’s bidding, and she and Adam are banished from paradise. “So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.” Emil Nolde’s painting Paradise Lost, 1921, catches perfectly the moment the penny drops with Adam and Eve on the consequences of falling for the serpent. Yet by the following chapter of Genesis they start a family, moving on with life with new insight.

To never confront disappointment would be to remain as an infant, without the opportunities to grow and develop as adults.

In the Good Samaritan, one of the best-known parables, Jesus transforms the categorising question ‘who is my neighbour?’ into the universal quest of ‘how can I be a better neighbour’? Our bonds with our communities, a sense of shared humanity are the best, possibly the only defence, against those who would mislead us or do us harm.

Celebrated American journalist Ira Glass said: “Great stories happen to those who can tell them.” Published in 2018, The Salt Path’s direct, film-like scenes of survival against the odds and against the elements, would have resonated with all the people who saw their security and lifestyle nosedive after the 2008 financial crash, never to recover. Suspending disbelief, Raynor and Moth’s 620-mile wild camping trek, represented a symbolic railing against a heartless economic system.

My experience of the penny dropping a fraction too late to escape the scammers, has made me revise my self image as a streetwise Londoner. On my way to pick up holiday money that afternoon, my head was full of travel plans rather than focused on the here and now, a tendency I must curb.

If my assailant was writing her memoir I like to think our scrap would be the opening chapter, where she is at a crossroads of having to mug somebody in broad daylight, with a small, attentive audience, or rethink her street hustling career. Dressed in a fake leather biker jacket on a hot summer day - the smell lingers in my olfactory memory - her outfit was possibly an homage to Catherine Zeta Jones’ catsuit in Entrapment. As we know from all the TV series on con artists, looking the part is key.

Finding out the reality of her life since I broke free of her grip 11 months ago would not be hard, as she is now stationed outside Premier Foods by the tube station, in much scruffier clothes, asking for a pound for water. This sideways, or probably downwards move, in the street economy appears to be working out for her, and the peace of the neighbourhood.

Despite having lived in small rural communities for decades, throughout all The Salt Path controversy, nobody has come forward to say the Winns / Walkers were good neighbours. Setting this right could be their next adventure and next bestseller.

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This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

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