<div class="fr-view"><p>Meeting new people, particularly the older I get, can turn very quickly into a formulaic discussion where many words are spoken but very little is said. After the exchange of names comes the meaningless question, you know the one: &lsquo;So what do you do?&rsquo; We manage to reduce people very quickly to little more than their job, as though the role they have either found themselves in or chosen as a career tells us everything we really need to know about someone. I have lost count of the number of times I have met someone on a social occasion and all they have learnt about me is the city I was born in, whatever job I had at the time, my name and, if I&rsquo;m lucky, what football team I support.</p>
<p>This goes the other way too &ndash; in my current job I meet lots of people but with very few of them do I come away knowing much about who they are. If I were to describe them I could give you an assessment of their physical traits, tell you their job, make a half-decent attempt at remembering their name and their football team. But what does that actually tell you about a person? Nothing. It would be like describing an NPC (non-player character) in a video game.</p>
<p><img class="fr-fic fr-dib alignnone" style="width: 883px" src="https://thehootstudents.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/IMG_7398.jpeg" alt="A photo of a concert crowd at a stadium." width="5712" height="4284" data-id="40874"></p>
<p>I was struck by this during the Edinburgh fringe when a friend of mine (6&rsquo;2&rdquo;, Paul, teacher, Inverness Caledonian Thistle) and I were relaxing in one of the main fringe hubs between shows. We noticed the man across from us speaking in an Edinburgh accent, which is surprisingly rare in Fringe venues during August, so got into conversation with him. I regret to admit one of the first things I asked him was his job, but for once he gave an answer which led me to ask further questions. He was a retired funeral director. In my social life I am not sure I have ever met a funeral director before. When I have met them it has been in the personal capacity of arranging a funeral for a loved one, so my focus has not been on them and their job, but this time was different and he gave us a riveting assessment of the career he had loved, peppered with anecdotes that went from the wildly funny to genuinely heartbreaking. A few beers in, and this man&rsquo;s openness meant it was not long before we started asking him more intimate questions, particularly around his own relationship with death having worked with death for so long. He opened up about the difference he felt doing it as a profession and when it has touched him personally, and it was only really in retirement that he was able to properly allow himself to think about what death meant to him as an individual rather than as part of his job.</p>
<p>It was shortly after that he revealed the next interesting part of our interaction. One of the difficulties he had at work, it turned out, is that he is a lifelong naturist. He and his wife would regularly attend naked swimming events, naturist holidays and trips to nudist beaches. Much of his social life appeared to be dictated by naturism and he spoke eloquently and passionately about his love for social nudity. As the social barriers had already been broken, Paul and I felt emboldened enough to ask him many questions about it which he was all too glad to answer. He gave us a sales pitch and whilst we both declined, he said he was really happy to be able to talk about it. During his time as a funeral director he felt unable to discuss with his closest colleagues and many of his friends this hobby he clearly felt so passionately about. He said nobody wants their father, brother, grannie or cousin sent on their final journey by someone who gets his kit off at the weekends.</p>
<p>His next show was looming and we said our goodbyes, but in the month that follows I have reflected on him a few times. How interesting it was to meet someone and really get to know what made them tick, and someone who at first looked like an ordinary sixty-something bloke turned out to have a whole books&#039; worth of stories and felt to me to be a completely unique person. If I can get into a conversation with someone who shares this city with me, and I quickly find out he is a nudist undertaker, how many other stories are out there amongst the people I waste my time saying &lsquo;Hello, and what do you do?&rsquo; to when I meet them? How many stories are there in the hundreds of people I meet and idly chat to each year, and share and learn nothing with? Any time I see a group of people since meeting him I have started feeling an overwhelming sense of wonder, at who these people could be, the stories they have, the lives they have lived, the situations they have experienced, that have shaped them, not as people who work a certain job, but as a unique person living one of the unlimited possibilities that life provides us. I hope to find a way to hear more of these stories and get to know more people properly, and never again define someone by things as insignificant as their job, where they are from, or their football team ever again.</p>
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