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Undaunted by what he describes as ‘the horrific tragedy of modern politics’, Ray regards himself as a cross between apolitical activist and strict Socialist.
His allegiance to Labour (seen in his adolescence as the only real chance for socialism) started to wither in the late seventies and finally fizzled out for good when he read that ‘Tony Blair MP’ was an anagram for ‘I’m Tory Plan B’.
Ray feels that the age-old system of politics is now in the process of killing itself, and if it wasn’t for his wife’s ailment, or more precisely how it had crippled him financially, he’d still be an active protester against political force.
The fact is, he now finds himself caught up in a battle of conscience.
On one hand, he feels certain that he needs to be there for Annie and that without his job he cannot do so. On the other hand, he is constantly pulled and tugged by his strong, lifelong urge to make a difference and its needs to be followed through.
Although Ray is a stereotypical pacifist, this never stopped him fighting good causes.
While his pacifism had been borne out of a good upbringing and a desire to do right by his wife, Ray’s true being was an entirely different animal.
From an early age, he’d always been a dreamer of fantastic dreams.
When he left school, those dreams began to fall away with the daily grind of conformity and when he started dating Annie, he was happy to put his dreams down to a childish sense of fun.
That said, if you were to divide mankind into the two sections that William Blake defined (those in active opposition and those in passive acceptance to evil), Ray remained firmly in the former category.
He fed his innate desires by joining the plight of the coal-miners in the seventies, spending weeks on the picket-lines serving tea and coffee to the jobless masses. In the eighties and early nineties, Ray attended the cause of the manufacturing trades killed off by foreign competition.
Afterwards, things changed for him. Nearing the age of fifty and disillusioned by the futility of it all, Ray reluctantly decided that strike action and mass opposition to world change was all but dead.
Aware that resentment had begun to eat away at his personal life, Ray put his philanthropic desires to task by taking on voluntary work with a local charity that helped ex-servicemen with previously undiagnosed mental illness, most of whom were alcoholic.
Being against war, he saw these men as victims of society, lost souls who had mistakenly chosen to believe that patriotism meant fighting whomsoever the government decided to teach a lesson.
For almost twenty years, Ray saw most of these men slowly shrivel away. It seemed that they were so spiritually wounded by their experience of war that they could not reconcile themselves in society. Feeding on alcohol to block maddening thoughts, the idea that they were the victims as much as those they fought eluded them, and no matter how much Ray tried to clear away the debris of their minds they remained, for the most part, deaf and depressed.
Then, on the night before Annie first attempted suicide, Ray had a lucid dream in which he experienced the beginning of the end of the world from the start (which he pinpoints as the Second World War).
Now, he truly believes that the time has come, although he doesn’t talk about this to anyone at all, mostly because he can’t work out what the full consequences of the end will be.
Ray promised to keep his thoughts to himself until they may be heard without laughter drowning them out.
The dream revealed to him the end of capitalism, which he has always relished.
Having remembered the dream, he wrote it down and, along with details of his own interpretations of the Mayan calendar, has spent these last two years forming a thesis on how the downfall of Western culture might come about.
He has kept a pamphlet under the carpet in his living-room and refers to it from time to time, adding and refining material to his findings, endorsing them with newspaper clippings.
When he’s not at work or in his own garden, which he tends whenever the sun comes out in his free time, Ray can be seen taking the two buses that get him to and from Annie’s nursing-home, where she is housed, fed, treated and drugged for £430 a week.