I have been thinking about stubbornness.

Not the petty kind — the kind that makes a man argue about the bill at a restaurant, or insist that his watch is correct when it is not, or refuse to ask for directions in a city he has never visited. That is not stubbornness. That is vanity with a hat on.

I mean the other kind. The kind that makes a person do the same thing, in the same way, for so long that the doing of it becomes a kind of faith.

Consider Alf Burnett, who has swum in the Lower Ashwater at dawn for twenty-two years. He swims from the old pilings to the mudflats and back. Twelve minutes. Every morning. He does not vary the route. He does not accept alternatives. When a marine biologist asked him to swim elsewhere — for the seals, for science, for the greater good — he said no. He said he was there first. And he got back in the water.

There is something admirable in this, and something maddening, and the line between the two is so fine that I am not sure it exists.

Consider Pella Strand, who has spent two months underground in a brick tunnel, filling seventeen notebooks with measurements of a waterway that nobody knew was there. She emerged on Friday with sixty pages and a dedication to builders whose names are lost. Nine hundred and forty-seven metres. She traced every one of them. She could have stopped at five hundred and written a perfectly adequate report, and nobody would have questioned it. She did not stop.

Consider Orin Blackshaw, who returned to The Foundry on Saturday and headed a corner from Dunmore into the same net, at the same end, by the same method that won the Merchants’ Cup six weeks ago. The Ironhall defenders knew it was coming. They had watched the film. They had discussed it in the dressing room. It did not matter. Blackshaw jumped. The ball went in. Some things, once learned, cannot be unlearned.

Consider Walter Trent, who has stood behind the bar of the Greystone Arms for twenty-eight years and has decided, finally, to stop. Stubbornness kept him there through two decades of the Docklands’ decline, through burst pipes and thin winters and the slow erosion of a neighbourhood’s pubs into offices and dental surgeries. He stayed because he loved the work and because the people kept coming and because a pub is not a building — it is an argument that people should have somewhere to go. He is tired now, and his knees are sore, and he is entitled to stop. But his stopping is a loss, and we should say so.

And consider Captain Viggo Hagen, who sailed the Kestrel out of Port Caravel on Friday morning with 1,200 tonnes of cargo and a piece of paper that said the Kaelmar Strait was open. Someone had to go first. Someone had to trust the framework, the inspectors, the insurance certificate, the signatures of diplomats who had spent five weeks arguing over commas. Hagen went. He went because that is what he does — he sails east with cargo — and because the alternative was to wait for someone else to go first, and he is not that sort of man.

Stubbornness is not always a virtue. It can be foolish. It can be selfish. It can be the thing that prevents a person from hearing what they need to hear. Burnett may be wrong about the seals. Trent may have stayed a year too long. Even Strand, with her seventeen notebooks, might have served the city better by sleeping occasionally.

But there is a version of stubbornness — the quiet, unglamorous, daily version — that holds things together. The version that says: I was here yesterday, I will be here tomorrow, and I will do it the same way, because the doing of it is the point.

A city is built by people who show up. It is sustained by people who keep showing up. And it is lost, slowly and then quickly, when the people who showed up every day decide to stop.

I hope someone buys the Greystone Arms and keeps it as a pub.

I hope the seals stay.

I hope Blackshaw’s knees hold.

I hope Hagen reaches Thessara.

And I hope Alf Burnett is in the water tomorrow morning at twenty to six, swimming his twelve minutes, unbothered by anything except the current and the cold and the quiet conviction that he belongs exactly where he is.

Stubbornness, at its best, is just another word for love.