It’s been an odd year for friendships.
I’ve reconnected with people I went to primary school with over seventy years ago, and I’m constantly astonished at the longevity for some of my friendships. I guess the other natural result of a prolonged existence is that, on quite a regular basis, one or other of my old chums will shake off this mortal coil, and, when that happens, it is always cause for deep reflection.
Charlie Batterbury is a case in point.
We went to school together and became chums.
He’d just arrived with his family from the UK, a garrulous wee chap with glasses, a Pommy accent, and eccentric British public schoolboy ways. From memory he’d been a chorister, and if that isn’t a long enough list of ‘differences’ to guarantee relentless bullying by antipodean clods I don’t know what is. He accepted the bashings and the abuse with irritating good humour and always refused my offers to intercede on his behalf which was probably for the best because I’d have been next to useless too.
I suspect we initially became friends because neither of us had anyone else, not that we realised that at the time. I’ve always been an outsider, an introvert, and Charlie was the opposite, a gregarious chatterbox, so there you are. If we’d been in America, chances are we’d both have been incels, shot up our schools à la Sandy Hook, and become notorious, but instead, in the Austin Mitchell ‘Quarter Acre, Half Gallon, Pavlova Paradise’ of the time, Charlie became an Anglican minister, and I became a teacher.
How depressing is that?
We lost touch for years and reconnected at a school jubilee where, along with a couple of other old mates (Brian Keeley and Richard Brooks), we got horribly drunk, and, as you do, swore eternal fealty. Charlie and I did occasionally keep in touch but I haven’t seen Richard or Brian since, though stalking Facebook suggests they’re both still alive and kicking. I’m pleased about that even though, apart from a predilection for red wine, white wine, and all shades in between, on that extraordinary, drunken, jubilee night, we never did have that much in common.
Cheap plonk will do that.
Charlie, on the other hand, passed away in 2016. His obituary in The Press reads ‘peacefully at home, on Friday, April 22, 2016, aged 69 years and ten twelfths.’
I’m glad it was peaceful and sad he didn’t make 70. He’d have liked that.
It goes on to say ‘loved husband of Wendy. Cherished father and father-in-law of David and Stephanie; Tina and Paul; Susi and Himi. Adored Grandpop of Ezri, Lili, Finn and Brie; Sophia, Hannah and Blake; and Ashwin,’
So, Charlie was well bred, and he bred well, and there’s an end on’t.
He was a good man and, I suspect, his enduring legacy will be one of kindness and care.
I’m a TS Eliot clone but without the talent.
I doubt I’ll ever be anything but a sceptic, a doubter, and a cynic, right to the end, which is to be, undeniably, a human without use or purpose. In ‘The Waste Land’, Eliot became a voice for his generation, and perhaps for ours too, whereas I don’t speak for anyone and, mercifully, no-one cares about that. Eliot’s verse shows a civilisation in decline, ‘with the haunting image of falling towers followed by a list of major cities, each of which was once the capital of a great empire and civilisation: Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna’, and then, in his ultimate assessment, London.
In mine, it’s Washington DC.
Could it be that, in 2025, exactly one hundred years after Eliot penned ‘The Hollow Men’ and his bleak vision failed to fully materialise, his apocalyptic end-of-days prophecy might finally be coming to pass. Eliot implies that ‘this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.’
I’d add, accompanied by unrelenting whining and the scratching of a black sharpie.
All those echoes of biblical ‘Revelations’, with Trump, considered by millions to be the second coming of Christ, squatting like an orange toad at his desk with the nuclear codes in his top drawer, filling his diaper, and then blowing us all to smithereens?
Just for shits and giggles?
What’s that about, America?
Salvation?
I don’t think so.
So, there you go. Just in case you were in any doubt. Absolute proof I’ve spent too much time meditating on my own mortality this past year which is, without a skerrick of doubt, pretty damned unhealthy, and my plan going forward is to stop doing it right now.
Right now.
Just as soon as I finish reading Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’.
I have been ‘much possessed by death and see the skull beneath the skin’.
On the other hand – and there’s always another side to this coin – I’m happy to say that I’m not afraid of the end, that I occasionally wish for it, would welcome it, to get it over with, so my family can get on with the wonderful lives they have built for themselves without being held back by the burden of me, dribbling down my face, in a wheelchair.
I’m equally happy to say, however, that this isn’t how they see it, which is also a blessing in its own way.
At the end of the day, as they say, whatever I do, it’ll still be the end of the day. So, until then, I’m with existential philosopher Soren Kierkegaard who wrote ‘hope is passion for what is possible.’
I’ll certainly drink to that brand of hope.
And, as someone I care for once said, ‘Mostly, I’ll just shut up and get on with it.’
dykiegirl 