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 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, 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 ‘difference’ to ensure 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 probably been next to useless too.
I suspect we initially became friends because neither of us had anyone else. I’ve always been an outsider anyway, 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, and Charlie and I did occasionally keep in touch. I haven’t seen Richard and Brian since, but stalking 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 one extraordinary drunken jubilee night, we never did have 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 that was an end on’t.
He was a good man and, I suspect, his legacy will be one of kindness and care.
I’m, unfortunately, an Eliot clone but without any talent. I doubt I’ll be anything but a sceptic, a doubter, and a cynic right to the end which is to be undeniably without any real use or purpose. In ‘The Waste Land’ Eliot became the voice for his generation, and perhaps for ours too whereas I don’t speak for anyone and, mercifully, no-one cares. His poem shows a civilisation in decline, ‘with the haunting image of falling towers followed by a list of major cities which were once the capitals of great empires and civilisations: Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna’, and then, in his ultimate view, 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 had failed to fully materialise, his apocalyptic end-of-days prophecy might at last be coming to pass. He suggests that ‘this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.’
Accompanied by 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 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.
Salvation nigh? I don’t think so.
There you go. In case you were in any doubt. Proof I’ve probably spent too much time meditating on my own mortality this past year which is, without 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 Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’.
On the other hand – and there’s always another side to the 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 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, however, 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, ‘I’ll just shut up and get on with it.’
dykiegirl 