I wake up sweating - I could be dead. Reduced to a chiselled inscription on some badly maintained war memorial.I mean there were so many opportunities. The war in Korea, the Greco-Turkish spat in Cyprus, panga-ed to bits by the Mau-Mau in Kenya, dead of the fever in Malaya. And didn't something nasty happen in Aden? - God knows what. The bullets all missed me and I was saved to do a job in journalism which added not a farthing nor a half-penny to the British national economy.
And then again, journalism's a volatile occupation. Thrice was I made redundant. I could have ended up as a security guard in a shopping mall, cleaning out the bogs in a primary school, or simply applying - hopeless and broken - to the Job Centre, being paid some miserable sum by the state and succumbing to malnutrition.
So was I saved to die in extreme old age, ravaged lungs flapping like autumn leaves, a victim of what the hateful orange-faced loon calls The Chinese Disease? If so it seems so anti-climactic and I've learned to avoid such conclusions, at least when writing fiction.
I've dried off the sweat. Well it's got to happen some way; suppose it was my choice. A touch of nobility, perhaps. Accidentally revealing some arcane Anglo-Irish detail here in Tone Deaf and having my Skoda Octavia sent sky high by those grim-faced guys of the Real IRA. As if their bomb-happy predecessors were inefficient amateurs.
Struck down by a heart-attack while straining to complete the perfect Shakespearean sonnet, the final rhyming couplet only hinted at? A teaser for Eng. Lit. scholars yet to be born.
The trouble is we regard our death as an event. It isn’t, it’s merely an end. A cessation. Night following day*
*And that’s the 299th word.
Well... hope you’re ok...and OH!... it’s a poppy. Thought it was a military insignia at first... perhaps it is that too.
ReplyDeleteMikeM: Sure, I'm OK. That's the point. I'm not sure I should be. If I'm being saved, to what end?
ReplyDeleteFake poppies are sold in the UK on the weeks leading to November 11. Armistice Day. Profits to support old and decrepit soldiers now in care homes. Nobody bothers about old and decrepit airmen, referred to by the old soldiers as Brylcreem Boys. Stay awake there at the back, when it come to Brit culture you've got a long way to go.
That whole business with health is completely overrated in my experience but I would not wish my experience on anybody.
ReplyDeleteWe - the family - are waiting and hoping and thinking of our oldest relative currently locked up in a covid-positive rest home with no access and little news. She was born at the time of the Spanish flu and will die in this pandemic, both ends burning as my nephew says. The life in between was a gentle one, at least.
Don't we all wish for an easy death.
Take care.
Sabine: I'm chilled by "will die" because I know you to be a woman of certainty. Can music reach her in any way? It's all I can suggest.
ReplyDeleteEasy death? Yes. But my mind goes back to 1959 when I shared a London apartment with a professional drummer (Indoors he used a sorbo rubber practice pad, so it wasn't as bad as you might have imagined.) We were talking about jazz and I noted that it was form of music not well suited to handling "noble" subjects. A laconic American, he replied, "Perhaps because there isn't much nobility going around."
He may have been right. And the assertion can be extended to noble deaths. They too are rare. There's a British tradition about dying without making "too much fuss". Reckon that's about far as anyone may go.
Your ability to discipline yourself to under 300 Words and yet still write such great Posts I appreciate much more fully now! *LOL* I know, being taken out by this damned invisible Virus does seem anti-climactic... I want something gentler too actually, like just dying in my Sleep... dying horribly just isn't anything I relish, I doubt anyone does!
ReplyDeleteBohemian: You got the wrong end of the stick, Bo. 300 words was always what it was going to be. Less I would have undersold the idea, more and I'd have blurred it. Gosh, I'm getting pontifical.
ReplyDelete