EPISODE 36; YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED

Welcome to my blog which today will update you on the non-developments in my writing career and then turn its attention to syncronicity and the death of a companion.

My reader will be aware that back in the summer, a publisher read the first chapters of a novel of mine and said as soon as i finished the book he'd like to e-publish it. Early September, I finished the book and sent it to him. Since then all I heard from him was promises to read it 'soon'. Last Friday I sent one last despairing email and what does he say? Sorry mate, must have lost it, could you send another copy?'

The good news is that my article 'No Need for Spiritual Needs' has been accepted by a magazine; unfortunately I've now rewritten it say that the spiritual need is the paramount need. It isn't a change of mind as such but a development in the argument separating the abrahamic religions from Hinduism and Buddhism. And now to a christian...

‘You never know what would have happened,’ is a quote from the C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books that I have never forgotten even though I have failed to remember all the other great words the wise have passed on to me apart from, ‘It is the bright day that bring forth the adder,’ which is from Julius Caesar and is so cynical that it can never be usefully repeated. Today is not a bright day; the wind is blowing a gale and the skies are dark with rain. Six hours ago, my daughter’s stepfather died. He is 58 and has died from a lung cancer which is hard not to blame on the culminative effect of 45 years of constant tobacco smoking. Naturally there is a certain amount of anger and frustration that sensible people like Dave, and myself, slowly kill ourselves in front of the ones we love.

Of course when we began smoking was acceptable in society and it was the age we began at, not the smoking itself, that was considered wrong. In the college I went to before going to University I was allowed to smoke in tutorials and it was drinking I had to hide. (Neither of my parents smoked by the way but all five of their children did.) It was probably the drinking that got me into Aston University because I turned up to most of my interviews a little drunk and consequently tended to underperform and not be offered a place at anywhere decent. It was on my first day at Aston that I met Dave. We were in the student bar, both I think already aware we’d gone to the wrong university, wondering what to do with ourselves and Dave offered me a cigarette.

And if he hadn’t?

A few weeks before meeting Dave in Birmingham, I had met Barby in Reading where I lived with my parents on the campus of a Teacher’s Training College at which Barby was a student and my mother one of her disapproving tutors. Barby was easy to spot as she wore a fantastic long red velvet coat which delighted my hippyish eyes. I met her at a party. I don’t remember how it happened but I do recall going home on my bicycle so happy and so stoned that I was stopped by the police for riding around in circles at a traffic-lighted crossroads – and subsequently was given a £3 for being drunk in charge of a bicycle. When she came to visit me in Birmingham a fortnight later I stood at the bottom of the escalator at New Street Station wondering how I would recognize her because in those days I was too vain to wear my glasses and could only identity people when they got close-up. Fortunately she was wearing the famous velvet coat. (That was meant to be an allusion to Leonard Cohen’s whose dulcet tones graced many a student block and went well with intellectual melancholy.)

Dave and I were on a four year ‘Behavioural Science Degree’. What we’d actually gone to study was psychology which we thought was the study of the human mind as illustrated by R.D. Laing, Cooper, Scaz, Jung, et cetera, what we got was frog’s brains to cut up. After about six weeks at the University, I wrote an essay on suicide which I thought was unbelievably brilliant. When I received a disappointing mark I quit. This was as typical of me as it was of Dave to finish a course he had no fondness for or desire to continue with after University.

Barby and I took lots of LSD, lived hedonistically and worked when we had to.  We had a daughter that we doted upon. Dave would come to visit over the years whether we were in Reading, Bristol or Anglesey. He and I liked to talk books; Le Grande Meulnes being a great favourite of us both and to explore ideas. He wasn’t into the drugs but liked the countryside and the manly pursuits he followed with Barby’s brother, Chris.

One day when I was on mushrooms I realized that Dave and Barby were having an affair. I was gutted at the time to lose my daughter but from what I recall I was mostly decent about it all and over the years we patched up our friendship although we never talked what had happened, only about how much he cared for and loved my daughter even when she was difficult. When I later became a step-parent myself, I realized what a good job he’d made of it. I suspect Dave always found me to be irresponsible or flaky and our conversations over the years have been brief, albeit fond.

Then 35, 40, years and half a million cigarettes later, just like that, the blink of an eye, and here we are at the end of it all. For all our ups and down, my life has been better for accepting that cigarette from Dave.