A Somerset Lad

The pharmacy hadn’t all the tablets to make up my prescription when I called last Wednesday. I was given enough for a week and told to call back.

Going to collect the balance of the medication, I realised it would include three weeks’ supply of Sertraline, the anti-depressant I have taken for the past year. I was about to say to the pharmacist not to include it, but realised I had paid the full cost of the medicines last week and that it would be no cost to anyone but me if I accepted the packet of tablets without having any intention of taking them.

There has been a feeling of being less tired since I stopped taking the Sertraline last week – and there have been no dips.

The much thumbed book on cognitive behavioural therapy has been of assistance. There has been a development in my capacity to let go of things that I cannot change, to detach myself from a constant contemplation of a past that cannot be altered.

Oddly, though, it has not been either prescription medicine or therapeutic writing that has been of most assistance, but a sense of temporal perspective.

On Good Friday, my sisters and I did a round of the family graves. It is an experience I greatly value, it brings a sense of rootedness and longevity. Last Sunday, my mother reached her eighty-fifth birthday, with a brain as sharp as many half of her age, she has regained some of her physical health in recent times.

If I should attain the age of my late grandmother, I have at least another thirty-three years of living to do and I have no intention of spending three decades lamenting that which cannot be changed.

When I moved into my present apartment in March, it was the first time in my life that I had ever lived anywhere on my own. It was not a prospect that seemed inviting.

With the passing of the weeks there has come the establishment of a routine, and an increasing delight in living in the present moment. I stand on the terraces of the local soccer club and talk to whoever may be standing near by. I go to rugby matches and watch with fascination a sport that is like a physical game of chess.

To watch whatever programmes I want, I have a VPN on my laptop and Chromecast to watch the miscellaneous detectives, and obscure rugby clashes from deep in the French midi, on the television screen. I can play the music I choose and keep the hours I want (this may mean going to bed at nine and getting up at dawn). I can spend hours and hours on my studies and feel a sense of delight at being told a paper submitted is ‘a very good piece of writing’.

A single life is not the life I would have chosen, but if it is to be a single life, it may as well be a happy one.

The man stood staring at me.

Wearing an old brown anorak with the hood pulled up, his pallor was paler than that of some corpses I have seen. Curly white hair was visible beneath his hood, his beard had a similar whiteness. Perhaps it created the pallid hue of the man who screwed up his eyes and stared intently.

He took a step closer.

‘It’s no good asking me for money,’ I thought, ‘I have had no cash since before Easter.’

To be honest, he looked more like someone who would tell me that he was an alien, or that he was the king of France, or that he was ten thousand years old.

Standing trying to avoid catching his eye lest it lead to the sort of conversation in which he told me that he had an atomic bomb in a carrier bag, I noticed he was carrying a swede in his right hand.

Well, I would call it a swede. It was such a vegetable that was my first introduction to Hiberno-English. Standing in a canteen, I asked the woman behind the counter for ‘swede’. She had looked at me blankly, when I pointed she said, ‘that’s turnip, why did you call it swede?’

It was not clear why he was carrying a swede. He had no other shopping.

His stare continued.

Then I realised that he was not staring at me. He was trying to read the electronic display above my head that gave bus numbers, destinations and when the next service would leave. Clearly he should have been wearing glasses for he was having to squint to read the information.

I relaxed. There would be no nuclear devices, nor conversations about messages brought by Martians.

The relaxed moment did not last.

A woman standing a few yards away was reading a book with a foreign title. The subtitle was The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning. It seemed as meaningful a title as At Swim-Two-Birds by Brian O’Nolan (also known as Flann O’Brien, Myles na Gopaleen, Brother Barnabas, or George Knowall). Except you knew that O’Nolan was writing satire, mocking affectation, unmasking pretentiousness. It seemed unlikely that Swedish Death Cleaning was particularly humorous.

A Google search produced an explanation of the book:

Döstädning, or the art of death cleaning, is a Swedish phenomenon by which the elderly and their families set their affairs in order. Whether it’s sorting the family heirlooms from the junk, downsizing to a smaller place, or setting up a system to help you stop misplacing your keys, death cleaning gives us the chance to make the later years of our lives as comfortable and stress-free as possible. Whatever your age, Swedish death cleaning can be used to help you de-clutter your life, and take stock of what’s important. Margareta Magnusson has death cleaned for herself and for many others. Radical and joyous, her guide is an invigorating, touching and surprising process that can help you or someone you love immeasurably, and offers the chance to celebrate and reflect on all the tiny joys that make up a long life along the way.

To be honest, I think I would rather be a myopic old man standing at a bus stop with a large root vegetable and living in the present moment.

A colleague who retired in the 1980s used to comment, “at least there is no poverty now.”

Of course, he was right. There was nothing comparable with the conditions of the 1930s when he had been a young man.

But he knew himself that poverty continued. He would comment that man made fibres had disguised the poor, that the ragged clothes that were once a clear sign of deprivation had been superseded by polyester and crimplene and nylon.

Forty years on from his comments, in times considerably more affluent than the 1980s, there still seems poverty, but it seems poverty of the spirit as much as material poverty.

Catching a bus from the city centre on the evening of a bank holiday Monday, I should have been aware that it would be busy. People would have come into the centre to go shopping, for shopping is our chief leisure activity now.

The lower deck was crowded but the upper deck offered space until the second of the city centre stops was reached. Noisy girls crowded up the stairs and filled up whatever seats remained empty.

The girl who sat beside me took out her phone and plugged its power cable into one of the seat’s USB sockets. She proceeded to watch TikTok videos: inane dances to bursts of forgettable music.

Whatever happened to teenage rebellion? Whatever happened to young people standing against the ‘system’? Whatever happened to the newness and vibrancy and energy that once characterised youth? Social media seem to have sedated any tendency not to conform, any desire to be original or unconventional.

Worse than the noise was the smell.

In 2022, body odour is not a sign of material poverty, it is a sign of a lack of hygiene, a sign that someone has not bothered to wash and has not bothered to use a deoderant.

Someone who has an iPhone to follow her friends’ TikTok videos has no material excuse for not washing. It is a poverty of spirit, an indifference, an apathy.

I remember a colleague who worked in a poor area of Belfast in the 1990s talking about how a cookery course in a community had been an empowering experience for many of the participants, they could cook healthy food and have money to spare.

Thirty years on from such programmes, perhaps even more basic training is now needed. The social, personal and health education courses need to teach personal hygiene – and be blunt in telling learners that everyone will know if they have not listened.