A Somerset Lad

“How old are you, sir?” asked the Third Year student

It is a frequent question, I’m not sure why.

“I’ll be sixty-two later this year.”

“What, sir? I thought you were in your twenties.”

“Don’t be silly, you know I am much older.”

“I do. But, seriously, sir, I thought you were about fifty.”

“You are very kind.”

Sixty-two. I wondered if he could imagine being thirty-two, let alone sixty-two. I wonder if he ever thinks about days that have gone beyond recall. He probably thinks it is good those years have passed.

As for the idea of death, it would be an utterly remote prospect for him. Of course, he would recognize that it happens, but, probably reasonably, assume that it is something he will not have to consider until late in this century or early in the next.

Is there a point when time suddenly becomes something infinitely valuable, something not to be passed in the virtual world of electronic media? Is there a point where the idea of death makes us focus on life, or is it only in extremis that we value the moments in ordinary life? Is it only when it’s almost too late that we place value upon things which otherwise slip past?

It is almost as though that even with the advancing years we assume that the supply remains unlimited – if we lived our life in days, rather than years, would it make a difference?

Philip Larkin, understood, I think:

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

Where can we live but days?

Isn’t it what the late great Kirsty McColl sang about?

Thank you for the days
Those endless days, those sacred days you gave me
I’m thinking of the days
I won’t forget a single day believe me

It is how Sebastian Faulks’ character Engleby copes,

Days. Days are what we live in.

Days came. Days went.

Three thousand years ago the writer of Psalm 90 in the Bible had come to the same conclusion,

Teach us to number our days aright,
that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

Whatever happens, the days pass.

Of course, such observations would be pointless when you are in Third Year.

A friend once told me that when he joined the Masonic Order as a young man it was not because he believed that they had secrets he wished to discover (like anyone who wished to inquire at a public library, he knew there weren’t really any secrets). Nor was it because he was much interested in their rituals, he had become a master mason, the third degree, but had never been interested in the thirty other side degrees. Nor was it because he thought it would bring him advancement in his career, most of his colleagues were Roman Catholics who would not have recognized a particular handshake as meaning anything. The reason he joined the Freemasons was for companionship. Wherever he might be sent in Ireland to work, if he went along to the meeting of the local lodge, he would find a friendly welcome.

Never being much of a person for joining things and thinking rolling up one’s trouser leg and taking off one’s shirt is more the stuff of Monty Python than the world in which I live, I have never been tempted to join the Masonic Order, but I can understand why someone would want to join to find friendship. To have someone to listen to stories, to have someone who accepts you for being you, to have someone taciturn in their response, seems not such a bad thing.

The Washington Post reported last week on a scheme in Japan where people who feel isolated can “rent a stranger.”

Anyone familiar with Japanese television from times past might wonder if that is some psychological version of the game show Endurance, clips from which used to leave English television presenter Chris Tarrant sitting looking bemused. However, it is not an endurance test, or if it is about endurance, it is about the capacity of the stranger to sit and listen. It is about having someone with whom to go to places, about having someone with whom to talk.

Once, people lived in communities where everyone knew someone. Stand in the pub in the evening, and the faces were familiar. Go to the football match at the weekend, and the usual people would be standing around you. Walk down the street in the morning, and the greetings were from those whom you had known for years.

Society has become atomised, isolation has been exacerbated by lockdowns, acquaintances reduced in number by remote working practices. Communication may never have been easier, but loneliness has never been greater. Renting a stranger seems a much easier option than swearing to have your tongue torn out and being buried neck deep below the high tide mark if you betray any of the (non) secrets.

I was such a serious twelve year old that I failed to understand that there is great fun in the absurd.

The genius of Monty Python, and similar programmes in my youth, was to realize that people, well some people, delighted in the utterly incongruous. To realize that what was sometimes not much more than schoolboy humour, worked because it was simply silliness for the sake of it.

I remember a class of twelve year olds who seemed to far better understand and delight in the absurd than I did at their age..

“Why did the Prodigal Son leave home?” they had been asked.

“To join the circus”, wrote one boy, “or maybe it was just because he was bored”.

Perhaps the questions from the RE textbook were platitudinous. Perhaps the twelve year olds had a keen eye for such things.

The exercise concluded with questions about how they would make the world a better place.  Maybe it was not such a bad question, but it was probably one they had answered countless times, in the knowledge that their answer made not the slightest difference.

One answer was sharp, a note of frustration, “It should not take a crisis for people to do something”.

Most contained the stock responses about the environment and peace and climate change, though there was a feeling that  these were being recited, just as the answer to 6 x 3 might be spoken without much thought.

A handful had no time for churning out lines they had been taught.

“What would you do to make the world a better place?” asked the textbook, and the potential Monty Pythons, who were dotted around the classroom responded.

“Grapefruits, bigger grapefruits”.

“Make cement a different colour”.

“Have barbecues on Wednesdays”.

“Profiteroles, lots more profiteroles, oh yeah, and peace as well”.

Twelve year olds were hardly likely to be able to articulate thoughts on being subversive, but it was probably those who gave the absurd answers, answers that might appear in some student rag magazine, who will go on to ask the most searching questions.

It was George Bernard Shaw, that troublesome questioner from former times who is quoted as saying, “Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.”

Being absurd brings with it a sense of identity, a sense of freedom, a feeling of individuality, of challenging convention of kicking back at established thinking. Such subversiveness needs to be taught in schools.

Soon after I first moved to Dublin in 1999, I went to see Martin McDonagh’s black comedy, The Beauty Queen of Leenane.

Going to the theatre on a Dublin summer’s evening seemed an occasion for casual clothes; an open necked shirt and chinos seemed in keeping with most of the audience.  However, many of the seats around us were occupied by American visitors, who must have travelled with very full suitcases, for some of the women were in evening dress, with ankle length skirts. They took the occasion with the utmost seriousness; while most of us had gone along to enjoy an evening of humour, they treated the experience with an altogether greater degree of gravitas.

Manahan was an extraordinary woman, and one personal moment of seems particularly pertinent.

While a young woman, Manahan went touring to Egypt with Michael MacLiammoir, Hilton Edwards and her new husband Colm O’Kelly.  O’Kelly went for a swim in the Nile and contracted polio on a Thursday and died the following Tuesday.

Manahan and O’Kelly had been married just ten months; the evening after losing her husband, Anna Manahan went on stage to play her part as scheduled.

At a time when almost every serious programme seems to come with the announcement that anyone affected by the issues raised can phone a helpline, Anna Manahan’s stoicism seems something from another age.

Is a generation raised on a diet of counsellors for every eventuality better able to cope with the horrible realities that inevitably arise in everyone’s lives? Or is stoicism a better response? Does the Manahan attitude create a greater degree of resilience?

What would modern analysis suggest regarding Anna Manahan’s behaviour  in going on stage even though her husband has just died?  Probably that she was anaesthetised by the shock, even in denial about what had happened.  Maybe so, but she coped with her bereavement and went on to become a world-acclaimed actress.

My grandfather served in the National Fire Service in London during the Second World War. He was a Section Leader, the Fire Service equivalent of an NCO. During the winter of 1939-40 he saw horrifying sights, burnt remnants of flesh that were once a human being, people dying ghastly deaths. His experience was a common one. Hundreds of thousands of people suffered severe emotional trauma, yet all the talking in the world was never going to change the facts. There was no choice other than to carry on.

Counselling does not change reality. Facts are not changed by attempting to finesse or nuance them with pseudo-scientific language. Horrible stuff can’t be talked away.

Anna Manahan was right, and those American theatre-goers knew how seriously she should have been taken. You just have to get up and get on.