A SENSE OF AN ENDING

Another unproductive weekend has drifted into history as another week of that “4000 week holiday” has vanished forever.

Friday evening found me alone and binge-viewing a stack of “NYPD: Blue” episodes which helped me to close that loop I mentioned a few days ago whilst the Beloved went out on a work “do” for the night. Having squandered my evening unwisely, I then went out into the darkness for the first time in a few months and collected her, and ended up watching from the car park as I waited for the train as a group of teenagers used the waiting room on the platform as their personal Friday evening “Party Pod” and flouted the “No Smoking” signs with reckless abandon.

As a moral coward, of course, I did nothing but silently fume to myself fromn the safety of my car, making sure I’d clicked the central locking first.

Well, I never did like confrontation…

The weekend proper, i.e. Saturday I suppose, started with a migraine – which, for once, was not mine - but it remained one which basically kicked the entire day into touch when it came to getting anything much done.

Instead I popped my head around the door from time-to-time, brought food and drink upon request and did my very best to concentrate on the Third One-Day International on the radio, especially as it featured pretty much my perfect commentary “Dream Team” insofar as both Michael Vaughan and Graeme Swann were not there to irritate me.

The cricket was disappointing, to be honest. One of those fifty-over games where the result is so predictable from such `an early stage that you kind of feel as if you might as well not bother playing it, although you can’t really do that because, sometimes, surprises actually do happen.

They didn’t though, so, as it ground along, I finished a book I've been reading instead. This was the autobiography of the thespian Deborah Watling and was about both her life and that of her actor father, Jack, and it bears the title “Daddy’s Girl”.

To be honest, I rather enjoyed it, apart from a slight tendency towards mud-slinging and glossing over vast swathes of her life, but I’d only picked it up the previous weekend and so, with my current track-record of glacial progression through my book-reading, it probably almost counts as “unputdownable…”

Inevitability the story got to the point where her father was dying in hospital and this triggered a lot of dark fears in me when it stirred up far too many memories of my own and my friends’ experiences over the past couple of years, and made me really, really believe that the one thing that I never want to happen is to go to flippin’ hospital.

Those places are lethal, you know.

I mean, I know that nobody gets out of here alive, and all that, but I’d much rather pop off (with a decent amount of warning, of course!) whilst leaning against the bar in some hostelry rather than have to suffer those dreadful long nights on a ward listening to all the screaming and moaning and grumbling of my fellow patients, and suffering the thousand and one other indignities that come with doing your suffering in public, if you know what I mean.

A few years ago, at about the time I started doing this blog, I wrote a short piece about a lonely man walking off into the wilderness to die alone and, to be honest, in my more romantic moments, that still feels like a very appealing way to go, if you have nothing much in the way of family to see you on your way.

But, I don’t know. Reality, practicality, and all of those other factors do tend to come into play when you’re facing the proverbial “it” and much of these things seem to be very much out of your control when it comes to that, unfortunately.

Sunday rolled around with me inevitably in a brooding frame of mind, because I was so very full of this sense of an ending, and had endured a fairly broken night because of it.

The main discovery of the day, found out when I was hanging out the washing during an increasingly rare spell of sunshine, was that our lovely next-door neighbour is indeed going to be “off” to pastures new fairly soon, and so another “sense of an ending” burst unannounced into my day and the weekend itself became pretty much unsalvageable.

I do, after all, seriously not cope all that well with change, and that includes the idea of my own mortality and decay, so anything that points out the general entropy that is occurring in my own little life is almost bound to trigger a supernova of depression and lead to me writing rambling nonsense like this.

And I’m not going to change a bloody word of it…