A few hours ago I was sitting in a room with a dead body. Now I’m dressed up as watermelon gum listening to the audience laughing at an old mate who got famous.
Life is… life.
My mum’s old boyfriend died after breakfast. I found out just before I went to work. I drove over to the where he was and brought daffodils. When I found mum someone had put a daff on her. I said my farewells and did the same for him.
A dead body really is just dead. I’ve only seen a few. That spark that makes us all the things we can be … once it is gone we are just husk. Almost unrecognisable as human. The body is really just a vessel for… something.
Here tonight everybody is flashing with that something. Men and women dressed as the weirdest things. Mad scenes, friendships, songs, politics. Breath and words and eyes and the things that pass between us all that we can’t see.
Where is he now, the charming rake I used to fight with as a teenager? Where’s the slow old fellow having a smoke on the bench outside Tesco? Where’s the man who made a charity and gave me my first job designing the annual report? Nothing of what he was could be felt as I sat with him. But I spoke to him anyway, as some of us do with the dead, feeling the prickle of what might remain of him in the air, in the shiftspaces beyond the easy reach.
I’ve got to go join the Killy Revolution now. I’ve got to team up with a bunch of keys and defuse a hamster bomb. One day I’ll be that husk, but not today.
All the worries and the wasted time. All the things we spend so long with. We are not here long enough to forget the spark that makes us what we are. Kindle that spark, let it burn bright while it burns. And if that involves looking like an idiot in front of loads of people in order to raise the self esteem of a young man from Somerstown, then do it and do it with pride. This is Walter Extra, the limited edition watermelon gum, signing off for the day.
AlBarclay 