ThisLife

. I've just finished reading through all the posts on this thread. Perhaps unsurprisingly there certainly are a great number of different ideas about what karma is and how it functions. Because the topic interests me as well, I thought I would look up the quote that best expressed my own feelings,... many of you probably know the one ... Buddha saying something along the lines that 'karma is unknowable except by a fully enlightened being'. (Because the one thing that did strike me as unusual in reading through all the replies here, was how 'certain' so many people seemed to be about the truth of their particular idea.) Anyway, in the modern day 'Google method' of looking for answers, the edited article that I've pasted below came up top of the search for quotations. I read through it, and found the things the author had to say about karma left me with a much 'happier' feeling about the meaning of this word that I and many others banter about so freely. I'll tack it on below on the off chance that someone else might find his ideas interesting. They did seem pertinent to the topic under discussion : * * * Two Ways to Look at Karma As a doctrine karma has been viewed as a way of explaining why things happen the way they do. I like to think of karma in two ways – as a Buddhist doctrine and as a spiritual, contemplative practice. Karma as a doctrine doesn't do much for me, while karma as a practice does. Let’s talk about these two ways of looking at karma, and why the second way is much more meaningful for me – contemplation what is karma as a spiritual practice rather than as a teaching on why things happen the way they do. How do we try to get a grip on why terrible bad things happen, especially when there is no reason for it ? In our culture we often say “It’s God’s will.” I remember watching an acceptance speech for an award like the Grammys – I don’t remember which award it was actually, but I seem to remember it was a vocalist – who immediately thanked Jesus, then her parents. Am I being too cynical here to suggest this is just a bit naïve? I mean would Jesus be invested in someone winning a Grammy? Of course, the rationale that is often offered is that God’s will is beyond the ability of our minds to grasp. Interestingly, this is the same kind of argument presented by Buddhist apologists (at least IMHO) when they say that the workings of karma are unknowable to the unenlightened, and even to the merely enlightened it is still not clear, as one would have to attain the realization of a Buddha to see how karma works. And that is tantamount to saying it is unknowable, as Buddhas are produced over an unimaginably long, long, long time scale. Karma as a doctrine Karma as a doctrine attempts to explain why in this life things happen the way they do. I remember hearing a practicing Buddhist meditator say that a short while after the 9/11 tragedy that every single one of those people who were killed were killed because it was the ripening of their individual karma, as karma is an individual affair. Wait a minute here. Do you really mean that I asked ? He replied most emphatically yes, and cited a Buddhist sutra to back this mind-boggling position. That indeed yes, every single one of those individuals committed horrendous actions in past lives and the karma has now ripened. All at once for each of them on that day, and every single one of them – including presumably the first responders – did unspeakably horrible things in previous lives, and they all just happened to all be together on that horrific morning in NYC. OK, is it only me or does this not strain the bounds of credulity ? That explanation I am sorry to say just does nothing for me. These people died. You could say they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Could it be that one reason why these explanations stick is because they are convenient ways to avoid the pain of bare, naked reality ? Karma as a doctrine does nothing for me. I can feel myself on certain levels of my mind attracted to it as it tells me that there is some kind of justice or sense to be made out of the world. But this is just a passing fantasy I simply, with a little chagrin, take note of and let go. What is karma as a spiritual contemplation This is entirely another matter, and for me a rewarding one. What is karma as a spiritual contemplation is very simple, as I think all commonsense aspects of Buddhist spirituality are. How we view and interact with the world we perceive is affected directly by what we do in this world. And if we give close, careful and gentle attention to what we do in the world, a process of spiritual uplift is placed in motion. The closer and gentler the attention, the more we allow into awareness a type of self-awareness which when coupled with certain ethical encouragements slowly begins to change the way we view the world. Which organically changes the way we act. Which changes the way we feel. And so on. This is what I call putting into motion the process of spiritual uplift. *

. Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Susan Ertz

His recent collection of poems, "Book of Longing", shows Leonard Cohen still writing with the old troubadour’s intensity, still sexually alert; but with a depth of thoughtfulness that defies any sense of redundancy in relation to his earlier work. Here’s a characteristically cheeky example called, “Other Writers”: * Steve Sanfield is a great haiku master. He lives in the country with Sarah, his beautiful wife, and he writes about the small things. Kyozan Joshu Roshi, who has brought hundreds of monks to a full awakening, addresses the simultaneous expansion and contraction of the cosmos. I go on and on about a noble young woman who unfastened her jeans in the front seat of my jeep and let me touch the source of life because I was so far from it. I’ve got to tell you, friends, I prefer my stuff to theirs. Leonard Cohen

* Having recently re-joined this forum after a several year absence I'm still at the stage of re-acquainting myself with its various different posts and threads. Since our individual natures will draw each one of us towards a different collection of topics, I noticed that my own first pulled me towards two of the more fascinating and popular threads,.... "Favourite Quotes", and another on "Mystical Poetry". Nevertheless, as inspiring as so many of these quotes and (often) brief poems were,... to me they seemed mostly to be examples of one type of writing. Essentially they are one or two-liners with a high and quickly-discernable, 'punch value'. They work particularly well on the internet and in our modern times where very often it seems that, (contrary to expectations), our attention span and patience have somehow been greatly reduced through today's instant, universal. and almost unlimited access to information. Here I think of Charles Dickens works which originally appeared as serialised newspaper stories for readers of the time who possessed what was then considered only fairly basic literacy. Yet now, in 2013,.... the 'complex' vocabulary of these same stories largely makes them accessible only to students preparing for their highest level secondary school exams. As a substitute for our now much-blunted language tool, the preferred means of communicating ideas for many in our current times seems to be the far-more-accessible, 117 character limit of Twitters and Tweets. Progress, eh wot ? Since I must admit to being a bit of a literary dinosaur, I nevertheless wondered if perhaps there might be others here who have found inspiration and joy in somewhat longer extracts than the two line maximum of most quotes. So, I thought I would start a new thread to see if anyone else was interested in sharing inspiring stories they've come across.To start the ball rolling I've added one of my all-time favourites, an extract from "Songlines", (a collection of travel writings by Bruce Chatwin.) * * Bruce Chatwin wrote: On a ferry back from Manly a little old lady heard me talking. "You're English, aren't you ?" she said, in an English North Country accent. "I can tell you're English." "I am." "So am I !" She was wearing thick, steel-framed spectacles and a nice felt hat with a wisp of blue net above the brim. "Are you visiting Sydney ?" I asked her. "Lord, love, no !" she said, "I've lived here since 1946. I came out to live with my son, but a very strange thing happened. By the time the ship got here, he'd died. Imagine ! I'd given up my home in Doncaster, so I thought I might as well stay ! So I asked my second son to come out and live with me. So he came out…emigrated…and do you know what ?" "No." "He died. He had a heart attack and died." "That's terrible," I said. "I had a third son," she went on. "he was my favourite, but he died in the war. Dunkirk, you know ! He was very brave. I had a letter from his officer. Very brave, he was ! He was on the deck…covered in blazing oil…and he threw himself into the sea. Oooh ! He was a sheet of living flame !" "But that is terrible !" "But it's a lovely day," she smiled. "Isn't it a lovely day ?" It was a bright sunny day with high white clouds and a breeze coming in off the ocean. Some yachts were beating out towards The Heads, and other yachts were running under spinnaker. The old ferry ran before the whitecaps, towards the Opera House and the Bridge. "And it's so lovely out at Manly !" she said. "I loved to go out to Manly with my son…before he died ! But I haven't been for twenty years !" "But it's so near," I said. "But I haven't been out of the house for sixteen. I was blind, love ! My eyes was covered with cataracts, and I couldn't see a thing. The eye surgeon said it was hopeless, so I sat there. Think of it ! Sixteen years in the dark ! Then along comes this nice social worker the other week and says, 'We'd better get those cataracts looked at.' "And look at me now !" I looked through the spectacles at a pair of twinkling – that is the word for them – twinkling blue eyes, "They took me to hospital," she said. "And they cut out the cataracts ! And isn't it lovely ? I can see !" "Yes," I said. "It's wonderful !" "It's my first timeout alone," she confided. "I didn't tell a soul. I said to myself at breakfast, ' It's a lovely day. I'll take the bus to Circular Quay, and go over on the ferry to Manly…just like we did in the old days." I had a fish lunch. Oh, it was lovely !" She hunched her shoulders mischievously, and giggled. "How old would you say I was ?" she asked. "I don't know," I said. "Let me look at you. I'd say you were eighty." "No. No. No.," she laughed. "I'm ninety-three… and I can see ! * *

* MARTIN If she hadn't tried to kill me, I'd be dead, no question. But we've all got a preservation instinct, haven't we ? Even if we're trying to kill ourselves when it kicks in. All I know is that I felt this thump on my back, and I turned round and grabbed the railings behind me, and I started yelling. I was drunk by then. I'd been taking nips out of the old hip-flask for a while, and I'd had a skinful before I came out, as well. (I know, I know, I shouldn't have driven. But I wasn't going to take the fucking stepladder on the bus.) So, yes, I probably did let rip with a bit of vocabulary. If I'd known it was Maureen, if I'd known what Maureen was like, then I would have toned it down a bit, probably, but I didn't; I think I might even have used the c- word, for which I've apologized. But you'd have to admit it was a unique situation. I stood up and turned round carefully, because I didn't want to fall off until I chose to, and I started yelling at her, and she just stared. 'I know you,' she said. 'How ?' I was being slow. People come up to me in restaurants and shops and theatres and garages and urinals all over Britain and say, 'I know you,' and they invariably mean precisely the opposite; they mean, 'I don't know you. But I've seen you on the telly.' And they want an autograph, or a chat about what Penny Chambers is really like, in real life. But that night, I just wasn't expecting it. It all seemed a bit beside the point, that side of life. 'From the television.' 'Oh, for Christ's sake. I was about to kill myself, but never mind, there's always time for an autograph. Have you got a pen? Or a bit of paper ? And before you ask, she's a right bitch who will snort anything and fuck anybody. What are you doing up here anyway ?' 'I was . . . I was going to jump too. I wanted to borrow your ladder.' That's what everything comes down to: ladders. Well, not ladders literally; the Middle East peace process doesn't come down to ladders, and nor do the money markets. But one thing I know from interviewing people on the show is that you can reduce the most enormous topics down to the tiniest parts, as if life were an Airfix model. I've heard a religious leader attribute his faith to a faulty catch on a garden shed (he got locked in for a night when he was a kid, and God guided him through the darkness); I've heard a hostage describe how he survived because one of his captors was fascinated by the London zoo family discount card he kept in his wallet. You want to talk about big things, but it's the catches on the garden sheds and the London Zoo cards that give you the footholds; without them you wouldn’t know where to start. Not if you’re hosting Rise and Shine with Penny and Martin you don't, anyway. Maureen and I couldn't talk about why we were so unhappy that we wanted our brains to spill out onto the concrete like a McDonald's milk shake, so we talked about the ladder instead. 'Be my guest.' 'I'll wait until . . . Well, I'll wait.' 'So you're just going to stand there and watch ?' 'No. Of course not. You'll be wanting to do it on your own, I'd imagine.' 'You'd imagine right.' I’ll go over there.’ She gestured to the other side of the roof. 'I'll give you a shout on the way down.' I laughed, but she didn't. 'Come on. That wasn't a bad gag. In the circumstances.’ 'I suppose I'm not in the mood, Mr Sharp.’ I don't think she was trying to be funny, but what she said made me laugh even more. Maureen went to the other side of the roof, and sat down with her back against the far wall. I turned around and lowered myself back on to the ledge. But I couldn't concentrate. The moment had gone. You're probably thinking, How much concentration does a man need to throw himself off the top of a high building? Well, you'd be surprised. Before Maureen arrived I'd been in the zone; I was in a place where it would have been easy to push myself off. I was entirely focused on all the reasons I was up there in the first place; I understood with a horrible clarity the impossibility of attempting to resume life down on the ground. But the conversation with her had distracted me, pulled me back out into the world, into the cold and the wind and the noise of the thumping bass seven floors below. I couldn't get the mood back; it was as if one of the kids had woken up just as Cindy and I were starting to make love. I hadn't changed my mind, and I still knew that I'd have to do it some time. It's just that I knew I wasn't going to be able to do it in the next five minutes. I shouted at Maureen. 'Oi ! Do you want to swap places ? See how you get on ?' And I laughed again. I was, I felt, on a comedy roll, drunk enough - and, I suppose, deranged enough - to feel that just about anything I said would be hilarious. Maureen came out of the shadows and approached the breach in the wire fence cautiously. 'I want to be on my own, too,' she said. 'You will be. You've got twenty minutes. Then I want my spot back.' 'How are you going to get back over this side ?' I hadn't thought of that. The stepladder really only worked one way: there wasn't enough room on my side of the railings to open it out. 'You'll have to hold it.' 'What do you mean ?' 'You hand it over the top to me. I'll put it flush against the railings. You hold it steady from that side.' 'I'd never be able to keep it in place. You're too heavy.' And she was too light. She was small, but she carried no weight at all; I wondered whether she wanted to kill herself because she didn't want to die a long and painful death from some disease or other. 'So you'll have to put up with me being here.' I wasn't sure that I wanted to climb over to the other side anyway. The railings marked out a boundary now: you could get to the stairs from the roof, and the street from the stairs, and from the street you could get to Cindy, and the kids, and Danielle, and her dad, and everything else that had blown me up here as if I were a crisp packet in a gale. The ledge felt safe. There was no humiliation and shame there - beyond the humiliation and shame you'd expect to feel if you were sitting on a ledge, on your own, on New Year's Eve. 'Why can't you shuffle round to the other side of the roof ?' 'Why can't you ? It's my ladder.' 'You're not much of a gentleman.' 'No, I'm fucking not. That's one of the reasons I'm up here, in fact. Don't you read the papers ?' 'I look at the local one sometimes.' 'So what do you know about me ?' 'You used to be on the TV.' 'That's it ?' 'I think so.' She thought for a moment. 'Were you married to someone in Abba ?' 'No.' 'Or another singer ?' 'No.' 'Oh. And you like mushrooms, I know that.' 'Mushrooms ?' 'You said. I remember. There was one of those chef fellas in the studio, and he gave you something to taste, and you said, "Mmmm, I love mushrooms. I could eat them all day." Was that you ?' 'It might have been. But that's all you can dredge up ?' ‘Yes.’ 'So why do you think I want to kill myself ?' 'I've no idea.' 'You're pissing me around.' 'Would you mind watching your language ? I find it offensive.' 'I'm sorry.' But I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe I'd found someone who didn't know. Before I went to prison, I used to wake up in the morning and the tabloid scum were waiting outside the front door. I had crisis meetings with agents and managers and TV executives. It seemed impossible that there was anyone in Britain uninterested in what I had done, mostly because I lived in a world where it was the only thing that seemed to matter. Maybe Maureen lived on the roof, I thought. It would be easy to lose touch up there. 'What about your belt ?' She nodded at my waist. As far as Maureen was concerned, these were her last few moments on earth. She didn't want to spend them talking about my passion for mushrooms (a passion which, I fear, may have been manufactured for the camera anyway). She wanted to get on with things. 'What about it ?' 'Take your belt off and put it round the ladder. Buckle it your side of the railings.' I saw what she meant, and saw that it would work, and for the next couple of minutes we worked in a companionable silence; she passed the ladder over the fence, and I took my belt off, passed it around both ladder and railings, pulled it tight, buckled it up, gave it a shake to check it would hold. I really didn't want to die falling backwards. I climbed back over, we unbuckled the belt, placed the ladder in its original position. And I was just about to let Maureen jump in peace when this fucking lunatic came roaring at us. JESS I shouldn't have made the noise. That was my mistake. I mean, that was my mistake if the idea was to kill myself. I could have just walked, quickly and quietly and calmly, to the place where Martin had cut through the wire, climbed the ladder and then jumped. But I didn't. I yelled something like, 'Out of the way, losers !' and made this Red Indian war-whoop noise, as if it were all a game - which it was, at that point, to me, anyway - and Martin rugby-tackled me before I got halfway there. And then he sort of kneeled on me and ground my face into that sort of gritty fake-Tarmac stuff they put on the tops of buildings. Then I really did want to be dead. I didn't know it was Martin. I never saw anything, really, until he was rubbing my nose in the dirt, and then I just saw dirt. But I knew what the two of them were doing up there the moment I got to the roof. You didn't have to be like a genius to work that out. So when he was sitting on me I went, So how come you two are allowed to kill yourselves and I'm not ? And he goes, You're too young. We've fucked our lives up. You haven't, yet. And I said, How do you know that ? And he goes, No one's fucked their lives up at your age. And I was like, What if I've murdered ten people ? Including my parents and, I don't know, my baby twins ? And he went, Well have you ? And I said, Yeah, I have. (Even though I hadn't. I just wanted to see what he'd say.) And he went' Well, if you're up here, you've got away with it, haven't you ? I'd get on a plane to Brazil if I were you. And I said, What if I want to pay for what I’ve done with my life ? And he said, Shut up. MARTIN My first thought, after I’d brought Jess crashing to the ground, was that I didn't want Maureen sneaking off on her own. It was nothing to do with trying to save her life; it would simply have pissed me off if she'd taken advantage of my distraction and jumped. Oh, none of it makes much sense; two minutes before, I'd been practically ushering her over. But I didn't see why Jess should be my responsibility and not hers, and I didn't see why she should be the one to use the ladder when I'd carted it all the way up there. So my motives were essentially selfish; nothing new there' as Cindy would tell you. After Jess and I had had our idiotic conversation about how she’d killed lots of people, I shouted at Maureen to come and help me. She looked frightened, and then dawdled her way over to us. 'Get a bloody move on.’ 'What do you want me to do ?' 'Sit on her.' Maureen sat on Jess's arse, and I knelt on her arms. Just let me go, you old bastard pervert. You're getting a thrill out of this, aren't you ?' Well, obviously that stung a bit, given recent events. I thought for a moment Jess might have known who I was, but even I'm not that paranoid. If you were rugby-tackled in the middle of the night just as you were about to hurl yourself off the top of a tower-block, you probably wouldn't be thinking about breakfast television presenters. (This would come as a shock to breakfast television presenters, of course, most of whom firmly believe that people think about nothing else but breakfast, lunch and dinner.) I was mature enough to rise above Jess's taunts, even though I felt like breaking her arms. 'If we let go, are you going to behave ?' Yes. So Maureen stood up, and with wearying predictability Jess scrambled for the ladder, and I had to bring her crashing down again. 'Now what ?' said Maureen, as if I were a veteran of countless similar situations, and would therefore know the ropes. 'I don't bloody know.' Why it didn't occur to any of us that a well-known suicide spot would be like Piccadilly Circus on New Year's Eve I have no idea, but at that point in the proceedings I had accepted the reality of our situation: we were in the process of turning a solemn and private moment into a farce with a cast of thousands. And at that precise moment of acceptance, we three became four. There was a polite cough, and when we turned round to look, we saw a tall, good-looking, long-haired man, maybe ten years younger than me, holding a crash helmet under one arm and one of those big insulated bags in the other. 'Any of you guys order a pizza ?' he said. MAUREEN I'd never met an American before, I don't think. I wasn't at all sure he was one, either, until the others said something. You don't expect Americans to be delivering pizzas, do you ? Well, I don't, but perhaps I'm just out of touch. I don't order pizzas very often, but every time I have, they've been delivered by someone who doesn't speak English. Americans don't deliver things, do they ? Or serve you in shops, or take your money on the bus. I suppose they must do in America, but they don't here. Indians and West Indians, lots of Australians in the hospital where they see Matty, but no Americans. So we probably thought he was a bit mad at first. That was the only explanation for him. He looked a bit mad, with that hair. And he thought that we'd ordered pizzas while we were standing on the roof of Toppers' House. 'How would we have ordered pizzas ?' Jess asked him. We were still sitting on her, so her voice sounded funny. 'On a cell,' he said. 'What's a cell ?'Jess asked. 'OK, a mobile, whatever.' Fair play to him, we could have done that. 'Are you American ?' Jess asked him. 'Yeah.' 'What are you doing delivering pizzas ?' 'What are you guys doing sitting on her head ?' 'They're sitting on my head because this isn't a free country,' Jess said. 'You can't do what you want to.' 'What did you wanna do ?' She didn't say anything. 'She was going to jump,' Martin said. 'So were you !' He ignored her. 'You were all gonna jump ?' the pizza man asked us. We didn't say anything. 'The f - ?' he said. 'The f - ?' said Jess. 'The f – what ?' 'It's an American abbreviation,' said Martin. "'The f - ?" means "What the f--?" In America, they're so busy that they don't have time to say the "what".' 'Would you watch your language, please ?' I said to them. 'We weren't all brought up in a pigsty.' The pizza man just sat down on the roof and shook his head. I thought he was feeling sorry for us, but later he told us it wasn't that at all. 'OK,' he said after a while. 'Let her go.' We didn't move. 'Hey, you. You f - listening to me ? Am I gonna have to come over and make you listen ?' He stood up and walked towards us. 'I think she's OK, now, Maureen,' Martin said, as if he was deciding to stand up of his own accord, and not because the American man might punch him. He stood up, and I stood up, and Jess stood up and brushed herself down and swore a lot. Then she stared at Martin. 'You're that bloke,' she said. 'The breakfast TV bloke. The one who slept with the fifteen-year-old. Martin Sharp. F - ! Martin Sharp was sitting on my head. You old pervert.' Well, of course I didn't have a clue about any fifteen-year-old. I don't look at that sort of newspaper, unless I'm in the hairdresser's, or someone's left one on the bus. 'You kidding me ?' said the pizza man.'The guy who went to prison ? I read about him.' Martin made a groaning noise. 'Does everyone in America know, too ?' he said. 'Sure,' the pizza man said. 'I read about it in the New York Times.' 'Oh, God,' said Martin, but you could tell he was pleased. 'I was just kidding,' said the pizza man. 'You used to present a breakfast TV show in England. No one in the US has ever heard of you. Get real.' 'Give us some pizza, then,' said Jess. 'What flavours have you got?' 'I don't know,' said the pizza man. 'Let me have a look, then,' said Jess. 'No, I mean . . . They're not my pizzas, you know ?' 'Oh, don't be such a pussy, said Jess. (Really. That's what she said. I don't know why.) She leaned over, grabbed his bag and took out the pizza boxes. Then she opened the boxes and started poking the pizzas. 'This one's pepperoni. I don't know what that is though. Vegetables.' 'Vegetarian,' said the pizza man. 'Whatever,' said Jess. 'Who wants what?' I asked for vegetarian. The pepperoni sounded like something that wouldn't agree with me. JJ I told a couple people about that night, and the weird thing is that they get the suicide part, but they don't get the pizza part. Most people get suicide, I guess; most people, even if it's hidden deep down inside somewhere, can remember a time in their lives when they thought about whether they really wanted to wake up the next day. Wanting to die seems like it might be a part of being alive. So anyway, I tell people the story of that New Year's Eve, and none of them are like, 'Whaaaaat ? You were gonna kill yourself ?' It's more, you know, 'Oh, OK, your band was fucked up, you were at the end of the line with your music which was all you wanted to do your whole life, PLUS you broke up with your girl, who was the only reason you were in this fuckin' country in the first place . . . Sure, I can see why you were up there.’ But then like the very next second, they want to know what a guy like me was doing delivering fucking pizzas. OK, you don't know me' so you'll have to take my word for it that I'm not stupid. I read the fuck out of every book I can get my hands on. I like Faulkner and Dickens and Vonnegut and Brendan Behan and Dylan Thomas. Earlier that week - Christmas Day, to be precise - I'd finished Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, which is a totally awesome novel. I was actually going to jump with a copy - not only because it would have been kinda cool, and would've added a little mystique to my death, but because it might have been a good way of getting more people to read it. But the way things worked out, I didn't have any preparation time, and I left it at home. I have to say, though, that I wouldn't recommend finishing it on Christmas Day, in like a cold-water bedsit, in a city where you don't really know anybody. It probably didn't help my general sense of well-being, if you know what I mean, because the ending is a real downer. Anyway, the point is, people jump to the conclusion that anyone driving around North London on a shitty little moped on New Year's Eve for the minimum wage is clearly a loser, and almost certainly one stagione short of the full Quattro. Well, OK, we are losers by definition, because delivering pizzas is a job for losers. But we're not all dumb assholes. In fact, even with the Faulkner and Dickens, I was probably the dumbest out of all the guys at work, or at least the worst educated. We got African doctors, Albanian lawyers, Iraqi chemists . . . I was the only one who didn't have a college degree. (I don't understand how there isn't more pizza-related violence in our society. Just imagine: you're like the top whatever in Zimbabwe, brain surgeon or whatever, and then you have to come to England because the fascist regime wants to nail your ass to a tree, and you end up being patronized at three in the morning by some stoned teenage motherfucker with the munchies . . . I mean, shouldn't you be legally entitled to break his fucking jaw ?) Anyway. There's more than one way to be a loser. There's sure more than one way of losing. So I could say that I was delivering pizzas because England sucks, and, more specifically, English girls suck, and I couldn't work legit because I'm not an English guy. Or an Italian guy, or a Spanish guy, or even like a fucking Finnish guy or whatever. So I was doing the only work I could find; Ivan, the Lithuanian proprietor of Casa Luigi on Holloway Road, didn't care that I was from Chicago, not Helsinki. And another way of explaining it is to say that shit happens, and there's no space too small, too dark and airless and fucking hopeless, for people to crawl into. The trouble with my generation is that we all think we're fucking geniuses. Making something isn't good enough for us, and neither is selling something, or teaching something, or even just doing something; we have to be something. It's our inalienable right, as citizens of the twenty-first century. If Christina Aguilera or Britney or some American Idol jerk can be something, then why can't I ? Where's mine, huh ? OK, so my band, we put on the best live shows you could ever see in a bar, and we made two albums, which a lot of critics and not many real people liked. But having talent is never enough to make us happy, is it ? I mean, it should be, because a talent is a gift, and you should thank God for it, but I didn't. It just pissed me off because I wasn't being paid for it, and it didn't get me on the cover of Rolling Stone. Oscar Wilde once said that one's real life is often the life one does not lead. Well, fucking right on, Oscar. My real life was full of headlining shows at Wembley and Madison Square Garden and platinum records, and Grammies, and that wasn't the life I was leading, which is maybe why it felt like I could throw it away. The life I was leading didn't let me be, I don't know . . . be who I thought I was. It didn't even let me stand up properly. It felt like I'd been walking down a tunnel that was getting narrower and narrower, and darker and darker, and had started to ship water, and I was all hunched up, and there was a wall of rock in front of me and the only tools I had were my fingernails. And maybe everyone feels that way, but that's no reason to stick with it. Anyway, that New Year's Eve, I'd gotten sick of it, finally. My fingernails were all worn away, and the tips of my fingers were shredded up. I couldn't dig any more. With the band gone, the only room I had left for self-expression was in checking out of my unreal life: I was going to fly off that fucking roof like Superman. Except, of course, it didn't work out like that. Some dead people, people who were too sensitive to live: Sylvia Plath, Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Jackson Pollock, Primo Levi, Kurt Cobain, of course. Some alive people: George W. Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Osama Bin Laden. Put a cross next to the people you might want to have a drink with, and then see whether they're on the dead side or the alive side. And, yeah, you could point out that I have stacked the deck, that there are a couple of people missing from my 'alive' list who might fuck up my argument, a few poets and musicians and so on. And you could also point out that Stalin and Hitler weren't so great, and they're no longer with us. But indulge me anyway: you know what I'm talking about. Sensitive people find it harder to stick around. So it was real shocking to discover that Maureen, Jess and Martin Sharp were about to take the Vincent Van Gogh route out of this world. (And yeah, thank you, I know Vincent didn't jump off the top of a North London apartment building.) A middle-aged woman who looked like someone's cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talk-show host with an orange face . . . It didn't add up. Suicide wasn't invented for people like this. It was invented for people like Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake. And me. Suicide was supposed to be cool. New Year's Eve was a night for sentimental losers. It was my own stupid fault. Of course there'd be a low-rent crowd up there. I should have picked a classier date - like March 28th, when Virginia Woolf took her walk into the river, or Nick Drake November 25th. If anybody had been on the roof on either of those nights, the chances are they would have been like-minded souls, rather than hopeless fuck-ups who had somehow persuaded themselves that the end of a calendar year is in any way significant. It was just that when I got the order to deliver the pizzas to the squat in Toppers' House, the opportunity seemed too good to turn down. My plan was to wander to the top, take a look around to get my bearings, go back down to deliver the pizzas and then Do It. And suddenly there I was with three potential suicides munching the pizzas I was supposed to deliver and staring at me. They were apparently expecting some kind of Gettysburg address about why their damaged and pointless lives were worth living. It was ironic, really, seeing as I didn't give a fuck whether they jumped or not. I didn't know them from Adam, and none of them looked like they were going to add much to the sum total of human achievement. 'So,' I said. 'Great. Pizza. A small, good thing on a night like this.' Raymond Carver, as you probably know, but it was wasted on these guys. 'Now what ?' said Jess. 'We eat our pizza.' 'Then ?' Just give it half an hour, OK ? Then we'll see where we're at.' I don't know where that came from. Why half an hour ? And what was supposed to happen then ? 'Everyone needs a little time out. Looks to me like things were getting undignified up here. Thirty minutes ? Is that agreed ?' One by one they shrugged and then nodded, and we went back to chewing our pizzas in silence. This was the first time I had tried one of Ivan's. It was inedible, maybe even poisonous. 'I'm not fucking sitting here for half an hour looking at your fucking miserable faces,' said Jess. 'That's what you've just this minute agreed to do,' Martin reminded her. 'So what ?' 'What's the point of agreeing to do something and then not doing it ?' 'No point.' Jess was apparently untroubled by the concession. 'Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative,' I said. Wilde again. I couldn't resist. Jess glared at me. 'He's being nice to you,' said Martin. 'There's no point in anything, though, is there ?'Jess said. 'That's why we're up here.' See, now this was a pretty interesting philosophical argument. Jess was saying that as long as we were on the rooftop, we were all anarchists. No agreements were binding, no rules applied. We could rape and murder each other and no one would pay any attention. 'To live outside the law you must be honest,' I said. 'What the fucking hell does that mean?' said Jess. You know, I've never really known what the fuck it means, to tell you the truth. Bob Dylan said it, not me, and I'd always thought it sounded good. But this was the first situation I'd ever been in where I was able to put the idea to the test, and I could see that it didn't work. We were living outside the law, and we could lie through our teeth any time we wanted, and I wasn't sure why we shouldn't. 'Nothing,' I said. 'Shut up, then, Yankee boy.' And I did. There were approximately twenty-eight minutes of our time out remaining. JESS A long time ago, when I was eight or nine, I saw this programme on telly about the history of the Beatles. Jen liked the Beatles, so she was the one who made me watch it, but I didn’t mind. (I probably told her I did mind, though. I probably made a fuss and pissed her off.) Anyway, when Ringo joined, you sort of felt this little shiver, because that was it, then, that was the four of them, and they were ready to go off and be the most famous group in history. Well, that's how I felt when JJ turned up on the roof with his pizzas. I know you'll think, Oh, she's just saying that because it sounds good, but I'm not. I knew, honestly. It helped that he looked like a rock star, with his hair and his leather jacket and all that, but my feeling wasn’t anything to do with music; I just mean that I could tell we needed JJ, and so when he appeared it felt right. He wasn't Ringo, though. He was more like Paul. Maureen was Ringo, except she wasn't very funny. I was George, except I wasn’t shy, or spiritual. Martin was John, except he wasn't talented or cool. Thinking about it, maybe we were more like another group with four people in it. Anyway, it just felt like something might happen, something interesting, and so I couldn't understand why we were just sitting there eating pizza slices. So I was like, Maybe we should talk, and Martin goes, What, share our pain ? And then he made a face, like I'd said something stupid, so I called him a wanker, and then Maureen tutted and asked me whether I said things like that at home (which I do), so I called her a bag lady, and Martin called me a stupid, mean little girl, so I spat at him, which I shouldn’t have done and which also by the way I don't do anywhere near as much nowadays, and so he made out like he was going to throttle me, and so JJ jumped in between us, which was just as well for Martin, because I don't think he would have hit me, whereas I most definitely would have hit and bitten and scratched him. And after that little fluffle of activity we sat there puffing and blowing and hating each other for a bit. And then when we were all calming down, JJ said something like, I'm nor sure what harm would be done by sharing our experiences, except he said it more American even than that. And Martin was like, Well, who's interested in your experiences ? Your experiences are delivering pizzas. And JJ goes, Well, your experiences, then, not mine. But it was too late, and I could tell from what he'd said about sharing our experiences that he was up here for the same reasons we were. So I went, You came up here to jump, didn't you ? And he didn't say anything, and Martin and Maureen looked at him. And Martin just goes, were you going to jump with the pizzas ? Because someone ordered those. Even though Martin was joking, it was like JJ's professional pride had been dented, because he told us that he was only here on a recce, and he was going downstairs to deliver before coming back up again. And I said, Well, we've eaten them now. And Martin goes, Gosh, you didn't seem like the jumping type, and JJ said, If you guys are the jumping type then I can't say I'm sorry. There was, as you can tell, a lot of, like, badness in the air. So I tried again. Oh, go on, let's talk, I said. No need for pain-sharing. Just, you know, our names and why we're up here. Because it might be interesting. We might learn something. We might see a way out, kind of thing. And I have to admit I had a sort of plan. My plan was that they'd help me find Chas, and Chas and I would get back together, and I'd feel better. But they made me wait, because they wanted Maureen to go first. MAUREEN I think they picked me because I hadn't really said anything, and I hadn't rubbed anyone up the wrong way yet. And also, maybe, because I was more mysterious than the others. Martin everyone seemed to know about from the newspapers. And Jess, God love her . . . We'd only known her for half an hour, but you could tell that this was a girl who had problems. My own feeling about JJ, without knowing anything about him, was that he might have been a gay person, because he had long hair and spoke American. A lot of Americans are gay people, aren't they ? I know they didn't invent gayness, because they say that was the Greeks. But they helped bring it back into fashion. Being gay was a bit like the Olympics: it disappeared in ancient times, and then they brought it back in the twentieth century. Anyway, I didn't know anything about gays, so I just presumed they were all unhappy and wanted to kill themselves. But me . . . You couldn't really tell anything about me from looking at me, so I think they were curious. I didn't mind talking, because I knew I didn't need to say very much. None of these people would have wanted my life. I doubted whether they'd understand how I'd put up with it for as long as I had. It's always the toilet bit that upsets people. Whenever I've had to moan before - when I need another prescription for my anti-depressants, for example - I always mention the toilet bit, the cleaning up that needs doing most days. It's funny, because it's the bit I've got used to. I can't get used to the idea that my life is finished, pointless, too hard, completely without hope or colour; but the mopping up doesn't really worry me any more. That's always what gets the doctor reaching for his pen, though. 'Oh, yeah,' Jess said when I'd finished. 'That's a no-brainer. Don't change your mind. You'd only regret it.' 'Some people cope,' said Martin. 'Who ?' said Jess. 'We had a woman on the show whose husband had been in a coma for twenty-five years.' 'And that was her reward, was it ? Going on a breakfast TV show ?' 'No. I'm just saying.' 'What are you just saying ?' 'I'm just saying it can be done.' 'You're not saying why, though, are you ?' 'Maybe she loved him.' They spoke quickly, Martin and Jess and JJ. Like people in a soap opera, bang bang bang. Like people who know what to say. I could never have spoken that quickly, not then, anyway; it made me realize that I'd hardly spoken at all for twenty-odd years. And the person I spoke to most couldn't speak back. 'What was there to love ?' Jess was saying. 'He was a vegetable. Not even an awake vegetable. A vegetable in a coma.' 'He wouldn't be a vegetable if he wasn't in a coma, would he ?' said Martin. 'I love my son,' I said. I didn't want them to think I didn't. 'Yes,' said Martin. 'Of course you do. We didn't mean to imply otherwise.' 'Do you want us to kill him for you ?' said Jess. 'I'll go down there tonight if you want. Before I kill myself. I don't mind. No skin off my nose. And it's not like he's got much to live for, is it ? If he could speak, he'd probably thank me for it, poor sod.' My eyes filled with tears, and JJ noticed. 'What are you, a f- idiot ?' he said to Jess. 'Look what you've done.’ 'So-rry,' said Jess. 'Just an idea.' But that wasn't why I was crying. I was crying because all I wanted in the world, the only thing that would make me want to live, was for Matty to die. And knowing why I was crying just made me cry more. MARTIN Everyone bloody knew everything about me, so I didn't see the point of this lark, and I told them that. 'Oh, come on, man,' said JJ, in his irritating American way. It doesn't take long, I find, to be irritated by Yanks. I know they're our friends and everything, and they respect success over there, unlike the ungrateful natives of this bloody chippy dump, but all that cool-daddio stuff gets on my wick. I mean, you should have seen him. You'd have thought he was on the roof to promote his latest movie. You certainly wouldn't think he'd been puttering around Archway delivering pizzas. 'We just want to hear your side of it,' said Jess. 'There isn't a "my side". I was a bloody idiot and I'm paying the price.' 'So you don't want to defend yourself ? Because you're among friends here,' said JJ. 'She just spat at me,' I pointed out. 'What kind of a friend is that ?' 'Oh, don't be such a baby,' said Jess. 'My friends are always spitting at me. I never take it personally.' 'Maybe you should. Perhaps that's how your friends intend it to be taken.' Jess snorted. 'If I took it personally, I wouldn't have any friends left.' We let that one hang in the air. 'So what do you want to know, that you don't know already ?' 'There are two sides to every story,' said Jess. 'We only know the bad side.' 'I didn't know she was fifteen,' I said. 'She told me she was eighteen. She looked eighteen.' That was it. That was the good side of the story. 'So if she'd been, like, six months older you wouldn't be up here ?' 'I don't suppose I would, no. Because I wouldn't have broken the law. Wouldn't have gone to prison. Wouldn't have lost my job, my wife wouldn't have found out . . .' 'So you're saying it was just bad luck.' 'I'd say there was a certain degree of culpability involved.' This was, I need hardly tell you, an attempt at dry understatement; I didn't know then that Jess is at her happiest wallowing in the marshland of the bleeding obvious. 'Just because you've swallowed a fucking dictionary, it doesn't mean you've done nothing wrong,’ said Jess. 'That's what "culpability" . . .' 'Because some married men wouldn't have shagged her no matter how old she was. And you've got kids and all, haven't you ?' 'I have indeed.' 'So bad luck's got nothing to do with it.' 'Oh, for fuck's sake. Why d'you think I've been dangling my feet over the ledge, you moron ? I screwed up. I'm not trying to make excuses for myself. I feel so wretched I want to die.' 'I should hope so.' 'Thanks. And thanks for introducing this exercise, too. Very helpful. Very . . . curative.' Another polysyllabic word, another dirty look. 'I'm interested in something,' said JJ. 'Go on.' 'Why is it easier to like leap into the void than to face up to what you've done ?' 'This is facing up to what I've done.' 'People are always fucking young girls and leaving their wives and kids. They don't all jump off of buildings, man.' 'No. But like Jess says, maybe they should.' 'Really ? You think anyone who makes a mistake of this kind should die? Woah. That's some heavy shit,' said JJ. Did I really think that ? Maybe I did. Or maybe I had done. As some of you might know, I’d written things in newspapers which said exactly that, more or less. This was before my fall from grace, naturally. I'd called for the restoration of the death penalty, for example. I'd called for resignations and chemical castrations and prison sentences and public humiliations and penances of every kind. And maybe I had meant it when I'd said that men who couldn't keep their things in their trousers should be . . . Actually, I can't remember what I thought the appropriate punishment was now for philanderers and serial adulterers. I shall have to look up the column in question. But the point is that I was practising what I preached. I hadn't been able to keep my thing in my trousers, so now I had to jump. I was a slave to my own logic. That was the price you had to pay if you were a tabloid columnist who crossed the line you'd drawn. 'Not every mistake, no. But maybe this one.' 'Jesus,' said JJ. 'You're real tough on yourself.' 'It's not just that, anyway. It's the public thing. The humiliation. The enjoyment of the humiliation. The TV show on cable that's watched by three people. Everything. I've . . . I've run out of room. I can't see any way forward or back.' There was a thoughtful silence, for about ten seconds. 'Right,' said Jess. 'My turn.' JESS I launched in. I just went, My name's Jess and I'm eighteen years old and, see, I'm here because I had some family problems that I don't need to go into. And then I split up with this guy. Chas. And he owes me an explanation. Because he didn't say anything. He just went. But if he gave me an explanation I'd feel better, I think, because he broke my heart. Except I can't find him. I was at the party downstairs looking for him, and he wasn't there. So I came up here. And Martin goes, all sarcastic, You're going to kill yourself because Chas didn't turn up at a party ? Jesus. Well, I never said that, and I told him. So then he was like, OK, you're up here because you're owed an explanation, then. Is that it ? He was trying to make me sound stupid, and that wasn't fair, because we could all do that to each other. Like, for example, say, Oh, boo hoo hoo, they won't let me be on breakfast television any more. Oh, boo hoo hoo, my son's a vegetable and I don't talk to anyone and I have to clean up his . . . Well, OK, you couldn't make Maureen sound stupid. But it seemed to me that taking the piss wasn't on. You could have taken the piss out of all four of us; you can take the piss out of anyone who's unhappy, if you're cruel enough. So I go, That wasn't what I said either. I said an explanation might stop me. I didn't say it was why I was up here in the first place, did I ? See, we could handcuff you to those railings, and that would stop you. But you're not up here because no one's handcuffed you to railings, are you ? That shut him up. I was pleased with that. JJ was nicer. He could see that I wanted to find Chas, so I was like, Duh, yeah, except I wished I hadn't done the Duh bit because he was being sympathetic and Duh is taking the piss, really, isn't it ? But he ignored the Duh and he asked me where Chas was and I said I didn't know, some party or another, and he said, Well, why don't you go looking for him instead of fucking around up here and I said I'd run out of energy and hope and when I said that I knew it was true. I don't know you. The only thing I know about you is, you're reading this. I don't know whether you're happy or not; I don't know whether you're young or not. I sort of hope you're young and sad. If you're old and happy, I can imagine that you'll maybe smile to yourself when you hear me going, He broke my heart. You'll remember someone who broke your heart, and you'll think to yourself, Oh, yes, I can remember how that feels. But you can't, you smug old git. Oh, you might remember feeling sort of pleasantly sad. You might remember listening to music and eating chocolates in your room, or walking along the Embankment on your own, wrapped up in a winter coat and feeling lonely and brave. But can you remember how with every mouthful of food it felt like you were biting into your own stomach ? Can you remember the taste of red wine as it came back up and into the toilet bowl? Can you remember dreaming every night that you were still together, that he was talking to you gently and touching you, so that every morning when you woke up you had to go through it all over again ? Can you remember carving his initials in your arm with a kitchen knife ? Can you remember standing too close to the edge of an Underground platform ? No ? Well, fucking shut up then. Stick your smile up your saggy old arse. JJ I was going to just like splurge, tell 'em everything they needed to know - Big Yellow, Lizzie, the works. There was no need to lie. I guess I felt a little queasy listening to the other guys, because their reasons for being up there seemed pretty solid. Jesus, everyone understood why Maureen's life wasn't worth living. And, sure, Martin had kind of dug his own grave, but even so, that level of humiliation and shame . . . If I'd been him, I doubt if I'd have stuck around as long as he had. And Jess was very unhappy and very nuts. So it wasn't like people were being competitive, exactly, but there was a certain amount of, I don't know what you'd call it . . . marking out territory ? And maybe I felt a little insecure because Martin had pissed all over my patch. I was going to be the shame and humiliation guy, but my shame and humiliation was beginning to look a little pale. He'd been locked up for sleeping with a fifteen-year-old, and fucked over in the tabloids; I'd been dumped by a girl, and my band wasn't going anywhere. Big fucking deal. Still, I didn't think of lying until I had the trouble with my name. Jess was so fucking aggressive, and I just lost my nerve. 'So,' I said. 'OK. I'm JJ, and . . .' ''Woss that stand for ?' People always want to know what my initials are for, and I never tell them. I hate my name. What happened was, my dad was one of those self-educated guys, and he had a real, like, reverence for the BBC, so he spent too much time listening to the World Service on his big old short-wave radio in the den, and he was real hung up on this dude who was always on the radio in the sixties, John Julius Norwich, who was like a lord or something, and writes millions of books about like churches and stuff. And that's me. John fucking Julius. Did I become a lord, or a radio anchor, or even an Englishman ? No. Did I drop out of school and form a band ? Yep. Is John Julius a good name for a high-school dropout ? Nope. JJ is OK, though. JJ's cool enough. 'That's my business. Anyway, I'm JJ, and I'm here because . . .' 'I'll find out what your name is.' 'How ?' 'I'll come round your house and ransack it until I find something that tells me. Your passport or bank book or something. And if I can't find anything then I'll just steal something you love and I won't give it back until you've coughed up.' Jesus Christ. What gives with this girl ? 'You'd rather do that than call me by my initials ?' 'Yeah. Course. I hate not knowing things.' 'I don't know you very well,' said Martin. 'But if you're really troubled by your own ignorance, I'd have thought there should be one or two things higher up the list than JJ's name.' 'What's that supposed to mean?' 'Do you know who the Chancellor of the Exchequer is ? Or who wrote Moby-Dick ?' 'No,' said Jess. 'Course not.' As if anyone who knew stuff like that was a dork. 'But they're not secrets, are they ? I don't like not knowing secrets. I could find that other stuff out any time I felt like it, and I don't feel like it.' 'If he doesn't want to tell us, he doesn't want to tell us. Do your friends call you JJ ?' 'Yeah.' 'Then that's good enough for us.' 'S'not good enough for me,' said Jess. Just belt up and let him talk,' said Martin. But for me, the moment had gone. The moment of truth, anyway, ha ha. I could tell I wasn't going to get a fair hearing; there were waves of hostility coming off Jess and Martin, and these waves were breaking everywhere. I stared at them all for a minute. 'So ?' said Jess. 'You forgotten why you were going to kill yourself, or what ?' 'Of course I haven't forgotten,' I said. 'Well, fucking spit it out then.' 'I'm dying,' I said. See, I never thought I'd run into them again. I was pretty sure that sooner or later we'd shake hands, wish each other a happy whatever, and then either trudge back down the stairs or jump off the fucking roof depending on mood, character, scale of problem etcetera. It really never occurred to me that this was going to come back and repeat on me like a pickle in a Big Mac. 'Yeah, well you don't look great,' said Jess. 'What you got ? AIDS ?' AIDS fitted the bill. Everyone knew you could wander around with it for months; everyone knew it was incurable. And yet . . . I'd had a couple friends who died from it, and it's not the kind of thing you joke about. AIDS I knew I should leave the fuck alone. But then - and this all ran through my head in the thirty seconds after Jess's question - which fatal disease was more appropriate? Leukemia ? The Ebola virus ? None of them really says, 'No, go on, man, be my guest. I'm only a joke killer disease. I'm not serious enough to offend anyone.' 'I got like this brain thing. It's called CCR.' Which of course is Creedence Clearwater Revival, one of my all-time favourite bands, and a big inspiration to me. I didn't think any of them looked like big Creedence fans. Jess was too young, I really didn't need to worry about Maureen, and Martin was the kind of guy who'd only have smelled a rat if I'd told him I was dying of incurable ABBA. 'It's like Cranial Corno-something.' I was pleased with the 'cranial' part. That sounded about right. The 'corno-' was weak, though, I admit. 'Is there no cure for that ?' Maureen asked. 'Oh, yeah,' said Jess. 'There's a cure. You can take a pill. It's just that he couldn't be arsed. Der.' 'They figure it's from drug abuse. Drugs and alcohol. So it's all my own fuckin' fault.' 'You must feel a bit of a berk, then,' said Jess. 'I do,' I said. 'If "berk" means asshole.' 'Yeah. Anyway, you win.' Which confirmed to me once and for all that a competitive edge had snuck in. 'Really ?' I was pleased. 'Oh, yeah. Dying ? Fuck. That's, you know. . . Like diamonds or spades or those . . . Trumps ! You've got trumps, man.' 'I'd say that having a fatal disease was only any good in this game,' said Martin. 'The who's-the-most-miserable bastard game. Not much use anywhere else.' 'How long have you got ?' Jess asked. 'I don't know.' 'Roughly. Just like off the top of your head.' 'Shut up, Jess,' said Martin. 'What have I said now? I wanted to know what we were dealing with.' 'We're not dealing with anything,' I said. 'I’m dealing with it.' 'Not very well,’ Jess said. 'Oh, is that right ? And this from the girl who can't deal with being dumped.' We fell into a hostile silence. 'Well,' said Martin. 'So. Here we all are, then.' 'Now what ?' said Jess. 'You're going home, for a start,' said Martin. 'Like fuck I am. Why should I ?' 'Because we're going to march you there.' 'I'll go home on one condition.' 'Go on.' 'You help me find Chas first.' 'All of us ?' 'Yeah. Or I really will kill myself. And I'm too young to do that. You said.' 'I'm not sure I was right about that, looking back,' said Martin. 'You're wise beyond your years. I can see that, now.' 'So it's OK if I go over ?' She started to walk towards the edge of the roof. 'Come back here,' I said. 'I don't give a fuck, you know,' she said. 'I can jump, or we can look for Chas. Same thing, to me.' And that's the whole thing, right there, because we believed her. Maybe other people on other nights wouldn't have but the three of us, that night, we had no doubts. It wasn't that we thought she was really suicidal, either; it was just that it felt like she might do whatever she wanted to do, at any given moment, and if she wanted to jump off a building to see what it felt like, then she'd try it. And once you'd worked that out, then it was just a question of how much you cared. 'But you don't need our help,' I said. 'We don't know how to start looking for Chas. You're the only one who can find him.' 'Yeah, but I get weird on my own. Confused. That's sort of how I ended up here.' 'What do you think ?' said Martin to the rest of us. 'I'm not going anywhere,' said Maureen. 'I'm not leaving the roof, and I won't change my mind.' 'Fine. We wouldn't ask you to.' 'Because they'll come looking for me.' 'Who will ?' 'The people in the respite home.' 'So what ?' said Jess. 'What are they going to do if they can't find you ?' 'They’ll put Matty somewhere terrible.' 'This is the Matty who's a vegetable? Does he give a shit where he goes ?' Maureen looked at Martin helplessly. 'Is it the money ?' said Martin. 'Is that why you have to be dead by the morning ?' Jess snorted, but I could see why he had asked the question. 'I only paid for one night,' said Maureen. 'Have you got the money for more than one night ?' 'Yes, of course.' The suggestion that she might not seemed to make her a little pissed. Pissed off. Whatever. 'So phone them up and tell them he'll be staying two.' Maureen looked at him helplessly again. 'Why ?' 'Because,' said Jess. 'Anyway, there's fuck all to do up here, is there ?' Martin laughed, kind of. 'Well, is there ?' said Jess. 'Nothing I can think of,' said Martin. 'Apart from the obvious.' 'Oh, that,' said Jess. 'Forget it. The moment's gone. I can tell. So we've got to find something else to do.' 'So even if you're right, and the moment has passed,' I said, 'why do we have to do anything together ? Why don't we go home and watch TV ?' "Cos I get weird on my own. I told you.' 'Why should we care ? We didn't know you half an hour ago. I don't give much of a fuck about how weird you get on your own.' 'So you don't feel like a bond kind of thing because of what we've been through.' 'Nope.' 'You will. I can see us still being friends when we're all old.’ There was a silence. This was clearly not a vision shared by all. *

* { NOTE 3 : } Another message informing me that the text is still too long. So looks like this story will have to be in three parts. Apologies for the dis-jointedness. * * * MARTIN Can I explain why I wanted to jump off the top of a tower-block ? Of course I can explain why I wanted to jump off the top of a tower-block. I'm not a bloody idiot. I can explain it because it wasn't inexplicable: it was a logical decision, the product of proper thought. It wasn't even a very serious thought, either. I don't mean it was whimsical - I just meant that it wasn't terribly complicated, or agonized. Put it this way: say you were, I don't know, an assistant bank manager, in Guildford. And you'd been thinking of emigrating, and then you were offered the job of managing a bank in Sydney. Well, even though it's a pretty straightforward decision, you'd still have to think for a bit, wouldn't you? You'd at least have to work out whether you could bear to move, whether you could leave your friends and colleagues behind, whether you could uproot your wife and kids. You might sit down with a bit of paper and draw up a list of pros and cons. You know: CONS - aged parents, friends, golf club. PROS –more money, better quality of life (house with pool, barbecue, etc.), sea, sunshine, no left-wing councils banning 'Baa-Baa Black Sheep', no EEC directives banning British sausages, etc. It's no contest, is it ? The golf club ! Give me a break. Obviously your aged parents give you pause for thought, but that's all it is - a pause, and a brief one, too. You'd be on the phone to the travel agents within ten minutes. Well, that was me. There simply weren't enough regrets, and lots and lots of reasons to jump. The only things in my 'cons' list were the kids, but I couldn't imagine Cindy letting me see them again anyway. I haven’t got any aged parents, and I don’t play golf. Suicide was my Sydney. And I say that with no offence to the good people of Sydney intended. MAUREEN I told him I was going to a New Year’s Eve party. I told him in October. I don't know whether people send our invitations to New Year's Eve parties in October or not. Probably not. (How would I know ? I haven't been to one since 1984. June and Brian across the road had one, just before they moved. And even then I only nipped in for an hour or so, after he'd gone to sleep.) But I couldn’t wait any longer. I'd been thinking about it since May or June, and l was itching to tell him. Stupid, really. He doesn't understand, I'm sure he doesn't. They tell me to keep talking to him, but you can see that nothing goes in. And what a thing to be itching about anyway ! It just goes to show what I had to look forward to, doesn’t it ? The moment I told him, I wanted to go straight to confession. Well, I'd lied, hadn't I ? I'd lied to my own son. Oh, it was only a tiny, silly lie: I'd told him months in advance that I was going to a party, a party I'd made up. I'd made it up properly, too. I told him whose parry it was, and why I'd been invited, and why I wanted to go, and who else would be there. (It was Bridgid’s party, Bridgid from the church. And I'd been invited because her sister was coming over from Cork, and her sister had asked after me in a couple of letters. And I wanted to go because Bridgid's sister had taken her mother-in-law to Lourdes, and I wanted to find out all about it, with a view to taking Matty one day.) But confession wasn’t possible, because I knew I would have to repeat the sin, the lie, over and over as the year came to an end. Not only to Matty, but to the people at the nursing home, and . . . Well, there isn’t anyone else, really. Maybe someone at the church, or someone in a shop. It's almost comical, when you think about it. If you spend day and night looking after a sick child, there's very little room for sin, and I hadn't done anything worth confessing for donkey's years. And I went from that, to sinning so terribly that I couldn't even talk to the priest, because I was going to go on sinning and sinning until the day I died, when I would commit the biggest sin of all. (And why is it the biggest sin of all ? All your life you're told that you'll be going to this marvellous place when you pass on. And the one thing you can do to get you there a bit quicker is something that stops you getting there at all. Oh, I can see that it's a kind of queue-jumping. But if someone jumps the queue at the Post Office, people tut. Or sometimes they say, 'Excuse me, I was here first.' They don't say, 'You will be consumed by hellfire for all eternity.' That would be a bit strong.) It didn't stop me from going to the church. But I only kept going because people would think there was something wrong if I stopped. As we got closer and closer to the date, I kept passing on little tidbits of information that I told him I'd picked up. Every Sunday I pretended as though I'd learned something new, because Sundays were when I saw Bridgid. 'Bridgid says there'll be dancing.' 'Bridgid's worried that not everyone likes wine and beer, so she'll be providing spirits.' 'Bridgid doesn't know how many people will have eaten already.' If Matty had been able to understand anything, he'd have decided that this Bridgid woman was a lunatic, worrying like that about a little get-together. I blushed every time I saw her at the church. And of course I wanted to know what she actually was doing on New Year's Eve, but I never asked. If she was planning to have a party, she might've felt that she had to invite me. I'm ashamed, thinking back. Not about the lies - I'm used to lying now. No, I'm ashamed of how pathetic it all was. One Sunday I found myself telling Matty about where Bridgid was going to buy the ham for the sandwiches. But it was on my mind, New Year's Eve, of course it was, and it was a way of talking about it, without actually saying anything. And I suppose I came to believe in the party a little bit myself, in the way that you come to believe the story in a book. Every now and again I imagined what I'd wear, how much I'd drink, what time I'd leave. Whether I'd come home in a taxi. That sort of thing. In the end it was as if I'd actually been. Even in my imagination, though, I couldn't see myself talking to anyone at the party. I was always quite happy to leave it. JESS I was at a party downstairs in the squat. It was a shit party, full of all these ancient crusties sitting on the floor drinking cider and smoking huge spliffs and listening to weirdo space-out reggae. At midnight, one of them clapped sarcastically, and a couple of others laughed, and that was it - Happy New Year to you too. You could have turned up to that party as the happiest person in London, and you'd still have wanted up to jump off the roof by five past twelve. And I wasn't the happiest person in London anyway. Obviously. I only went because someone at college told me Chas would be there, but he wasn't. I tried his mobile for the one zillionth time, but it wasn't on. When we first split up, he called me a stalker, but that's like an emotive word, 'stalker’, isn't it ? I don't think you can call it stalking when it’s just phone calls and letters and emails and knocking on the door. And I only turned up at his work twice. Three times, if you count his Christmas party, which I don't, because he said he was going to take me to that anyway. Stalking is when you follow them to the shops and on holiday and all that, isn't it ? Well, I never went near any shops. And anyway, I didn’t think it was stalking when someone owed you an explanation. Being owed an explanation is like being owed money, and not just a fiver, either. Five or six hundred quid minimum, more like. If you were owed five or six hundred quid minimum and the person who owed it to you was avoiding you, then you're bound to knock on his door late at night, when you know he's going to be in. People get serious about that sort of money. They call in debt collectors, and break people's legs, but I never went that far. I showed some restraint. So even though I could see straight away that he wasn't at this party, I stayed for a while. Where else was I going to go ? I was feeling sorry for myself. How can you be eighteen and not have anywhere to go on New Year's Eve, apart from some shit party in some shit squat where you don't know anybody ? Well, I managed it. I seem to manage it every year. I make friends easily enough, but then I piss them off, I know that much, even if I'm not sure why or how. And so people and parties disappear. I pissed Jen off, I'm sure of that. She disappeared, like everyone else. MARTIN I'd spent the previous couple of months looking up suicide inquests on the Internet, just out of curiosity. And nearly every single time, the coroner says the same thing: 'He took his own life while the balance of his mind was disturbed.' And then you read the story about the poor bastard: his wife was sleeping with his best friend, he'd lost his job, his daughter had been killed in a road accident some months before . . . Hello, Mr Coroner ? Anyone at home ? I'm sorry, but there's no disturbed mental balance here, my friend. I'd say he got it just right. Bad thing upon bad thing upon bad thing until you can't take any more, and then it's off to the nearest multi-storey car park in the family hatchback with a length of rubber tubing. Surely that's fair enough ? Surely the coroner's inquest should read, 'He took his own life after sober and careful contemplation of the fucking shambles it had become' ? Not once did I read a newspaper report which convinced me that the deceased was off the old trolley. You know: 'The Manchester United forward, who was engaged to the current Miss Sweden, had recently achieved a unique Double: he is the only man ever to have won the FA Cup and an Oscar for Best Actor in the same year. The rights to his first novel had just been bought for an undisclosed sum by Steven Spielberg. He was found hanging from a beam in his stables by a member of his staff.' Now, I've never seen a coroner's report like that, but if there were cases in which happy, successful, talented people took their own lives, one could safely come to the conclusion that the old balance was indeed wonky. And I'm not saying that being engaged to Miss Sweden, playing for Manchester United and winning Oscars inoculates you against depression - I'm sure it doesn't. I'm just saying that these things help. Look at the statistics. You're more likely to top yourself if you've just gone through a divorce. Or if you're anorexic. Or if you’re unemployed. Or if you're a prostitute. Or if you've fought in a war, or if you've been raped, or if you've lost somebody … There are lots and lots of factors that push people over the edge; none of these factors are likely to make you feel anything but fucking miserable. Two years ago Martin Sharp would not have found himself sitting on a tiny concrete ledge in the middle of the night, looking a hundred feet down at a concrete walkway and wondering whether he'd hear the noise that his bones made when they shattered into tiny pieces. But two years ago Martin Sharp was a different person. I still had my job. I still had a wife. I hadn't slept with a fifteen-year- old. I hadn't been to prison. I hadn't had to talk to my young daughters about a front-page tabloid newspaper article, an article headlined with the word 'SLEAZEBAG !’ and illustrated with a picture of me lying on the pavement outside a well-known London nightspot. (What would the headline have been if I had gone over ? 'SLEAZY DOES IT !' perhaps. Or maybe 'SHARP END !')There was, it is fair to say, less reason for ledge-sitting before all that happened. So don't tell me that the balance of my mind was disturbed, because it really didn't feel that way. (What does it mean, anyway, that stuff about 'the balance of the mind' ? Is it strictly scientific ? Does the mind really wobble up and down in the head like some sort of fish-scale, according to how loopy you are ?) Wanting to kill myself was an appropriate and reasonable response to a whole series of unfortunate events that had rendered life unliveable. Oh, yes, I know the shrinks would say that they could have helped, but that’s half the trouble with this bloody country, isn't it? No one's willing to face their responsibilities. It's always someone else's fault. Boo-hoo-hoo. Well, I happen to be one of those rare individuals who believe that what went on with Mummy and Daddy had nothing to do with me screwing a fifteen-year-old. I happen to believe that I would have slept with her regardless of whether I'd been breast-fed or not, and it was time to face up to what I'd done. And what I’d done is, I'd pissed my life away. Literally. Well, OK, not literally literally. I hadn't, you know, turned my life into urine and stored it in my bladder and so on and so forth. But I felt as if I'd pissed my life away in the same way that you can piss money away. I'd had a life, full of kids and wives and jobs and all the usual stuff, and I'd somehow managed to mislay it. No, you see, that's not right. I knew where my life was, just as you know where money goes when you piss it away. I hadn't mislaid it at all. I'd spent it. I'd spent my kids and my job and my wife on teenage girls and nightclubs: these things all come at a price, and I'd happily paid it, and suddenly my life wasn't there any more. What would I be leaving behind ? On New Year's Eve, it felt as though I'd be saying goodbye to a dim form of consciousness and a semi-functioning digestive system - all the indications of a life, certainly, but none of the content. I didn't even feel sad, particularly. I just felt very stupid, and very angry. I'm not sitting here now because I suddenly saw sense. The reason I'm sitting here now is because that night turned into as much of a mess as everything else. I couldn't even jump off a fucking tower-block without fucking it up. MAUREEN On New Year's Eve the nursing home sent their ambulance round for him. You had to pay extra for that, but I didn't mind. How could I ? In the end, Matty was going to cost them a lot more than they were costing me. I was only paying for a night, and they were going to pay for the rest of his life. I thought about hiding some of Matty's stuff, in case they thought it was odd, but no one had to know it was his. I could have had loads of kids, as far as they knew, so I left it there. They came around six, and these two young fellas wheeled him out. I couldn't cry when he went, because then the young fellas would know something was wrong; as far as they knew, I was coming to fetch him at eleven the next morning. I just kissed him on the top of his head and told him to be good at the home, and I held it all in until I'd seen them leave. Then I wept and wept, for about an hour. He’d ruined my life, but he was still my son, and I was never going to see him again, and I couldn’t even say goodbye properly. I watched the television for a while, and I did have one or two glasses of sherry, because I knew it would be cold out. I waited at the bus stop for ten minutes, but then I decided to walk. Knowing that you want to die makes you less scared. I wouldn't have dreamed of walking all that way late at night, especially when the streets are full of drunks, but what did it matter now ? Although then, of course, I found myself worrying about being attacked but not murdered - left for dead without actually dying. Because then I'd be taken to hospital, and they’d find out who I was, and they'd find out about Matty, and all those months of planning would have been a complete waste of time, and I’d come out of hospital owing the home thousands of pounds, and where was I going to find that ? But no one attacked me. A couple of people wished me a Happy New year, but that was about all. There isn't so much to be afraid of, out there. I can remember thinking it was a funny time to find that out, on the last night of my life; I'd spent the rest of it being afraid of everything. I'd never been to Toppers' House before. I'd just been past it on the bus once or twice. I didn't even know for sure that you could get on to the roof any more, but the door was open, and I just walked up the stairs until I couldn't walk any further. I don't know why it didn't occur to me that you couldn't just jump off whenever you felt like it, but the moment I saw it I realized that they wouldn’t let you do that. They'd put this wire up, way up high, and there were curved railings with spikes on the top . . . well, that’s when I began to panic. I'm not tall, and I'm not very strong, and I’m not as young as I was. I couldn't see how I was going to get over the top of it all, and it had to be that night, because of Matty being in the home and everything. And I started to go through all the other options, but none of them were any good. I didn't want to do it in my own front room, where someone I knew would find me. I wanted to be found by a stranger. And I didn't want to jump in front of a train, because I'd seen a programme on the television about the poor drivers and how suicides upset them. And I didn't have a car, so I couldn't drive off to a quiet spot and breathe in the exhaust fumes ... And then I saw Martin, right over the other side of the roof. I hid in the shadows and watched him. I could see he'd done things properly: he'd brought a little stepladder, and some wire-cutters, and he'd managed to climb over the top like that. And he was just sitting on the ledge, dangling his feet, looking down, taking nips out of a little hip flask, smoking, thinking, while I waited. And he smoked and he smoked and I waited and waited until in the end I couldn't wait any more. I know it was his stepladder, but I needed it. It wasn't going to be much use to him. I never tried to push him. I'm not beefy enough to push a grown man off a ledge. And I wouldn't have tried anyway. It wouldn't have been right; it was up to him whether he jumped or not. I just went up to him and put my hand through the wire and tapped him on the shoulder. I only wanted to ask him if he was going to be long. JESS Before I got to the squat, I never had any intention of going on to the roof. Honestly. I'd forgotten about the whole Toppers' House thing until I started speaking to this guy. I think he fancied me, which isn't really saying much, seeing as I was about the only female under thirty who could still stand up. He gave me a fag, and he told me his name was Bong, and when I asked him why he was called Bong he said it was because he always smoked his weed out of a bong. And I went, Does that mean everyone else here is called Spliff ? But he was just, like, No, that bloke over there is called Mental Mike. And that one over there is called Puddle. And that one over there is Nicky Turd. And so on, until he'd been through everyone in the room he knew. But the ten minutes I spent talking to Bong made history. Well, not history like 55 BC or 1939. Not historical history, unless one of us goes on to invent a time machine or stops Britain from being invaded by Al-Qaida or something. But who knows what would have happened to us if Bong hadn't fancied me ? Because before he started chatting me up I was just about to go home, and Maureen and Martin would be dead now, probably, and . . . well, everything would have been different. When Bong had finished going through his list, he looked at me and he went, You're not thinking of going up on the roof, are you ? And I thought, Not with you, stoner-brain. And he went, Because I can see the pain and desperation in your eyes. I was well pissed by that time, so looking back on it, I'm pretty sure that what he could see in my eyes were seven Bacardi Breezers and two cans of Special Brew. I just went, Oh, really ? And he went, Yeah, see, I've been put on suicide watch, to look out for people who've only come here because they want to go upstairs. And I was like, What happens upstairs ? And he laughed, and went, You're joking, aren't you ? This is Toppers' House, man. This is where people kill themselves. And I would never have thought of it if he hadn't said that. Everything suddenly made sense. Because even though I'd been about to go home, I couldn't imagine what I'd do when I got there, and I couldn't imagine waking up in the morning. I wanted Chas, and he didn't want me, and I suddenly realized that easily the best thing to do was make my life as short as I possibly could. I almost laughed, it was so neat: I wanted to make my life short, and I was at a party in Toppers' House, and the coincidence was too much. It was like a message from God. OK, it was disappointing that all God had to say to me was, like, Jump off a roof but I didn't blame him. What else was he supposed to tell me ? I could feel the weight of everything then - the weight of loneliness, of everything that had gone wrong. I felt heroic, going up those last few flights to the top of the building, dragging that weight along with me. Jumping felt like the only way to get rid of it, the only way to make it work for me instead of against me; I felt so heavy that I knew I'd hit the street in no time. I'd beat the world record for falling off a tower-block.

The following excerpt is from a novel, the likes of which I had never come across before or have again since. It truly is like one of those extraordinarily wonderful meals that someone creates out of the most unlikely ingredients imaginable. And yet, somehow,… it works ! The book is by one of England’s currently most popular writers, Nick Hornby, and it is entitled “A Long Way Down.” In this case, the author’s implausible ingredients are firstly, his choice of central issue around which the improbable plot revolves, (an analysis of the decisions reached by four people, unknown to each other, who independently decide to commit suicide by jumping off a tall building. Only they unwittingly all choose the same venue, and the same time - New Year's Eve.) Secondly, there's his choice of characters. (I can’t imagine any reader identifying with, or even liking, a single one of them. Similarly, each of them initially struggles to see even a shred of anything worthwhile in any of the others.) And finally, even more bizarrely, the bonding agent that against all odds deftly manages to hold the entire story together – is an absolutely wicked sense of humour ! As the story unfolds it takes the reader along into such strange places and unfamiliar ‘thought trains’, that when all the seemingly unconnected, disparate ends have finally been woven together … the pattern that was finally revealed left me feeling an incredible sense of gratitude for Mr. Hornby’s extraordinary kindness. By slapping down the price equivalent of merely an average, small-sized pizza, he had allowed me to share his insights through a truly worthwhile reading experience. Check out the few pages below. Maybe you’ll decide to forgo the pizza and take a chance on a literary ride into the unknown and the unexpected. It'll be quite a remarkable journey, I assure you. * { NOTE 1: } Perhaps here I should list a few English slang terms that are quite important to the development of the book, but which are largely unknown outside this country. (1) a “tower block” is a tall apartment block (2) to “top oneself” is an expression for committing suicide, and hence (3) “Topper’s House” is a tall apartment block from which many people have thrown themselves off. * { NOTE 2 : } When I tried to print the story, a message came up saying it was too long. So I'll separate out this introduction and try again with the main body of the text to follow. * * *

. You've shared a very interesting experience with your fox 'friends'. I imagine that most readers would connect with it because we've probably all had similar, (and equally puzzling) synchronicities happen in our lives. My feeling is that it's man's nature to wonder about things like this and to try to uncover explanations and reasons why things like this happen. But even though we often do come up with theories that temporarily satisfy this itch ... ultimately the real reasons about why anything happens, are completely unknowable. Because apparently, everything is part of a Oneness. So it is not possible to separate out strands from Oneness in order to examine their unique contribution, their causes, the effects that spring from them, etc. It's simply our dualistic mind which inescapably obliges us to view the world in this way. Our theories about causes and effects are merely imaginations. They are not actually connected to anything. So, whatever theory works to satisfy the itch for you,... is as good as any other. Personally, I often find myself falling back on the wisdom of Bhagwan Groucho Marx. With regard to the recurring foxes in your situation, I feel certain Groucho would offer his timeless quote : * A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere. .

. He who laughs last thinks slowest.

If you're not familiar with the work of Steven Wright, he's the famous comic scientist who once said: "I woke up one morning, and all of my stuff had been stolen and replaced by exact duplicates." His mind sees things differently than most of us do. Here are some of his gems : * * 1 - I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize. 2- Half the people you know are below average. 3 - 99% of lawyers give the rest a bad name. 4 - 82.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot. 5 - A conscience is what hurts when all your other parts feel so good. 6- A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory. 7 - All those who believe in psycho kinesis, raise my hand. 8 - I almost had a psychic girlfriend once... But she left me before we met. 9 - OK, so what's the speed of dark? 10 - How do you tell when you're out of invisible ink? 11 - Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm. 12 - When everything is coming your way, you're in the wrong lane. 13 - Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy. 14 - I intend to live forever... So far, so good. 15 - If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends? 16 - Eagles may soar, but foxes don't get sucked into jet engines. 17 - What happens if you get scared half to death twice? 18 - My mechanic told me, "I couldn't repair your brakes, so I made your horn louder." 19 - Why do psychics have to ask you for your name. 20 - A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking. 21 - Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it. 22 - The hardness of the butter is proportional to the softness of the bread. 23 - To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research. 24 - If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you. And my all-time favorite: 25 - If your car could travel at the speed of light, would your headlights work? * *

I've been saving this story for several weeks now, until all the agitated energies of Christmas, New Year’s, the family gatherings and mini-feuds,… have all had a chance to subside. I've always found that in contrast, the space which reveals itself after all this ‘social dust’ has settled is a much quieter, clearer, more introspective place to be in. It’s mid January, the deepest part of winter. Everything in nature, all the plant world and most of our fellow animal inhabitants … are all conserving energy in slow, ‘tick-over’ mode. So, often my mind gets attracted to a different style of story – like the one below. It too, is slower. It was written at a time when the people’s view of the world and of human and societal relationships, were radically different than they are today. “A Pattern of Islands” was written almost exactly a hundred years ago, just before the First World War – the war which ended forever a world where half a dozen European imperialist countries battled each other to carve up virtually every country in the world into one of their empires. Today, few people are able to look back on that era without experiencing a 'slightly guilty' sense of shame. Yet from another, more detached, purely historical point of view, it was simply another phase of history no different than the Greek, Roman, Persian, or Ottoman Empires. Not intrinsically any more or less interesting than the times of Genghis Khan, or the settling of the American West or Australia, (both of which processes depended on first overpowering, then destroying, the native cultures which had lived in those areas for millenia beforehand). Nevertheless, despite the shocking cultural genocide our ancestors so freely engaged in, undeniably there was exactly the same range of people and personality types in those times as there are now. There were equally as many kind and highly admirable human beings out walking in the streets as there are now. They just happened to be born at a time when, one hundred years later, a future generation would heartily disapprove of them. Yet, can we who by chance find ourselves alive now in this ever-moving window of time, truly imagine ourselves to be free from the possibility of being held in a similar, (or even worse) regard by those who will be looking back at us a century further on ? Anyway, this an autobiographical story written by an exceptionally kind-hearted young man who happened to be born in the very last days of empire, and who went off to serve his country and fellow men in a post that turned out to be almost the embodiment of many people’s dreams: a cluster of remote, tropical, Polynesian islands. The book that these few opening chapters are taken from, I feel is an absolute gem. Simply by decoding the record left behind by Arthur Grimble’s words on paper, we are able to transport ourselves to a romantic world and time vastly different from our own – yet one which is seen through the eyes of a person who is surprisingly, not very far removed from our own nature. He too, was a fellow lover of humanity. * * * OLD MAN OF THE COLONIAL OFFICE I was nominated to a cadetship in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Protectorate at the end of 1913. The cult of the great god Jingo was as yet far from dead. Most English households of the day took it for granted that nobody could be always right, or ever quite right, except an Englishman. The Almighty was beyond doubt Anglo-Saxon, and the popular conception of Empire resultantly simple. Dominion over palm and pine (or whatever else happened to be noticeably far-flung) was the heaven-conferred privilege of the Bulldog Breed. Kipling had said so. The colonial possessions, as everyone so frankly called them, were properties to be administered, first and last, for the prestige of the little lazy isle where the trumpet-orchids blew. Kindly administered, naturally - nobody but the most frightful bounder could possibly question our sincerity about that - but firmly too, my boy, firmly too, lest the school-children of Empire forgot who were the prefects and who the fags. Your uncles – meaning every man Jack of your father's generation, uncle or not, who cared to take you by the ear - all said you'd never be a leader if you weakened on that point. It was terrifying, the way they put it, for Stalky represented their ideal of dauntless youth, and you loathed Stalky with his Company as much as you feared him; but you were a docile young man, and, as his devotees talked, you felt the seeds of your unworthiness sprouting into shameful view through every crack in your character. The Colonial Office spoke more guardedly than your uncles. It began by saying that, as a cadet officer, you were going to be on probation for three years. To win confirmation as a member of the permanent administrative staff, you would have to pass within that time certain field-examinations in law and native language. This seemed plain and fair enough, but then came the rider. I forget how it was conveyed, whether in print or by word of mouth; but the gist of it was that you could hardly hope to be taken on as a permanent officer unless, over and above getting through your examinations, you could manage to convince your official chiefs overseas that you possessed qualities of leadership. The abysmal question left haunting you was - did the Colonial Office mean leadership in the same sense as Kipling and your uncles? If it did, and if you were anything like me, you were scuppered. I was a tallish, pinkish, long-nosed young man, fantastically thin-legged and dolefully mild of manner. Nobody could conceivably have looked, sounded or felt less like a leader of any sort than I did at the age of twenty-five. Apart from my dislike of the genus Stalky, I think the only positive things about me were a consuming hunger for sea-travel and a disastrous determination to write sonnets. The sonnet-writing had been encouraged by Arthur Christopher Benson at Cambridge; the wanderlust had started to gnaw at my vitals at school, when I read that essay of Froude's, “England's Forgotten Worthies" - especially the part of it that pictured how Humphrey Gilbert met his end in the ten-ton "frigate" Squirrel, sitting abaft with a book in his hand, "giving signs of joy" to his fellow-adventurers in the Golden Hinde and roaring at them through the wild Atlantic gale that engulfed him, "We are as near heaven by sea as by land", so often as they approached within hearing. I tried at Cambridge to cram some of my feelings about that, and the sea's lure in general, into a sonnet of dubious form: She called them with the voices of far lands And with the flute-like whispering of reeds, With scents of coral where the tide recedes, With thunderous echoes of deserted strands. She babbled the barbaric lilt of tongues Heard brokenly in dreams; she strung the light Of swarthy-smouldering gems across the night; She wrung their hearts with haunting of strange songs. She witched them with her ancient sorceries And lo! they knew the terrible joy of ships Gone questing where the moon's last footstep is, And stars hold passionless converse overhead While mariners are drawn with writhen lips Down, down, deep down, among her voiceless dead. Arthur Benson was pained at the rhyme-pattern of the octave, but said the thing sounded sincere and showed promise. I was unwise enough to bring his kindly letter to the notice of some of my uncles. They only said he ought to have known better; after all, he had had every chance, dammit, as the son of an Archbishop ! So, Benson, as a moral prop, was out. But I had acquired at school and Cambridge some kind of competence at cricket and other sports, which kept them always hoping for the best. When I became, first secretary, and then, in the normal course, captain of my college cricket XI, they began to believe I really might be on my way to vertebrate life. But they could not have been more deeply mistaken. As secretary, I invariably took orders from the captain; as captain, I invariably took orders from the secretary, while the team invariably played the game as if neither of us was there. The worst of it was, I loved it. If ever I had previously entertained a notion that I might enjoy ordering people around, that experience certainly disabused me of it. The fear of being packed home from the Gilbert and Ellice Islands in disgrace, after three years of probation, for having failed to become the kind of leader my uncles wanted me to be, began to give me nightmares. A moment came when I felt that the instant sack for some honest admission of my own ineptitude would be easier to bear than that long-drawn-out ignominy. In any case, I decided, someone at the top ought to be warned of my desperate resolve never to become like Stalky. It sounded rather fine, and lonely, and stubborn, put like that; but I fear I didn't live up to the height of it. I did, indeed, secure an interview at the Colonial Office, but my nearest approach to stubbornness with the quiet old gentleman who received me there was to confess, with a gulp in my throat, that the imaginary picture of myself in the act of meting out imperial kindness-but-firmness to anybody, anywhere in the world, made me sweat with shame. The quiet old gentleman was Mr. Johnson, a Chief Clerk in the department which handled the affairs of Fiji and the Western Pacific High Commission. That discreet title of his (abandoned today in favour of Principal and Secretary) gave no hint of the enormous penetrating Power of his official word. In the Western and Central Pacific alone, his modest whisper from behind the throne of authority had power to affect the destinies of scores of races in hundreds of islands scattered over millions of square miles of ocean. I was led to him on a bleak afternoon of February 1914, high up in the gloomy Downing Street warren that housed the whole Colonial Office staff of those days. The air of his cavernous room enfolded me with the chill of a mortuary as I entered. He was a spare little man with a tenuous sandy beard and heavily tufted eyebrows of the same colour. He stood before the fire, slightly bent in the middle like a monkey-nut, combing his beard with one fragile hand and elevating the tails of his cut-away coat with the other, as he listened to my story. I can see him still, considering me over his glasses with the owlish yet not unkindly stare of an undertaker considering a corpse. (Senior officials in the Colonial Office don't wear beards today, but they still cultivate that way of looking at you.) When I was done, he went on staring a bit; then he heaved a quiet sigh, ambled over to a bookcase, pottered there breathing hard for a long while (I think now he must have been laughing), and eventually hauled out a big atlas, which he carried to his desk. "Let us see, now," he murmured, settling into his chair, "let us see .. . yes . . . let us go on a voyage of discovery together. Where . . . precisely . . . are the Gilbert and Ellice Islands ? If you will believe me, I have often been curious to know." He started whipping over the pages of the atlas; I could do nothing but goggle at him while he pursued his humiliating research. "Ah !" he chirruped at last, "here we have them: five hundred miles of islands lost in the wide Pacific. Remote . . . I forbear, in tenderness for your feelings, from saying anything so Kiplingesque as far-flung. Do we agree to say remote and not far-flung ?" He cocked his wicked little eye at me. I made sounds in my throat, and he went on at once, "Remote . . . yes . . . and romantic . . . romantic ! Eastwards as far as ship can sail . . . up against the gateways of the dawn . . . coconut- palms, but of course ,not pines, ha-ha ! . . . the lagoon islands, the Line Islands, Stevenson's islands ! Do we accept palms, not pines ? Do we stake our lives on Stevenson, not Kipling? Do we insist upon the dominion of romance, not the romance of dominion ? I should appreciate your answer." I joyfully accepted Stevenson and ruled Kipling out (except, of course, for Puck of Pook's Hill and Kim, and the Long Trail, and others too numerous to mention) ; but my callowness squirmed shamefully at romance. He became suddenly acid at that: "Come, come! You owe perhaps more to your romanticism than you imagine - your appointment as a cadet, for example." The truth was, according to him, that I had been the only candidate to ask for the job in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. But for that . . . if, in fact, I had been up against the least competition . . . well . . . who could say ? As I, for one, could not, he leaned back in his chair and fired a final question at me: "I may take it, may I not, that, despite certain doubts which you entertain about the imperialism of Mr. Kipling and . . . hm. . . a great many of your betters, you still nurse your laudable wish to go to the Central Pacific ?" I replied yes, sir, certainly, sir, but how was I going to tackle this thing about leadership, sir. He peered at me incredulously, rose at once, and lifted his coat-tails again at the fire, as if I had chilled whatever it was. "I had imagined," he confided in a thin voice to the ceiling, "that I had already - and with considerable finesse - managed to put all that in its right perspective for this queer young man." "However," he continued, after a long and, to me, frightful silence, "let us dot our i's and cross our t's. The deplorable thing about your romanticism is that you display it as a halo around your own head. You seem to think that, when you arrive in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, the entire population will forthwith stop work to stand with bated breath awaiting your apotheosis as a leader among them." The blend of venomous truth and ghastly unfairness in this bit deep into my young soul; I opened my mouth to protest, but he overrode me: "You permit me to proceed ? Thank you. Now, believe me, your egocentric surmise is grotesquely incorrect. You will encounter out there a number of busy men interested primarily in only one thing about you, namely, your ability to learn and obey orders. These will severely deplore any premature motion of your own to order them - or, in fact, anybody else - about. They will expect you to do as you are told – neither more nor less - and to do it intelligently. In the process of learning how to obey orders with intelligence and good cheer, you may, we hope, succeed in picking up some first, crude notions about the true nature of leadership. I say 'we hope' because that is the gamble we, in the Colonial Office, have taken on you. Kindly do your best to justify it." Though his tone had been as cutting as his words, the flicker of a smile had escaped once or twice, as if by permission, through his beard. I got the notion that the smiles meant, “You incredible young ass ! Can’t you see, this is the way round to put it to your uncles ?" But when I gave him back a timid grin, he asked me sharply why. I answered sheepishly that he had eased my mind, because truly, truly I didn't want to go ordering anybody round any more than he wanted me to. At that, his manner changed again to one of sprightly good humour. He began to tell me a whole lot of things about a cadet’s training in the field (or, at least, the training he thought I was destined to get in the Central Pacific) that nobody else had ever hinted at. As I understood the burden of it, it was that I would spend my first year or so of probation on Ocean Island, the administrative capital of the protectorate, where I would be passed from department to department of the public service to learn in successive order, from a series of rugged but benevolent Heads (all. of whom quite possibly harboured a hidden passion for the writings of R.L.S.), the basic functions of the Secretariat, the Treasury, the Magistrate's Court, the Customs, the Works Department, the Police, the post Office, and the prisons organization. I don't know what magic he used - he certainly never spoke above a chirp ; but he managed to make that arid list of departmental names roll from his lips like the shouting of golden trumpets upon my ear. I had a vision as he spoke: the halo he had mentioned burst into sudden glory around my head. . . . . . . It was dawn. I was hurrying, loaded with papers of the utmost import, through the corridors of a vast white office building set on an eminence above a sapphire ocean. I had been toiling all night with the Chief Secretary, the Treasurer, the Magistrate, the Collector of Customs, the Commissioner of Works, the Chief of Police, the Postmaster General, and the Keeper of the Prison. The job was done ! I had pulled them all through. Just in time ! There in the bay below lay a ship with steam up, waiting for final orders. I opened a door. A man with a face like a sword - my beloved Chief, the Resident Commissioner himself—sat tense and stern-eyed at his desk. His features softened swiftly as he saw me: "Ah . . . you, Grimble . . . at last !" He eagerly scanned my papers: "Good man . . . good man! It's all there. I knew I could trust you. 'Where shall I sign ? … God, how tired I am !" "Sign here, sir. . . I'll see to everything else … leave it all to me.'' My voice was very quiet, quiet but firm . . . … and remember this,"-broke in the voice of Mr. Johnson, "a cadet is a nonentity." The vision fled. The reedy voice persisted: "A cadet washes bottles for those who are themselves merely junior bottle-washers. Or so he should assess his own importance, pending his confirmation as a permanent officer." He must have seen something die in my face, for he added at once, "Not that this should unduly discourage you. All Civil Servants, of whatever seniority, are bottle-washers of one degree or another. They have to learn humility. Omar Khayyam doubtless had some over-ambitious official of his own epoch chiefly in mind when he wrote 'and think that, while thou art, thou art but what thou shalt be, NOTHING: thou shalt not be less.' Sane advice, especially for cadets ! Nevertheless, you would do well to behave, in the presence of your seniors, with considerably less contempt for high office than Omar seems to have felt. Your approach to your Resident Commissioner, for example, should preferably suggest the attitude of one who humbly aspires to 'pluck down, proud clod, the neck of God'." Who was I, to question the rightness of this advice? I certainly felt no disposition to do so then (I don't remember having felt any since) and, as he showed no further wish to pursue the topic, I passed to another that had been on my mind. A marriage had been arranged. My pay as a cadet would be £3oo a year, plus free furnished quarters. Did he think a young married couple could live passably well on that at Ocean Island ? I pulled out a written list of questions about the local cost of living. At the word "marriage" he started forward with a charming smile, light-stepping as a faun, whisked the paper from my hand, laid it on the mantelpiece, and turned back to face me: "Ah …romance . . . romance again," he breathed, "a young couple … hull-down on the trail of rapture . . . the islands of desire . . ' but there is method, too . . . let us look before we leap . . . the cost of living ! A businesslike approach. Very proper. Well. . . now. . . hmm . . . yes . . . my personal conjecture is that you should find the emoluments adequate for your needs, provided always, of course, that you neither jointly nor severally acquire the habit of consuming vast daily quantities of champagne and caviar. Remember, for the rest . . . in your wilderness . . . how the ravens fed Elijah . . . or was it Elisha ?" And that was that about the cost of living. I was too timid to recover my list from the mantelpiece. Thus finally primed in the Colonial Office for exploding as a bottle-washer upon the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, I sailed with Olivia from England on March 6th, 1914. PACIFIC TRAMP We reached Australia in a liner designed for the delight of passengers; we wallowed out of Sydney harbour, towards the end of April, in a craft of more romantic dedication. She was Burns, Philp and Company's steamship Moresby, a typical Pacific tramp of those days - 1,3oo tons register, thirty-three years old, but still A1 at Lloyd's and still game to plug her stinking way at the rate of six knots through any weather to any palm-green shore where pearl-shell or beche-de-mer, shark-fins or copra were to be picked up. By the time we met her, her battered hull, surviving god-knows-how-many hurricanes at sea and casualties by reef or shoal, had puffed with unconquerable patience across three-quarters of a million miles of empty ocean (by the captain's reckoning) and pushed its grimy nose through every remotest archipelago of the Pacific. The captain, a minute Cockney as way-worn but steadfast as his ship, would talk to us for hours about her achievements, his brown eyes tender with love; but the chief of all her virtues for him was her iron hull. "Look at those lovely plates!" he would exclaim, pointing to the incredibly buckled decks, "all bent to hell, but not a leak in 'em anywhere! Because why? They're beautiful soft iron, not this-here cheap steel. She can knock her way into lagoons through horse's heads-and coral mushrooms . . . crack-crack, like that, port and starboard, the dear old what-not, just taking a few more dunts in her old bottom but never springing a blanky leak anywhere." A sweet old lady she was, he always finished up, a sweet old lady. She must have been, in her fashion, for the memory of her still tugs somehow at my heart; but she had not been designed for the comfort of landlubbers like us, nor had her business occasions sweetened the smell of her for our kind of noses. She reeked of dead shark, putrid oyster and rancid copra from stem to stern of her aged body, and the ruinous wooden hutch on the forward well-deck where we tried to sleep was undoubtedly the chief concentrating-point of all her odours. Then, too, there were the cockroaches. Those three-and-a-half-inch monsters, fattened on the oily refuse that clotted every crevice of the holds, swarmed up at night into our bunks, looking for a change of diet. Pacific cockroaches eat feet. They would willingly devour any other exposed part of the human body, for that matter, if one let them; but the tickle of a dozen or so on a hand or face usually wakes a sleeper before they can get down to a meal. A foot, though, is a different proposition; the thick skin on the sole is insensitive, and the victim feels nothing until they have gnawed that down to the quick. When he does wake, the ball and heel have been stripped pink, and he hobbles for the next week or so, to the exquisite enjoyment of all true sailormen and shell-backs. I know, because it happened to me in the Moresby. It was then that I heard for the first time that side-splitting joke, so gloatingly reiterated by shell-backs for the comfort of greenhorns: "Take it easy, son: it's only the first ten years in the islands that's hell !" We did learn later to accept cockroaches as domestic pets (or almost) for, in the Gilbert Islands, whenever foul weather threatened, whole rustling clouds of them would come flying into the house for refuge. Once lodged, they stayed for weeks; so we decided at last to count them in as an essential ingredient of Pacific romance - it was either that, or die of daily horror – and our only incurable pedantry about them in the long run was to keep them, if or when possible, out of the soup. It was fortunate, nevertheless, that we did not reach this stage of civilization in the Moresby, because, but for our first maniac terror of the brutes, we might never have slept on deck. The captain had strong ideas about the propriety of such a thing for a young woman. Nothing but our most haggard entreaties persuaded him to let us, at last, drag our mattresses up to the boat-deck amidships. Once we were there, however, he gave us a tarpaulin sheet for extra cover against rain squalls. We needed it a lot at first, but the weather cleared as we slid past the Santa Cruz group; and then we found out what it was to lie at night overleaned by nothing but a firmament of flaming stars - for the tropic stars did fame for us, just as the travel books had promised. The nights were amethyst clear and cool. Eddies of warm air, loaded with earth scents and jungle dreams from islands beyond sight, enmeshed us and were gone again. The swing of the old ship was so quiet, she seemed to be poised moveless while the stars themselves were rocking to the croon of the bow-wave, back and forth above her mastheads, as we lay tranced with watching. There were Gilbertese deck-hands in the crew, copper-skinned boys, thick muscled and short in the leg but as active as cats in the rigging. They were shy with strangers, stern-featured and remote-looking when they worked alone. We thought them dour folk until we saw them get together. That was somewhere on the edge of the tropics, when the trousers and jerseys that had veiled the glorious moulding of their bodies had been discarded for the belted waist-cloths, trimmed to the knee, of ordinary island wear. They had been called to the forecastle-head to heave an anchor inboard for cleaning. We saw them cluster in silence, a group of bronze statues by the cat-heads, while the boatswain's mate, an Ocean Islander, interpreted the first mate's talk. There was hardly a move and never the hint of a smile among them until the officer walked away. We wondered why he had left them standing so unresponsive there; but "you watch 'em" said the captain. Magically, as he spoke, the tough masks relaxed and were turned with grins towards one man of their number - not their official leader, the boatswain's mate, but a massive, towering fellow, who still stood utterly smileless. The captain said he was their licensed wag: it was up to him and nobody else on board to start things humming. He had his joke all ready cooked up behind those brooding eyes. It was a crack, as we heard later, of the most joyous ribaldry about the ancestry of anchors; he delivered himself of it in a high feminine shriek, tottering towards the side in perfect simulation of senility. The air suddenly rang with answering laughter; the crew leapt alive; the anchor came aboard in no time to the accompaniment of hoots and horse-play. When the job was finished, they stood around holding hands and chattering for a while, to look at what they had done, like satisfied children or artists well pleased with their handiwork. Then, one by one, they drifted off to their separate tasks, each wrapped again in the cloak of his austere silence. One evening, we heard them singing on the forecastle-head. We could make out, from where we listened, a circle of sitting shapes, their torsos stippled in black against the night sky. Their heads and shoulders were bowed, their voices muted; the queer inflections of their chant were cadenced, even for our alien ears, with grief beyond bearing. We knew it could not be one of the ancient island sagas of war or wonder-voyage that we had read about. We were to hear many of those later, triumphally intoned, in the packed meeting-houses of the Gilberts; but this was a new song and a sad song made by one of the crew for love of his cruel lady. I got the words of it from Teburea, the boatswain's mate, before we left the ship. He wrote them down for me and I still have the paper; here is the ungarnished translation of them: I am sore-hearted for you, Do not make me kill myself How great is my frustration Because you give me no reward! I am sad, I am sad, But I can hide my sadness from you, If you will only say that one day Perhaps I shall have my reward. Teburea told me that the suffering poet could not, for shame of seeming boastful, himself join in the singing. His part was to teach his song to friends who loved him, and sit weeping in their circle while they sang it for him. They too wept as they sang, Teburea said, because they knew their tears would make their friend a little happy, and because the words were very beautiful, and because all of them were sick for their own sweethearts, over there across the sea to eastward. Or perhaps, if they were not sick for sweethearts, they wanted to see their father and mother again. "Me sick, too, for my old man," Teburea finished simply (I know now that he meant his adoptive grandfather), "he love me too much; me love him too much, too," and walked away. It began to dawn on me then that, beyond the teeming romance that lies in the differences between men - the diversity of their homes, the multitude of their ways of life, the dividing strangeness of their faces and tongues, the thousand-fold mysteries of their origins - there lies the still profounder romance of their kinship with each other, a kinship that springs from the immutable constancy of man's need to share laughter and friendship, poetry and love in common. A man may travel a long road, and suffer much loneliness, before he makes that discovery. Some, groping along dark byways, never have the good fortune to stumble upon it. But I was luckier than most. The islands I had chosen blindly, for the only reason that they were romantically remote, were peopled by a race who, despite the old savagery of their wars and the grimness born of their endless battle with the sea, were princes in laughter and friendship, poetry and love. Something in the simple way Teburea had spoken of that love song and the singing of it gave me a sudden inkling of things to come. I felt in my bones I was going to a place that, for all its remoteness, would prove to be no strange land for me. ISLAND OF DUST AND DREAMS We raised Ocean Island, via Solomon Island ports, on the morning of our seventeenth day out of Sydney. It was one of those burning days of the doldrums, when the sea is glassy but not still. The solemn swells that came pulsing up out of the south were unruffled by any breath of wind, but the huge heave of them told of storms far away. The ship swung dizzily from valley to burnished mountain-crest and back again to shining valley as she laboured her way up to the island. We heard the boom of the breakers from miles offshore as they crashed upon the reef. It was a sound new to our ears, a note of majesty once heard, forever remembered. It seemed unbelievable that the sweep of that thunderous attack could fail to engulf the tiny lump of land - not 2,ooo acres of it in all - so forlornly crouched between the vastitudes of sky and sea. The shudder of Ocean Island's narrow reef to the shock of the surf is familiar to people who live there. The old fishermen who used to dwell in the waterside villages would whisper to each other, when they felt it, "Behold, Tabakea moves a little !" Tabakea was the great turtle at the bottom of the sea, who balanced on his back the thin column of rock that carried their home like a coral mushroom-head on its top. One day, they believed, Tabakea would move too much, and Baanaba (The Rock-Land - that was their name for it) would topple over and be engulfed in the roaring waters. But the thought did not trouble them mightily, for they knew that their hero ancestor, the far-voyager, the all-conquering warrior and lover, Au-of-the-Rising-Sun, who had pinned Tabakea down when his people had made the place their home, would see them safely through the end. Every new dawn was his repeated guarantee of that. So, when someone whispered, "Tabakea moves a little", it was enough to answer, "The Sun rises !" for everyone to be comforted again. And, awaiting the end, they treated the imprisoned giant as a friend and helper, as was only proper, because he too was an ancestor; the Turtle had been the god of the men whom the People of Au had overwhelmed, and so also the god of their widows and daughters. These had been taken to wife by the womanless invading horde for the raising of a new stock on Baanaba. But their subjection had not made them false to the faith of their fathers; their constancy saw to it that the children they bore to the invaders should inherit the cult of the Turtle not less than the cult of the conquering Sun-hero. Though Au remained the triumphant Lord of Heaven (Tau-karawa, the Holder-of-the-Skies), Tabakea sidled his way through the nurseries at sea-level, so to speak, into the daily life of the people. He became Tau-marawa, the Holder-of-the-Ocean. It was to him that the new generation turned to Pray for good fishing, and, above all, for safe goings and comings through the dangers of Baanaba's terrible reef. The fishermen's notion that the land was perched on a column of rock was not so very wide of the truth. Ocean Island is nothing but the tip of a vast pinnacle upthrust out of the depths. At two cables' lengths out from the reef in Home Bay, there is a little ledge a hundred fathoms down, over which ships can- tie up in fine weather to colossal buoys that carry the world's deepest moorings. Only a bare half-dozen cables' lengths farther to seaward, the bottom has plunged to nearly two thousand fathoms. In other words, the hundred-fathom mooring-ground is a mere niche by the pinnacle's crest, chipped out of a two-mile precipice that soars almost sheer from the ocean's abysses. It may be not even a niche, but a cornice of reef-coral overhanging the black deeps. If that be so, it follows that the island's cliffs have slipped six hundred feet lower today than once they stood, for the polyp that builds reef-coral is a creature of the light - its extreme living depth is within one hundred and twenty feet of the surface. It is sure, it any case, that the towering pinnacle has been the plaything of vast movements in the ocean's depths. Aeons ago, its crest must have lain under water, yet just near enough to the top for the reef-building polyps to live there, for it was capped in that age with a platform of coral rock. Perhaps, when the reef broke surface after countless centuries of growth, the grinding of the surf for countless further centuries of disintegration formed a bank of coral sand upon it; or perhaps there was simply a sudden upheaval of the peak to tremendous heights above the sea. Whichever it was, that solitary perch in the midst of the mighty waters became the sanctuary of unnumbered sea birds. There were so many of them, and they stayed for so long, that their droppings covered the coral platform with a bed of guano forty feet deep and tens of millions of tons heavy. That was the age of birds; it was ended by a subsidence; the island disappeared, and the age of fishes began. One relic that remains for man out of the era of engulfment is the fossil tooth of a shark so enormous that a motor lorry could be driven through its reconstructed jaws. The heaped bird-droppings, overlaid by the rich refuse of the depths, suffered a sea-change from guano into phosphate of lime. Then again the ocean's bed was convulsed, and the coral platform with its load of precious phosphate was pushed three hundred feet above the water. It did not sink again. Now generations of polyps got to work to build a cornice of reef around the island's foot; birds flew in from places afar bearing seeds in their feathers; the land was covered in scrub that rotted, and grew, and rotted again, to form a topsoil of black earth; a forest of great calophyllum trees appeared on the heights. Maybe it was not so very many millions of years after the last upheaval that seafaring men - the People of Tabakea, the People of Au, and who knows what other land-hungry swarms before them - arrived and built their villages above the south-west facing bay. Only a few score centuries more were to pass from then until the Pacific Islands Trading Company, scouring the archipelagos for cargoes of guano, chanced upon the vast deposit saved on Ocean Island out of the gulfs of time. The Company, never a very rich concern, was tottering towards financial collapse in the late eighteen-nineties. Its old ship, the Ocean Queen, sailing out of Melbourne, Australia, had helped to rake all the known guano-islands of the Western Pacific clean of their deposits by that time; persistent search had failed to discover any worthwhile new sources; a day came when the directors knew that a single speculative voyage would probably land them in the bankruptcy court. They decided to go out of business before worse happened. It was a bleak look-out for everyone at the table. They called in young Albert Ellis, the super-cargo of the Ocean Queen, and broke the gloomy news to him. But Albert had a bright bee in his bonnet. Their sad looks only made it buzz the louder. "'Wait a minute ... wait a minute !" he shouted, dashed out of the room and returned at a run carrying in his hand a queer-looking chunk of putty-coloured rock. Everyone recognized it. He had used it for several years to prop open the door of his office. "This," he said, "was given me by a friend, who picked it up at Ocean Island. I believe. . . ." "Yes, yes," they cut him short wearily, "you needn't go on." He had said the same thing before, a dozen, a hundred times. He believed the rock might have phosphate of lime in it. But they believed otherwise. They were so certain he was wrong, nobody had ever even thought of having the thing analysed. They scoffed at his plea for an analysis now, at the eleventh hour. "Fortune doesn't play fairy-godmother tricks these days, boy," they said: "Now drop it and hop it." But he was not to be put off this time. He could ill afford to pay for an analysis himself, but he rode his hunch and took the rock to an expert. A week or so later, he stalked into the directors' room again and reported what he had done. "I'm not asking for a refund of the fee," he told the astonished board, "because I think you're going to raise my pay quite soon." "My poor boy," answered the fatherly managing director, "you shall certainly have your money back. Foolish as you were, you acted in our interests and you shan't lose by it. But we can't raise your pay. The firm is closing down." "Oh-no-it's-not!" shouted the irrepressible Albert. "You just take a look at this report," and slapped the paper on the table. The analyst had recorded a ninety per cent phosphoric acid reaction to his tests. The rock was made of the purest phosphate of lime yet discovered in a natural state by man. On the strength of that report, a Melbourne bank granted an overdraft that enabled the Company to send the Ocean Queen prospecting up to Ocean Island. She returned, her holds crammed with the putty-coloured rock, bought piecemeal from the Baanabans in exchange for tobacco, beads, knives, prints, and calico. The profits from this first yield paid for a better-fitted second voyage; and so on; the business never looked back. The Pacific Islands Trading Company became the millionaire Pacific Phosphate Company; this, in its turn, was converted into the British Phosphate Company, which again, a few years later, became the British Phosphate Commissioners, a nationalized industry owned jointly by the governments of Britain, Australia and New Zealand. Albert Ellis finished his career as Sir Albert, a Knight of the Order of the British Empire and Phosphate Commissioner for New Zealand. The romance of the Company, however, was far from being the first point to strike us as the old Moresby brought us lurching into Home Bay. What stood out initially was a dreadful, corrugated-iron factory building above the water-front, from which enormous clouds of dust were being thrown sky-high. It was the crushing-mill of the Company, busy pulverizing its daily quota of a thousand tom of phosphate rock for the export market. The dust it flung up drifted heavily down the still air, to load all the greenery of the island's flank with a grey pall. Its belchings seemed to us as grossly out of place as a series of eructations in the face of the infinite. Yet the major impertinence was ours; the unmannerly monster we saw before us was helping to keep a million acres of pasture-land green in Australia and New Zealand; and, but for its disfiguring industry on Ocean Island, there would have been little enough revenue to maintain services for the thirty thousand Gilbertese and Ellice folk who lived by their bright lagoons in the atolls to east and south. But, though the first shock of our disappointment was tempered by no such mature reflections, we did not have to stand nursing our peevishness for long; a boat was riding the mighty procession of swells a mile offshore, awaiting our arrival. The ship swung to give it a lee, and Methven came aboard. Stuartson Collard Methven was the Officer-in-Charge of Police, Ocean Island. It was not his business, as such, to board ships for the Customs, or the Post Office, or anybody else. But there were Ellice Islanders in the police force, and no race in that ocean of sea-princes ever produced a more superb breed of surf-riders than theirs. So it was a hand-picked crew of Ellice Island policemen who manned the Government's boat for every purpose, and where they went Methven went too, in whatever weather. That is the sort of man he really was; he and his wife Ruby were to be our very dear friends a little later; but he was not actually bursting with bonhomie that day. The mails from the Moresby were, of course, worth coming our for, but the idea of hoiking ashore a curio called a cadet – a phenomenon until then most happily unknown in the Central Pacific - and his wife (heaven pity her whoever she might be), and their frightful luggage scratching the boat's beautiful paintwork to hell . . . well, I ask you, he said. We know he said it, because Ruby told us so in due course, and anyhow, we saw it sticking out of every angular Scottish inch of his six-foot-three, as he walked up to us like a one-man procession in resplendent ducks. "I am Methven," he opened, and added after a pause, "the Police Officer," with the courteous grimness of an executioner announcing his functions. "If you are the new What's-It from England, I'm to take you ashore, Will you please introduce me to your wife, . . . Thank you. . . . And is that your dunnage down there?" When I explained that there was still a big box to come from the baggage room, he exclaimed, "Oh, my God !" in a high, shaken whisper, and walked away to give some orders. On his return, he said, "I suppose you've seen to the Way Bill," and when I asked what the Way Bill was, he whispered "Oh, my God !" again, falsetto, but allowed me to gather that the thing was a kind of receipt for the mails, which I should have saved him the trouble of signing. So I went and did it at once, and that was my very first official gesture in the service of His Majesty overseas. I felt the job had been done with considerable éclat until Methven asked me if I had counted the mail-bags I had signed for. When I said I hadn't, he exclaimed "Oh, my God !" yet again, but this time on a bass note strangled with suffering. The top end of a Jacob's ladder hung over a ship's side is the only part of it made fast to anything. It follows that, when the ship rolls towards that side, the bottom end swings gaily out over the depths, only to crash back against the plates when the roll is reversed. The terror of the landsman at the bottom end is the greater or less in proportion to the extravagance of the rolling. Olivia was near the bottom when the prize-winning outward swing happened. The accompanying downward plunge caused an uprush of air beneath her skirts which lifted them over her head. Skirts were worn voluminous in those days; Olivia's got so firmly entangled with her hat that the downward draught caused by the following upward rush failed to dislodge them. She groped her way blind after that, through a series of sick swings and crashes, until her questing feet found no more steps to step upon, and she was left dangling in the void by her hands only, for somebody to do something about. It was Methven who did it. He grabbed at one of her wild legs as they swung out at him, and gave a good strong jerk. She came apart from the ladder like plucked fruit, and hurtled down upon him. I saw him crumple under the impact and collapse beneath her in the stern sheets. His only remark when I got into the boat was that women ought to be careful to wear bloomers for occasions of that sort in the Pacific. I agreed with him cravenly. Olivia either did not hear him or was past caring, for she was being sick into the deep blue waters. The swells got steeper where the bottom rose towards the reef. As their racing slopes snatched up our stern and tossed it high, the oarsmen fought to keep pace with the forward 'scend of them, and the boat drove on, impossibly tilted, into valleys that forever fed away from under the plunging bows. But the bronze giant at the steer-oar stood easily poised on the tiny locker-deck behind us. His bare feet braced against the gunwales, he swung in lovely rhythm to the heave and thrust of the seas upon his oar, and sang aloud for the joy of his mastery as he brought the boat swooping like a gull towards the boat harbour. His voice cut across the crashing diapason of the surf with the gay challenge of a clarion. When we came to the very edge of the reef - so near it seemed nothing could stop our onrush into the maelstrom - he called of a sudden, "Easy !" The crew lay on their oars and waited. The passage into the boat harbour, a narrow channel blasted through the reef was a few lengths ahead, its entrance wide open to the giant seas. The lesser surfs were breaking short of the entrance, and the back-suck from the brimming basin - we could hear it snarling - fought their furious invasion to make a hell's cauldron of the passage. No boat could live in that raging battle of waters. The only safe way in was to ride on the crest of a wave so big that it would sweep the boat well down the passage before being undercut by the back-suck. We lay rearing and plunging while the steersman picked his wave. It came, house-high: "Pull !" he yelled as its forefoot lifted the stern. 'We shot forward; the crest swung us towering; the crew spent their last ounce of strength to hold it; we held it – we were riding Leviathan - we were flying - we were halfway down the passage. The crest began to topple and foam overside. The wave hollowed itself for breaking, and the boat's nose was pushed out into the void over its forefoot. There was a sizzling downward rush through ruin as it collapsed; the sea came boiling in over the gunwales ; the life went out of the boat; we were labouring, half waterlogged. But we were safe in the still water of the boat harbour. Methven had sat bolt upright through all this, with a look of petrified correctitude upon his countenance. It somehow emanated from his total silence that the people of his clan regarded the demeanour of a royal mummy as the only proper one to adopt in the presence of the sea's contemptible nonsenses. Nevertheless, we supposed he actually had noticed something a bit out of the ordinary that day, because he did turn to the happily smiling steersman and murmur, "Nice work, Sergeant Kaipati, very nice indeed !" before we tottered up the steps of the boat jetty. From the boat jetty we climbed again, up the steep incline of a narrow-gauge cable-way which handled all the Company's imports in those times. The first terrace in the island's westward slopes was at the top. There stood the Company's trade-store and office. Strung out farther to the left, above the curve of Home Bay, were the electric power house, the machine shop, the crushing mills, the drying plant, the cold storage works, and the locations of the thousand or so Gilbert Islanders, Ellice Islanders and Japanese who worked under indenture as mechanics or boatmen, carpenters or miners for the Company. The bungalows of the European staff -forty or fifty of them maybe - straggled up the hillside above, pleasantly scattered among trees. But along the fragrant quarter-mile of factory buildings and workshops, hardly a green thing was to be seen. We passed through the brazen heat and clamour of it ridiculously perched upon minute flat-cars furnished with benches far too high for safety. These were pushed by poles in the manner of punts - but at breakneck speed - along a narrow-gauge railway line. The benches were built to suit the length of Methven's legs, but not ours. He was propelled ahead of us alone, sitting purchased by his heels, whatsoever the angle or velocity of his car, as firm and majestic as a monument of Caledonia. We rocketed after him together, legs flying, and clutching at each other despairingly for lack of any other hold. Fat, apricot-coloured children near the line laughed with delight as we went whizzing by. I mention the journey because it was the occasion of my first considered resolve upon a matter of dignity in the service of His Majesty. I decided that, if it was given me to survive, I would have the height of at least one bench lowered, so as to accommodate it to the length of my own particular legs, not Methven's. But the pace slowed as we took the slight gradient beyond the locations; suddenly, too, we were out of the torrid glare and running in the latticed shade of palms. The din of machinery was magically snuffed out as we rounded a bend; the dwellings of a Baanaban village over-arched by palms came in sight on the seaward slopes below us. We caught glimpses, through twined shadow and sunlight, of crimson and cream hibiscus, of thatches raised on corner-posts, of neatly matted floors beneath them, of bronze bodies in brightly coloured loin-cloths. We heard the chatter of laughing women and the shouts of children across a murmur of surf that rose muted through the trees. Scents of gardenia and frangipani floated up to us mixed with savours of cooking. The grim civilisation of Home Bay lay forgotten, as though a thousand miles away. The village was gone again in half a minute, but its spell stayed with us. We felt we had passed, in that flash of time, through a miraculous gateway opened for us into the real, the homely heart of the Pacific. We reached the government siding and got down from our cars. A hundred yards up-hill from there, we came upon a squalid-looking wooden bungalow, without side-verandahs, perched among rocks. The rear edge of its floor squatted up against the hillside; the front edge was propped, visibly sagging, on concrete stilts. Part of the space between the stilts had been boxed in, and the hutch so formed, said Methven, was the Post Office. On the top side of the floor were all the other offices of the Headquarters Administration of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Protectorate, a total of three rooms. A typewriter had been installed in one of them. Nobody yet knew how to use it. It awaited introduction to me, but the pleasure would have to be delayed until Monday, as this was Saturday afternoon. So this was the vast white office building with corridors, etcetera, of my vision in London. But no - Methven must be pulling my leg. How could all those departments that Mr. Johnson had reeled off -the Secretariat, the Magistracy, the Treasury, the Customs, the Public Works, the Police Administration, the Prisons organization, not to speak of the Resident Commissioner's personal group of Secretaries and so forth – I mean to say, I said how could so many senior officers with their senior assistants, their junior assistants and all their respective clerical staff possibly be crowded together into three little rooms ? It clearly pleased Methven to answer that one. This wasn't a rabbit-warren like the Colonial Office, he explained. People worked here. There was first the Old Man (in other words, the Resident Commissioner) who operated as his own Chief Secretary, Private Secretary, District Officer and Magistrate, except, of course, when his wife interfered. The Secretariat, as I had called it, consisted of a Clerk. Presumably, when I spoke of the Treasurer, I meant the Accountant, who comprised the entire financial personnel, besides being the Postmaster General, the Collector of Customs, the staff of Landing Waiters, the Immigration Officer, and what-not-else of the kind. That made three Europeans, then came himself: he, as Police Officer, was in charge of the Prisons too, and, as the prisons supplied a labour force, it followed that he also functioned as Superintendent of Public Works, Chief Sanitary Inspector, Conservator of the Water Supply, and manager of about a million other things that pertained to the upkeep and welfare of the government station. Fifth, there was myself who (as everybody hoped) would be fairly divided between all of them from the word go, and not merely collared as a private slave by the Old Man. I gathered from his tone that there was a good deal of local feeling about that. We learned, further, as we trudged past the Police Barracks and Prison, up the steep mile to the Residency, that the rest of the Protectorate's European staff consisted of a doctor employed on Ocean Island by the Company, but subsidized by the Government for public health duties; another doctor in charge of a government hospital in Tarawa, 25o miles to eastward; and four District Officers scattered singly, at distances ranging from three to five hundred miles away from us, up and down the chain of the Gilbert and Ellice groups. It came to me then that, however else we might be maintaining dominion over palm and pine in this particular corner of the Empire, we certainly were not doing it by weight of numbers. This, in some strange way, easily compensated for the loss of my dream-office teeming with busy bureaucrats. And, besides, there was the music of the lovely island-names that had rolled from Methven's tongue -Butaritari, Tarawa, Abemama, Funafuti - Abemama above all, where Stevenson had lived a while and written. I mentioned his piece on the Gilbert Islands to Methven; "Never seen it," he replied (Oh, sprightly shade of Mr. Johnson !). "Here's the cricket field and there's the Residency straight ahead." 'We had reached an open plateau overlooking the tremendous emptiness of the ocean to South and West. The northern edge of the cricket ground lay cool beneath a green bank fringed with coconut-palms. Behind the palms stood the Residency, a pleasant white bungalow, backed by a towering forest of calophyllum trees. A slim white-clad figure was waiting for us at the top of the broad front steps. "That's the Old Man," said Methven: "he won't ask you to tea. Come and have some with us when he's finished with you." His voice was warm of a sudden, but he left us to go forward alone. OLD MAN OF OCEAN ISLAND Edward Carlyon Eliot, the Resident Commissioner, was struggling at the time of our arrival to improve the conditions that governed the mining of phosphate on Ocean Island. His aims were to secure for the Baanaban villagers an increase of the tonnage-royalties paid into a trust fund for their phosphate and to set up guards against the premature encroachment of the diggings upon their villages. He won his fight eventually in the teeth of much official misunderstanding. Fifteen years later, as Resident Commissioner myself, I was called to add a little to the foundations he had laid, and others added more after me. But it was mainly due to his courage and foresight between 1913 and 1920 that the Baanabans of 1945 found themselves in a position to buy an exquisite new home for themselves in the Fiji group and to migrate there in their own good time. I was greatly fortunate to have him as my first chief, for he was a personification of the protective spirit which did inspire the best servants of autocracy with benevolence in the field, whatever may be said today about the system of their allegiance. He was healthy for me in another way, too, though the pleasure of it was at the time not so obvious. The prospect of having a cadet to lick into shape did not entrance him. There were reasons for this. His parents had not been rich and, as a youth, he had been obliged to forgo for the sake of a brilliant elder brother in the Diplomatic Service a number of things that it hurt him to miss, including his hope of a university education. I never heard him complain of it, but the handicaps he had suffered and the very success with which he had overcome them had affected his attitude towards beginners. He had started his own official career, while still in his teens, as a clerk of the fifth grade in the civil service of a Caribbean colony. From that "back-stairs entrance to the Colonial Administrative Service," as he bitterly chose to call it, he had fought his way up by the time he was forty-one to be Resident Commissioner of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. His achievement had shown him that a university degree was by no means an essential preliminary to getting on in his profession, which was all to the good; but it had also left him with a basic contempt for beginnings less difficult than his own. His generosity, so ready in other directions, was not predisposed in favour of young men like myself, who came out from Downing Street (so he said) with reach-me-down official futures all ready packed in our suitcases. Another neat thing he used to shoot off about my species was that we thought we had been despatched across the starlit foam with special warrants in our pockets to dispense celestial wisdom direct from the Colonial Office to the benighted inhabitants of the Empire. As a matter of fact, there was a good deal more in this than an ironic twist of phrase. We were not at that time sent out trained in advance for liaison-work in the field, as cadets are trained today. Nor were the senior administrative officers in the Colonies who had themselves started as cadets always careful to bludgeon us into habits of co-operation with other departments. On the contrary. The result was the spread of a poisonous kind of snobbery throughout the administrative branch, which encouraged its members, young and old, to regard themselves as unquestionably superior, clay for clay, to the members of other branches. The internal frictions engendered by this attitude militated heavily against the effectiveness of inter-departmental collaboration in the field, often to the incalculable cost of colonial populations. A good many years were to pass before a system of pre-service training designed to avoid these evils came into being. But pending that kind of improvement from the Downing Street end, my Resident Commissioner was certainly taking no chances with the likes of me. He did not, of course, cram everything down my throat at our first talk; nor, as far as I know, had he any prepared series of deflationary utterances laid up in pickle for my education over the weeks and months to come. He proceeded, rather, by the catastrophic method. His most instructive sallies - I mean the ones that sank in deepest - always leapt out of him impromptu under the goad of my many stupidities. Nevertheless, he did give me quite an insight into his feelings on the day of our arrival. While Mrs. Eliot talked to Olivia on the front verandah, he took me into his office and sat me before his desk. He was a neat, slim man of medium height with the very black hair and rather Phoenician features one sometimes sees in Cornwall. His slightly close-set dark eyes, overhung by thick, straight brows that almost met above the narrow nose, were as watchful and veiled as a poker player's. He had a habit of twitching his toothbrush moustache and sniffing twice, staccato, from time to time as he examined people or things. Going with his saturnine looks, it always struck me as strangely sinister. I remember he asked me first if I played cricket. When I said I liked it, he replied, "'Well, that's one good thing, anyhow !" in a way that left me wondering what next. I did not have to conjecture long. He went on, with irritation in his voice, "You know, Grimble, you ought not to have been sent here really. This isn't the sort of place for a cadet. I didn't ask the Colonial Office for one. I asked for an experienced man - someone who knew about men and affairs." There wasn't much I could say to that. I sat sweating while he gave me his ideas about the right man for the job. What he wanted was someone who had knocked around . . . not an official . . . preferably a fellow who had done a bit of trading and planting somewhere. A sahib, naturally . . . right kind of breeding, right kind of school . . . all that. But definitely not a cub from a university. Above all, not a heaven-born selection from the Colonial Office. I forget what I replied to this (if anything), but I recollect asking him if I could get lessons in Gilbertese from someone on the island, and the request seemed to brighten him for a little. He said the Government would pay the official interpreter to teach me. He turned gloomy again, though, in the course of wondering how the Colonial Office thought he was going to train me in other ways. He supposed he would have to take me to sessions of the Magistrate's Court and the Native Court, for one thing; and then I could learn a bit about correspondence from the clerk at head office, and book-keeping from the accountant, and police and prisons stuff from Methven, and so forth and so on. They could doubtless teach me a few odds and ends not yet revealed to either Cambridge or the Colonial Office; and outside the Government staff there were, of course, plenty of other people on the island aching to teach me what was truly what. I remember that his last words gave me another of those sudden visions I used to get. It was not as sanguine as the one I had had with Mr. Johnson. I saw myself standing (for some peculiar reason) on the sun-smitten railway line above the crushing mills, hemmed in by a circle of Company's men with hairy forearms and noble looks enhanced by the walrus moustaches of my uncles. They held themselves erect in silence, arms folded, looking at me with contempt in their eyes for my gross ignorance of everything a real man should know. As a matter of fact, I could not have been more mistaken about the Company's staff. Olivia and I were to find out almost at once that our ignorance could not have fallen among friendlier neighbours; only the vision was depressing in its moment. But for all that, there was a lot of comfort, too, in what Mr. Eliot had said. He obviously had no ambition to collar me as his private slave; I wasn't to suffer the strain of continuous proximity to the deity, and there wasn't going to be any fighting over my body. What with the relief of this thought, plus the fulfilment of Mr. Johnson's promise that I would start off as a washer of bottles for bottle-washers, plus the happy spell our first sight of a Baanaban village had laid upon both of us, I left the Residency reflectively, perhaps, and somehow not game to tell Olivia quite all the Old Man had said, or the way he had said it, but by and large a reasonably happy young man. *

Like yourself I find "What If ...?" questions endlessly intriguing. My immediate thought was that, like train spotters and collectors of miscellaneous objects everywhere in the world, we should unite and help each other out whenever possible. So, in that spirit, here's an extensive list of some of the "What if .. ?" questions that have long puzzled me -- just in case you either exhaust your own stock, or manage to solve all the ones currently occupying your mind : * * * Why doesn't McDonald's sell hotdogs ? Are eyebrows considered facial hair ? At a movie theatre which arm rest is yours ? Do vegetarians eat animal crackers ? If man evolved from monkeys, how come we still have monkeys ? How do you handcuff a one-armed man ? When does it stop being partly cloudy and start being partly sunny ? Is there a time limit on fortune cookie predictions ? Why is it that everyone driving faster than you is considered an idiot and everyone driving slower than you is a moron ? Can you buy an entire chess set in a pawn shop ? If a bald person works as a chef at a restaurant, do they still have to wear a hairnet ? How can one person be dirt poor, and another be filthy rich ? How fast do hotcakes sell ? Do prison buses have emergency exits ? When two gay men get married to each other, do they both go to the same bachelor party ? If a guy that was about to die in the electric chair had a heart attack, should they save him ? Can a cemetery raise its prices and blame it on the cost of living ? Can atheists get insurance for an act of God? If Mars had earthquakes would they be called Marsquakes? Why is the man who invests your money called a "broker"? If Wile E. Coyote had enough money to buy all that ACME stuff, why didn't he just buy dinner ? Do Chinese people get English sayings tattooed on their bodies ? Why isn't there mouse-flavoured cat food ? Is it possible to plan a surprise birthday party for a psychic ? How come lemon washing up liquid contains real lemons, but lemon juice contains artificial flavourings ? Do you first wake up, or do you open your eyes first ? If you ate pasta and antipasti, would you still be hungry ? If there's a speed of sound and a speed of light, is there a speed of smell ? Do the security guards at airports have to go through airport security when they get to work? What do Greeks say when they don't understand something ? If a deaf person has to go to court, is it still called a hearing ? Do bald people still get dandruff ? Why doesn't Tarzan have a beard ? Can you cry under water ? Why do they call it "raw sewage"? Is there any other kind ? What do people in China call their good plates ? Do Roman paramedics refer to 'IV's as '4's ? Do the Alphabet song and Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star have the same tune ? Why does a priceless object cost more than a pricey one ? If you put a chameleon in a room full of mirrors, what colour would it turn ? If a vacuum cleaner really sucks, is that good or bad ? Can an ambidextrous person make an offhand remark ? How old must you be before it can be said that you died of old age? Why is it so hard to remember how to spell 'mnemonic'? Could someone ever get addicted to counselling ? If so, how could you treat them ? Do butterflies remember life as a caterpillar ? Why do 'fat chance' and 'slim chance' mean the same thing ? Why aren't lawyers sworn in during trials ? Why do we say we're ‘head over heels’ when we're happy ? Isn't that just the normal way of being ? If there's an exception to every rule, is there an exception to that rule? How does the guy who drives the snowplough get to work in the mornings? How important does a person have to be before they are considered assassinated instead of just murdered? What is another word for "thesaurus" ? Why is a person who plays the piano called a pianist, but a person who drives a race car not called a racist ? Why is the word "abbreviation" so long ? Now that Microsoft is so big, should it be called Macrosoft? Why is it that bullets ricochet off of Superman's chest, but he ducks when the gun is thrown at him ? Why is a women's prison called a penal colony ? If you take an Oriental person and spin him around several times, does he become disoriented ? If nothing ever sticks to TEFLON, how do they make TEFLON stick to the pan ? *

My favourite poem is the one that starts 'Thirty days hath September', Because it actually tells you something. Groucho Marx

Thank you very much for your kind words, CT. I'm sure you realise that I too, value and enjoy the input of your well-balanced thoughts into this forum that we all share together. But just to clarify myself a little better - it most certainly was NOT that I felt Buddhist thought and practice didn't have 'enough substance' for me to bother continuing. The depth of Buddhist thought extends light years beyond what I could even begin to comprehend. Rather, the reason I fell away from Buddhism was because the organisation that I had placed my faith in gradually degenerated into a guru cult. Moreover, one that had no interest in its followers other than to milk their services as foot soldiers, free labour, and financial patrons in their quest to be the World's Biggest Buddhist Organisation. They somehow managed, without any desire, and in a direction completely opposite to their beliefs ... to transform themselves into a perfect example of 'the Eight Worldly Concerns' that they had always so sagely cautioned us to be vigilant of. Unfortunately, the unsavoury taste of hypocrisy that that group left in my mouth ... kind of left its flavour on most things to do with the study and practice of Buddhism for me. But I nevertheless, still hold in very high regard the religion, its founder, and a great many of its adherents. All I can say is that my experiences with that one group, for me, destroyed the entire belief system as a personal path. But to be a bit more fair to that group - spiritual materialism is a pitfall that very, very few religions or practitioners are ever able to avoid falling into. .

Yes, first lines are indeed revealing. For instance your own. Your choice of phrasing in " since you are already biased against Buddhist logic" would, from my own side be rendered as "I was a practicing Buddhist for over twenty years, so I am quite familiar with their system of logic." And then the rather flippantly dismissive " I see no reason to even attempt an answer" ... speaks volumes about your immediate reaction towards any opinion seeming to question the authority earned through your years of studying and practicing Buddhism. Of course you are right in assuming that directing me to Buddhist source materials would probably be fruitless. I too have studied this idea of the Five Skandas, dependent origination, etc. But the reason they didn't satisfy me is NOT because my lack of, (as you put it), " a slightly more open-minded manner." It is because everyone is different. For those drawn to spiritual questions, some find Christian-based answers satisfactory, some Buddhist ideas, some are attracted to Islamic doctrines, others to Taoism. It is NOT because one of these religions and its doctrine is correct and those who are attracted to others lack an open-mind. Surely this understanding is rather basic ? To be honest, I simply raised the question initially, to see how you would respond. I am very familiar with the referring back to scriptural authority as the preferred method of replying to questions which were posed to people in the hierarchy of the Buddhist organisation I used to be part of. It was a considerable part of why I gradually drifted away from that path. My way of seeing things is that human beings' minds are constructed in such a way that we almost all feel 'incomplete'. That something is missing in our life. Some people are made such that they feel that it is God, Spiritual Truth, Oneness, or some such invisible but conscious and powerful deity, Universal Consciousness, etc., which is missing. Others will feel their missing element will be fulfilled when they find and marry a perfect member of the opposite sex, others believe satisfaction will come when they gain wealth, worldly power, fame and recognition, approval etc, etc. All of us here on this forum have been attracted to this one branch of the seekers tree, in hopes of scratching our own particular itch. But there's people travelling along every branch of the tree. The ones I find the most helpful are the friendly ones who see our commonality and speak to me through that, rather than those who quote scriptural authority which supposedly proves that their branch is not only different, but somehow "better" than the limbs that others may be on. (Despite the fact that every branch has its own equally cherished 'sacred texts' which claim to authenticate its validity.) I have no trouble understanding how your chosen path can bring you satisfaction. I was simply curious to see whether it has also brought you an awareness of the commonality and equality between all us people suffering from this sense of incompleteness that our minds have sadly, but inescapably, been lumbered with. .

. I don't know if this will be helpful or not, but I put it to you with hopefully the same motivation that several people replied to Rara in one of the current popular threads regarding a Christmas disagreement that he had with his mother. Basically, they were suggesting that it's fruitless to set up and then try to resolve a question revolving around apportioning 'the degree of responsibility' after an unpleasant exchange with another person. The only person whose actions we can possibly hope to have any effect on is our own. So it's better to leave the other person's responsibility out of the equation and treat it as an impersonal event, like we would a squall of rain that disrupts what we had planned to be a perfect picnic. In the case you raised in this thread, if looked at in this way, perhaps what happened could offer you an insight into something unusual that you're doing, (which is invisible to you because it's always been there, and thus seems perfectly natural). As an illustration, I read through many threads on this forum and have become familiar with the style and way-of-thinking of scores of different poster here. But up till now, I've never been able to read through a single post of yours because the, (to my eyes), utter triviality and distraction of a pink bouncing horse endlessly flipping into my consciousness every single second - brings up an instant, unconscious reflex reaction of "I'm outa here ! This is like talking with a hyperactive two-year old !" Of course I know nothing whatsoever about you, so this statement has no possibility of being accurate. I'm just telling you my instant reaction to the cartwheeling horse. If I was to meet a person in the street who tried to engage me in conversation, all the time flipping a pink stuffed toy up in the air while we talked .. probably I wouldn't be able to look them in the eye either, and my eyes too would be making a 'jaggy circle' around them - looking desperately around for an escape route. I say this simply with the hopes that it might possibly be that an unattached, external view could notice something which would otherwise pass un-noticed through familiarity. If not, please feel free to dump my reply as being simply the meaningless remarks of someone who doesn't have a clue what you're like, or what the situation you're writing about was like. .

. Your well-intentioned post once again raised for me that recurring flaw in the otherwise seemingly watertight system of Buddhist logic. You illustrated it perfectly. Because the clearest explanation is always given from a direct and immediate example, please forgive me for using extracts from your post to show what I mean. I assure you, my intention is not to question your motivation or your obvious sincerity. I use it simply as an illustration for what I find to be an interesting academic point. In a nutshell, if a person makes and truly understands the statement {A} below ... then the truth of {A}, logically makes {B} ... absurd. * {A} In the context of the Yogacara school of Buddhism, all these major hindrances arise due to the "...reification of an 'imagined self.' " {B} If we can rectify our own faults and expand on our limited views, then we can take the better option of seeing all beings equanimously. * In other words, if all our problems stem from believing our 'imagined self' to be real ... then how can this purely imaginary 'thing' choose to do, or not do, certain actions in order to realise that it doesn't really exist ? Has this question never struck you as interesting the way it does me ? .

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart. H L Mencken

Original question : Was it "one way" to reach enlightenment ? Can anyone make sense out of this? Reply : As above

. You cannot earn liberation. I have not earned liberation. No one will ever earn liberation. You cannot become good enough or work hard enough or be sincere enough to deserve it. Liberation has not happened to me and it will not happen to you. Yet there is liberation. There is only ever liberation. Perfection is already here. What you are is already divine. Searching will not get you anywhere, but there is nothing wrong with searching. In this apparent process it may be heard that searching is meaningless,…but searching cannot be given up until it stops. Then it is over and it is seen that what you were searching for has always been with you, in fact it has always been what you are. But to suggest that you give up searching in order to find is pointless. It does not matter whether you get drunk, meditate, read the paper, sit with the guru or go to the races. None of these will make liberation any more or any less likely. The question of ‘whether to search or not to search’, misses the point. For there is no one who can choose to do any of these things. If meditation happens, it happens and it will go on happening until it does not. It is the same for getting drunk. You may as well give up the belief that you can choose anything. Except that you cannot do that either. Until it happens. Richard Sylvester

I sense that my continuing to add stories to this rather ad hoc collection may well be coming to end soon. I still wait until over a hundred people have read a new entry before I add another. But as soon as that reading stops, I stop as well. I simply notice that the interest is falling away, as anyone would normally expect once the novelty wears off. But for today anyway, there’s a new one. I’m actually still in the process of reading this particular book. It’s by an actress that I've seen a number of times on television, (but was never particularly impressed by one way or the other), called Rebecca Front. But her familiar face on the book’s cover attracted my curiosity, and aptly enough, it’s a collection of anecdotes of her life entitled, “Curious.” In the extract below she weaves together an intriguing television interview of Maggie Thatcher that she saw, (a Youtube link to which I've added after the end of this excerpt) – along with some unusual and insightful ideas on peer pressure,… plus a number of incidents from her own life. All these ingredients the author blends together with such finesse that in the end, I think the final result is absolutely irresistible. * * * The End of the Peer Show When Margaret Thatcher died, amid all the eulogising and demonising, a small curiosity began doing the rounds of the social networking sites. It was a video clip from an interview the Baroness had given, after her retirement from public office, to a Scandinavian broadcaster. The journalist conducting the interview, having come to the end of the serious stuff, was left with just the quirky, off-the-wall, ‘And finally … ' question, meant to lighten the mood and show a softer, more cuddly side to her subjects. ‘All the people that I interview,' she began in her nearly flawless English, 'I ask them to do something for me.' And you could tell from the awkward, beseeching lean towards Mrs Thatcher that she knew this was going to be a long shot. 'It's a kind of gimmick on my show and it's ... to make a jump ... just to stand up and make a jump up in the air.' Before she could elaborate any further on this concept, the Iron Lady was bringing down the shutter. 'I shouldn't dream of doing that,' she replied. The interviewer gamely pressed on, laughing an increasingly high-pitched, nervous laugh at every one of Mrs Thatcher's flat refusals, while admitting that they'd had a bet in the office beforehand and she'd told them this was never going to happen. The former Prime Minister was adamant, immoveable, true to her formidable reputation. She said it was silly, puerile. Why on earth would she do it ? 'Gorbachev did it,' the journalist ventured. It was a brave attempt, but a stupid one. Mrs Thatcher gave her a withering look. 'You amaze me,' she said, bristling with schoolmistressy disapproval. 'I wonder what he thought of the politics of a free society if that's what they ask you to do.' The interviewer gave it one last go, explaining that many people found it fun, a chance to show a different side of themselves. 'I'll tell you what it shows: it shows that you want to be thought to be normal or popular,' countered Mrs Thatcher. And that, unmistakeably, was that. I think the reason so many people liked this little snippet was that it reinforced the lack of humour they had long suspected of their erstwhile leader. A jump, a little jump. What possible harm could it do? Some people really need to lighten up. The problem for me watching it, as someone who resolutely disliked what Mrs Thatcher stood for, was that I couldn't help applauding what in this instance she wouldn't stand for, what she was never in a million years going to stand for - to leap around in an asinine manner on a chat show. The very intransigence that I'd always found so alarming, so mystifying, so unsympathetic, was in this instance something I could only respect. A jump is not a chance to show a different side to yourself; it's a chance for a TV producer to show that they've got one over on you. 'Even once-mighty people will jump when I tell them to,' the producer can declare, 'for I am Oz the great and powerful and nobody wants to look like a party pooper on camera.' When my children were small, I spent a great deal of time and energy warning them about peer pressure. It seemed to me that the roots of many of life's problems lay here – in the desire to fit in. So l would diligently explain to them that nobody could make you do a dare, for instance, or try a cigarette or take drugs, and that being different wasn't the same as being unpopular. In my own childhood, I had seen how the need to fit in had made people do things they were uncomfortable about, even ashamed of. It seemed to me then, and it still does, that you could place most of the ills that afflict young people (bullying, gangs, the sexualisation of young girls to name just a few) squarely at the door of our pathetic desire to be accepted. So surely, if we could tackle that at its source, if one of the first things we taught our kids was not just to say 'no’, but to say it forcefully and with a smile on their faces - 'no, that's a stupid idea, why on earth would anyone do that ?' - then perhaps a whole lot of misery could be avoided. But of course it's not that simple. Peer pressure is endemic in our culture. Take the Mexican wave, for example. Come on, indulge me a little. I know where I'm going with this. When my son was about seven, I took him to see his favourite band play at a huge arena. In the hiatus between the support group finishing and the main act arriving on stage, somebody on the other side of this cavernous space decided that we, the audience, should become one. We had to bond, we had to abandon our individuality, break down the invisible barriers between us, and become a cheering, stomping, amorphous, music-loving mass. One by one, then row by row, block by block, thousands of once-proud, inhibited, easily embarrassed English people leapt to their feet, arched their backs, threw up their arms in a near-orgasmic gesture of submission and shouted 'Woah'. I saw it coming towards us with a threatening and unstoppable momentum, and so did my son. 'Oh cool,' he exclaimed. 'Oh shit,' I muttered. 'Can we join in?' he asked, delightedly. 'We'll probably have to,' I replied, grimly, and then not wanting to sound like a killjoy, I added unconvincingly 'which is great.' For me, the Mexican wave was a symbol of oppression, a metaphor for the mindless subservience of the herd, the very definition of a futile gesture. Here was my chance to make a point, to put the case for individuality. Right here, right now, I could teach my son that we all speak with our own voice; that even if the rest of your gang are racist or sexist or homophobic or smoking crack, it's OK to go against the tide, to sit down and be counted. You are not just part of a greater 'Them', you are and always will be 'You', my son. He, however, was poised on the edge of his seat, desperate to join in with something greater than he had ever known. He wanted to be part of the machine, and worse, he badly wanted me to be too. The wave was, by now, hurtling towards us. What would I do ? I joined in. Of course I did. I'm not a total arse. It was, after all, a Mexican wave, not the Cultural Revolution. The only lesson my refusal would realistically have taught him was that his mother took herself too seriously. He was happy, I was momentarily embarrassed - neither of us lost our identity. But the Mexican wave was just the beginning. At the other side of the auditorium, the crowd had started doing the moves to 'YMCA’. People will do the most ludicrous things if they think it'll be more embarrassing not to. Go up to one person in that audience on their own and ask them to leap to their feet and shout 'Whoa', and I guarantee they wouldn't do it. We don't mind being a bit 'crazy' as long as everybody else is being 'crazy’, because then it doesn't seem ... well, crazy. In fact it would be crazier not to. A Mexican wave is as harmless as it is pointless, of course, but it is in its way a mass movement, and like all mass movements, to join in with it is an abdication of both responsibility and power. Because, there are only two ways you can have power in this scenario - if you're the one who starts the movement or if you're the one who stops it. Most people, as Mrs Thatcher said, will join in in order to be thought 'normal and popular'. Audience participation relies on just this sort of peer pressure, which is why I hate it so much. I've seen it from both sides: as a performer - demanding, expecting, relying on audience members to behave in a certain way - and as a punter desperately hoping not to be picked on. So I understand how the dynamic works. The performer is 99 per cent confident that whoever they select will do what they want them to do, just for the sake of a quiet life and not falling foul of the herd. But trust me, if you decide not to join in, you are the one with the power. Now I admit, it sounds pathetic even to think of it in those terms, but when you sit in an audience, you very often don't want to be singled out. And yet when you are, it can feel like you have no choice but to go along with it. Picking on members of the audience - however amusingly and inventively done - is ultimately the recourse of someone short of ideas. I apologise to my comedian friends for saying that, especially since some of them are quite spectacularly good at this spontaneous interaction - and if the audience members involved are happy with that, then great. But the performers need you more than you need them, and if you refuse to join in, you expose this. It's a mean trick, sure, but then so is dragging some poor sucker up on stage and humiliating them. I discovered this during a comedy show at the Edinburgh Festival. I'd just come off stage from my own show and was tired and hungry, so not in the most receptive of moods. But I'd heard great things about this particular comedian, so I thought I should try to catch him. A short while into his act, he announced that for the next section he was going to need a member of the audience. I desperately didn't want to be picked - after all, I'd done my performing for the night, going back on stage would have been something of a busman's holiday. So I lowered my head and tried to avoid eye contact as the comedian went from table to table weighing up his prey. Finally, of course, he picked on me. 'You’ll do,' he said, and I knew I was supposed to give a weary look of resignation and follow him onto the stage. But I really didn't want to, so I smiled and shook my head. 'Come on, on your feet,' he said. It seemed a fait accompli. The audience was already applauding me. And that, I realised, is what makes people do it: your whole peer group, relieved that it's you and not them, is willing you to obey orders, partly so that the show can go on, but also to make damn sure he doesn't change his mind and pick on them. I knew it would be easier to play along, but the more pressurised I felt, the less inclined I was to do it. I'd come to watch a show not to be in one. With as charming a tone as I could muster, I said, ‘No thanks. You'd better ask someone else.' But he wouldn't move on. It had become a power struggle between us. I hadn't sought it, but I certainly wasn't going to cave in. He had one more tactic up his sleeve. My shoulder bag was strung over the back of my seat, and he suddenly grabbed it and ran up to the stage. He threw it towards the curtain at the back and then, returning to centre-stage, said triumphantly: 'That'll get her up here.’ It had an odd effect on the audience, some laughing and applauding, but others audibly gasping, tutting and siding with me. He was right, though. I had to go up on stage now. So I did. I walked past the comic, retrieved my bag and went to sit back down with it. But as I passed him he tried to get it off me again. We tussled in this undignified fashion for longer than we should have done. I think we'd sort of forgotten about the show; we were now just two strangers having a fight in public. Eventually, and without really knowing what I was doing, I whacked him hard on the arm with my bag. He looked genuinely stunned, let go of the strap and I walked back to my seat to a round of applause. It was a pyrrhic victory. I'd ended up part of the show after all, looking far more ridiculous than I would have done if I'd just played along. But his refusal to let me just sit and watch had become a kind of bullying, and my not giving way felt pathetically like a win. The odd thing about this whole episode is that I'm someone who obeys rules. I don't have a rebellious nature. But I have to believe that the rules are there for a purpose, that they've been imposed by someone who broadly has my best interests at heart. To do something I'm told to do purely because it will make me look like an idiot offends even my eagerness to comply. It's the Mexican wave problem all over again - a seemingly harmless bit of nonsense with faintly sinister overtones. I can't be the only who worries about these things, and it makes me wonder if we shouldn't all routinely refuse to do stuff that society tells us to do, just for the practice. I'm not suggesting we break laws; heaven forbid. Little acts of rebellion – wearing odd socks, red wine with fish, milky Earl Grey - might just be enough one day to save us from tyranny. Take it too far though, and you risk cutting off your nose to spite your face. I could give you a long list of things I have refused to experience - plays I've deliberately missed, films I've eschewed, books I've spurned and on and on - for no better reason than that everyone else was reading it, watching it, doing it, banging on about it, and I refused to bow to the pressure. It includes seeing Les Miserables, taking drugs, skiing, eating bacon sandwiches, buying a motorbike, having sex on a first date, reading The Lord of The Rings, listening to Van Morrison and squash (the game, not the fruit drink). It was this very resistance to peer pressure that stopped me getting my ears pierced as a teenager … well, that and a faint suspicion that making holes in bits of flesh that didn't originally have them was a flawed idea. For years and years, I proudly flaunted my unmutilated lobes, preferring instead to suffer all day from the unique dragging pain caused by clip-ons. But then, when my daughter - as a result of peer pressure, I might point out - got her ears pierced without any fuss at all, I decided to give it a go. I was forty-five and it made me feel young again. It's a toss-up now what I'll try next - sex on a first date is tricky when you're married, but more appealing than reading The Lord of The Rings. Maybe I'll opt for squash. Refusing to go with the majority for the sake of being different can be every bit as mindless as following with ovine conformity. Somewhere between Mrs Thatcher's refusal to be 'normal' and jumping off a cliff because your friends tell you to, there's probably a healthy attitude. In an ideal world, we would all take decisions for ourselves, based on the best available information, and without feeling the need either to join in or stand alone. This is not, alas, an ideal world. I recently went for a walk in the country with my family. It had been unseasonably rainy, so the route was muddy and, in places, impassable. I was following along at the back of the group, whistling a little tune to myself in the manner of Winnie-the-Pooh, when we reached a swamp where there had previously been a field. My son weighed up the situation and decided on the best place for us to cross. 'It's not too deep here, but I'd do it fast if I were you" he called over his shoulder, and bounded, gazelle-like across the deep mud. Phil followed, perhaps more stag-like than gazelle, but still pretty impressive. Then my daughter, dancing across like a young Leslie Caron. I stopped and looked around me. I had a feeling this might not be the best place. It looked pretty deep to me, and we'd passed somewhere further back that seemed altogether more sensible. But they'd all done it and I didn't want to seem like a wuss. I stepped gingerly across, too slowly, allowing my weight to settle into the bog, contrary to my son's advice. By the time I reached the other side, my boots were squelching with a thick internal coating of mud and my trousers were soaked to the thigh. We carried on a little further and this time had to cross a stream. I was quite some way behind by now, not least because I was carrying within my footwear copious quantities of turf, but since Phil and the kids were in the distance, I could please myself. I decided I wasn't going to succumb to peer pressure. I'd failed to follow my instincts first time around, and look where it had got me. I found a place where I would be comfortable crossing, and carefully picked my way across the stream, feeling the water seeping through into my mud-filled boots. True, my trousers got wet all over again, but I didn't fall in and I felt pretty pleased with myself. I'd chosen an independent course and followed it. I caught up with the others. My daughter turned round and looked at my sodden legs. 'What happened?' she asked. It was then that I noticed her trousers were completely dry. 'There was a bridge just up to the right,' she explained. A bridge ? Why didn't somebody tell me ?' 'We just assumed you'd do what we were doing,' she said. 'You know, like a normal person would.' * * * Link to Swedish Interview :

. A Lebanese friend recently shared with me what is considered to be 'the funniest joke from his country.’ : "A man falls from a ladder while cleaning his second story window and lands in his garden. His neighbour, watching with horror as the accident happened, ran up to him and cried out, "Abdul ! Abdul ! Are you OK ?" To which the Abdul weakly replied, “I don’t know, I just got here.” .

. Traveller, there is no path. The path is made by walking. Antonio Machado .

. I couldn't resist adding another story by Michael Moore. I can’t say that I've ever read anything before quite like the anecdotes of his life written up in his fascinating autobiography, "Here Comes Trouble". Even though I grew up in an age of widespread political awareness and protest, I'm ashamed to admit that I never actually stirred my stumps enough to get involved in any of them myself. Reading his accounts of the way he decided to “act” when he felt outraged by some of the social injustices he encountered, really drove home to me how much our society needs gadflies like him in order to have any hope at all of remaining sane and healthy. The story he tells below I found as an almost perfect example of just how much good can develop from one person having the courage to stand up and publicly say,….”You do NOT have any right whatsoever, to treat other people in this way !” I’ll let him tell his tale, in his own unsurpassable way : * * * Boys’ State I had no idea why the principal was sending me to Boys State. I had broken no rules and was not a disciplinary problem of any sort. Although I was a high school junior, it was only my second year in a public high school after nine years of Catholic education, and not having nuns or priests to direct me still took some getting used to. But I thought I had adjusted quite well to Davison High School. On the very first day of my sophomore year, Russell Boone, a big, good ol' boy who would become one of my best friends, took his fist and knocked the books out of my hands while I was walking down the hall between fourth- and fifth-hour classes. "That's not how you hold 'em," he shouted at me. "You're holdin' 'em like a girl." I picked up the three or four books and looked around to see if anyone had stopped to laugh at the boy who carried his books like a girl. The coast seemed clear. "How'm I supposed to carry 'em ?" I asked. Boone took the books from me and held them in the cup of his hand with his arm fully extended toward the floor, letting the books hang by his side. "Like this," he said while walking a manly walk down the hallway. "How was I holding 'em ?" I asked. "Like this," he barked as he mocked me, holding my books up to the centre of his chest like he was caressing breasts. "That's how girls do it ?" I asked, mortified that for the first half of my first day in public school, everyone had seen me walking around like a pansy. "Yes. Don't do it again. You'll never survive here." Check. So, half a day impersonating a girl. What else had I done to deserve Boys State ? Well, there was that time a few months later on the band bus. Boone had fallen asleep with his socks and shoes off. Honestly I can't say he had socks. But there he was, barefoot, his leg propped up on the armrest of the seat in front of him. Larry Kopasz had his cigarettes with him and it was decided that in order to solve the riddle "How long does a cigarette take to burn all the way down if being smoked by a foot ?" he lit one and placed it between Boone's toes to find out. (Answer: seven and a half minutes.) Boone let out quite a yell when the hot cinder of the Lucky Strike reached his toes, and he didn't miss a beat from dreamland to wrestling Kopasz to the floor of the bus, which caught the attention of the driver. (In those days, as most adults and bus drivers smoked all the time, student smoking often went undetected because their smoke simply went into the same smoky air we were all breathing.) Somehow I got implicated in this brawl, as Boone held us all collectively responsible. (On that same overnight band trip, we snuck into Boone's room to run another science experiment: "Does placing one's hand while asleep in a warm bowl of water make one piss himself?" Answer: yes. And this time we took a Polaroid so we'd have proof to hold against him should Boone, the bedwetting tuba player, turn us in.) But that was it. Seriously. I got good grades, was on the debate team, never skipped school and other than a skit I wrote for Comedy Week about the principal living a secret life as Pickles the Clown, I had not a smirch on my record. As it turned out, Boys State was not a summer reformatory school for hoodlums and malcontents. It was a special honour to be selected to attend. Each June, after school ended, every high school in the state sent two to four boys to the state capital to "play government" for a week. You were chosen if you had shown leadership and good citizenship. I had shown the ability to come up with some very funny pranks to play on Boone. Michigan's Boys State was held three miles from the Capitol Building on the campus of Michigan State University (the girls held a similar event called Girls State on the other side of the campus). Two thousand boys were assembled to elect our own pretend governor of Michigan, a fake state legislature, and a made-up state supreme court. The idea was for us boys to break down into parties and run for various offices in order to learn the beauties of campaigning and governing. If you were already one of those kids who ran for class office and loved being on student council, this place was your crack house. But after campaigning for "Nixon-the-peace-candidate" as a freshman, I had developed an early allergy to politicians, and the last thing I wanted was to be one. I arrived at the Michigan State dormitories, was assigned my room and, after one "governmental meeting," where a boy named Ralston talked my ear off about why he should be state treasurer, I decided that my best course of action was to hole up in my room for the week and never come out except at feeding times. I was given a small single room that belonged to that floor's resident advisor. He apparently had not moved all of his stuff out. I found a record player and some record albums sitting near the windowsill. I had a few books with me, plus a writing tablet and a pen. It was all I needed to make it through the week. So I essentially deserted Boys State and found refuge in this well-stocked fifth-floor room in the Kellogg Dorms. The album collection in my room included James Taylor's Sweet Baby James, The Beatles' Let It Be, the Guess Who's American Woman, and something by Sly and the Family Stone. There was a big coin-operated snack machine down at the end of the hall, so I had everything I needed for the week. In between listening to the records and writing poems to amuse myself (I called them "song lyrics" to make them seem like a worthwhile endeavour), I became enamoured with a new brand of potato chip that I heretofore had not encountered. The snack machine offered bags of something called "Ruffles" potato chips. I was amazed at how they were able to put hills and valleys into a single chip. For some reason, these "hills" (they called 'em "ridges") gave me the impression that I was getting more chip per chip than your regular potato chip. I liked that a lot. On the fourth day inside my NO POLITICS ALLOWED / FIRE AND RAIN bunker, I had completely run out of Ruffles and made a run down the hall for more. Above the snack machine was a bulletin board, and when I got there I noticed someone had stuck a flyer on it. It read: BOYS STATERS ! SPEECH CONTEST on the life of ABRAHAM LINCOLN Write a speech on the life of Abe Lincoln and win a PRIZE ! Contest sponsored by the ELKS CLUB I stood and stared at this flyer for some time. I forgot about my Ruffles. I just couldn't get over what I was reading. The previous month, my dad had gone to the local Elks Club to join. They had a golf course just a few miles from where we lived, and he and his line mates from the factory loved to golf. Golf, the sport of the wealthier class, was not normally played by the working class in places like Flint. But the GM honchos had long ago figured out ways to lull the restless workers into believing that the American Dream was theirs, too. They understood after a while that you couldn't just crush unions - people would always try to start unions simply because of the oppressive nature of their work. So the GM execs who ran Flint knew that the best way to quell rebellion was to let the proles have a few of the accoutrements of wealth - make them think that they were living the life of Riley, make them believe that through hard work they, too, could be rich some day ! So they built public golf courses in and around the factories of Flint. If you worked at AC Spark Plug, you played the I.M.A. or Pierce golf courses. If you worked at Buick you headed over to the Kearsley course. If you worked at the Hammerberg Road plant, you played at Swartz Creek. If you worked in "The Hole," you played the Mott course. When the factory whistle blew at 2:30 p.m. every day, our dads grabbed their bags from the car and started whacking balls around (they’d play nine holes and be home for dinner by five). They loved it. Soon working class became "middle class." There was time and money for month-long family vacations, homes in the suburbs, a college fund for the kids. Consequently, as the years went on, the monthly union hall meetings became sparsely attended. When the company started asking the union for givebacks and concessions, and when the company asked the workers to build inferior cars that the public would soon no longer want, the company found they had a willing partner in their demise. But back in 1970, thoughts like that would get you locked up in the loony bin. Those were the salad days (though I'm certain it was illegal to offer a salad anywhere within a fifty mile radius of Flint). And the guys in the factory grew to believe that golf was their game. The Elks Club owned a beautiful course that was not as crowded as the Flint public courses, but you had to be a member. So it was with some disappointment when my dad went out to the Elks Club to join that he was confronted with a line printed at the top of the application: CAUCASIANS ONLY Being a Caucasian, this should not have been a problem for Frank Moore. Being a man of some conscience, though, it gave him pause. He brought the form home and showed me. "What do you think about this?" he asked me. I read the Caucasian line and had two thoughts: 1. Are we down South ? (How much more north can get than Michigan?) 2. Isn't this illegal ? My dad was clearly confused about the situation. "Well, I don't think I can sign this piece of paper," he said. "No, you can't," I said. "Don't worry. We can still golf at the I.M.A." He would occasionally go back to the Elks course if invited by friends, but he would not join. He was not a civil rights activist. He generally didn't vote because he didn't want to be called for jury duty. He had all the misguided racial "worries" white people of his generation had. But he also had a very basic sense of right and wrong and of setting an example for his children. And because the union had insisted on integrating the factories as early as the 1940s, he worked alongside men and women of all races and, as is the outcome of such social engineering, he grew to see all people as the same (or at least "the same" as in "all the same in God's eyes"). Now, here I was, standing there in front of this Elks Club poster next to the vending machine. The best way to describe my feelings at that moment is that I was seventeen. What do you do at seventeen when you observe hypocrisy or encounter an injustice? What if they are the same thing? Whether it's the local ladies' club refusing to let a black lady join, or a segregated men's club like the Elks that has the audacity to sponsor a contest on the life of the Great Emancipator, when you're seventeen you have no tolerance for this kind of crime. Hell hath no indignation like that of a teenager who has forgotten his main mission was to retrieve a bag of Ruffles potato chips. "They want a speech ?" I thought, a goofy smile now making its way across my face. "I think I'm gonna go write me a speech." I hurried back to my room, sans the bag of Ruffles, got out my pad of paper, my trusty Bic pen, and all the fury I could muster. "How dare the Elks Club besmirch the fine name of Abraham Lincoln by sponsoring a contest like this!" I began, thinking I would lead with subtlety and save the good stuff for later. "Have they no shame? How is it that an organization that will not allow black people into their club is a part of Boys State, spreading their bigotry under the guise of doing something good? What kind of example is being set for the youth here? Who even allowed them in here ? If Boys State is to endorse any form of segregation, then by all means, let it be the segregation that separates these racists from the rest of us who believe in the American Way ! How dare they even enter these grounds !" I went on to tell the story of my dad going to join the Elks and refusing to do so. I quoted Lincoln (my mother's continual stops at Gettysburg whenever we drove to New York would now pay off). And I closed by saying, "It is my sincere hope that the Elks change their segregationist policies - and that Boys State never, ever invites them back here again." I skipped dinner, putting the final touches on the speech, rewriting it a couple times on the pad of paper, and then fell asleep listening to Sly Stone. The next morning, all speech contestants were instructed to show up in a School of Social Work classroom and give their speech. There were fewer than a dozen of us in the room and, much to my surprise (and relief), there was no one present from the Elks Club. Instead, the speeches were to be judged by a lone high school forensics teacher from Lansing. I took a seat in the back of the room and listened to the boys who went before me. They spoke in laudatory tones of Lincoln's accomplishments and his humanity, but mostly how he won the Civil War. It was the type of stuff the mayor might say at a town's Fourth of July picnic. Sweet. Simple. Noncontroversial. Few in the room were prepared for the barrage of insults about to be hurled at the Elks Club. Take William Jennings Bryan, add some Jimmy Stewart, and throw in a healthy dose of Don Rickles, and I'm guessing that's what it must've sounded like to the assembled as I unleashed my invective disguised as a speech. About halfway through my rant, I looked over toward the teacher/judge. He sat there without expression or emotion. I felt my heart skip a beat, as I was not used to being in trouble - and the last thing I wanted was for my parents to have to drive down to East Lansing and haul me home. I occasionally glanced at the other Boys Staters in the room to see how this was going down. Some looked at me in fear, others had that "boy-is-he-gonna-get-it" look on their faces - and the black kid in the room.. . well, what can I say, he was the only black kid in the room. He was trying to cover the smile on his face with his hand. When the speeches were over, the teacher/judge went to the head of the class to issue his verdict. I slunk down in my seat, hoping that he would simply announce the winner and not issue any rebukes. "Thank you, all of you, for your well-thought-out and well-written speeches," he began. "I was impressed with each and every one of you. The winner of this year's Elks Club Boys State Speech Contest is...Michael Moore ! Congratulations, Michael. That was a courageous thing to do. And you're right. Thank you." I didn't realize it, but he was already shaking my hand, as were about a third of the other boys. "Thank you," I said somewhat sheepishly. "But I really didn't wanna win anything. I just wanted to say something." "Well, you sure said something," the teacher replied. "You'll receive your award tomorrow at the closing ceremonies with all two thousand boys in attendance. "Oh - and you'll have to give the speech to them." What ? Give what to whom ? "It's the tradition. The winner of the Elks Club speech gives his speech at the closing assembly, where they announce the election results and hand out all the awards." "Um, no, I don't really wanna do that," I said, distressed, hoping he would take pity on me. "You don't really want me to give that speech, do you ?" "Oh, yes I do. But it's not up to me, anyway. You have to give it. That's the rule." He also told me that for my own good, he wasn't going to mention to anyone the content of the speech before tomorrow. Oh, yes, that's much better, I thought. Let them all be hit with it fresh, like a big surprise, the kind which has the speaker being chased from the great hall, his prize in one hand, his life in the other. After winning the speech contest, my night went something like this: "Fire and Rain," bathroom. “Across the Universe," bathroom. "Hot Fun in the Summertime," bathroom. And when you're seventeen and you don't have a car and you aren't prone to walking long distances - and you live in a state where mass transit is outlawed - there is a sense of imprisonment. That's it - I was in Boys State Prison ! By morning, I had said my final prayers and made a promise to myself that if I got out of this alive, I'd never cause trouble like this again. The time came and thousands of Boys Staters were ushered into the university hall. On the stage sat various officials, including, I believe, the real governor of Michigan. I took a seat near the front, on the side, and quickly scanned the place for guys who enjoyed being white. There was virtually no long hair here in 1971, and way too many of them had that clean-cut, disciplined, aggressive look that would probably serve them well after a year or two in the Hanoi Hilton, if not the U.S. Congress. You will have to forgive me for the order of what came next because the event became a blur. My basic survival instincts had kicked in, and that was all that mattered. Someone was elected lieutenant governor or attorney general or Most Likely to Be Caught in the Senate Bathroom Someday. Somewhere in the middle of those announcements I heard my name. I lifted myself out of the chair (against the better advice of my excretory system) and made my way to the stage. The few boys I made eye contact with had that bored "Oh, shit another speech" look on their faces. For an instant I felt like I was soon going to be doing them a huge favour. This was certainly not going to sound like anything they were used to in third-hour civics class. That much I knew. I ascended to the stage and walked past the dignitaries settled in their comfortable chairs. As I looked at them one by one, I noticed a man who was wearing antlers. A hat with antlers. It was not Bullwinkle and this was not Halloween. This man was the Chief Elk, the head of all Elks, and he held in his lap the Elks Club Boys State speech trophy. He had a big, wide smile, a smile more appropriate for a Kiwanis or a Rotarian, with more teeth than I thought humanly possible, and he was so proud to see me take the podium. Oh, man, I thought, this guy is about to have a very bad day. I hope they did a patdown. Unrolling my pages of paper, I peered out at the mass of newly minted testosterone. Sixteen and seventeen-year-olds who should have been doing anything right now – shooting hoops, kissing girls, gutting trout - anything but sitting here listening to me. I took a deep breath and began the speech. "How dare the Elks Club..." I remember it was somewhere around that point when I could feel a whoosh of tension in the room, hundreds murmuring, snickering under their breath. Please God, I thought, could some responsible adult come up to the podium immediately and put an end to this ! No one did. I motored onward, and near the end I could hear the cadence in my voice and I thought this wouldn't be half bad if I were singing it in a rock band. I finished with my plea that the Elks change their ways and, as I turned my head to see the crimson tide that was now the face of the Chief Elk, his teeth resembling two chainsaws ready to shred my sorry self I blurted out, "And you can keep your stinkin' trophy !" The place went insane. Nearly two thousand boys leapt to their feet and whooped and hollered and cheered me. The hollering wouldn't stop and order had to be restored. I jumped off the stage and tried to get out of there, my escape route having been pre-planned. But too many of the Boys Staters wanted to shake my hand or slap my back locker-room style, and this slowed me down. A reporter began to make his way toward me, notebook in hand. He introduced himself and said that he was astonished at what he had just seen and was going to write something and put it over the wire. He asked me a few questions about where I was from and other things that I didn't want to answer. I broke away and headed quickly out a side door. Keeping my head down and avoiding the main campus path, I made it back to the Kellogg Dorms, checked the vending machine for Ruffles, rushed to my room and bolted the door. The machine was out of Ruffles, but there was the Guess Who, and I turned it up so I could have some time to figure out what in hell's name I'd just done. At least two hours passed, and it seemed like I was in the clear. No authorities had come to take me away, no Elks militia had arrived seeking revenge. All seemed to be back to normal. Until the knock on the door. "Hey,” the anonymous voice barked. "There's a call for you." The dorm rooms had no phones. "Where's the phone?" I asked without opening the door. "Down at the end of the hall." Ugh. That was a long walk. But I needed Ruffles, and maybe they had restocked the machine. I opened the door and headed down the long hallway to the one public phone. The receiver hung dangling by its cord, like a dead man swinging from the gallows. What I didn't know was that on the other end of the line was the rest of my life. "Hello?" I answered nervously, wondering who would even know where I was or how to reach me. "Hello, is this Michael Moore ?" the voice on the line asked. “Yes." "I'm a producer here at the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite in New York. We got this story that came over the wire about what you did today, and we'd like to send a crew over to interview you for tonight's newscast." "Huh ?" What was he talking about ? "We're doing a story on your speech exposing the Elks Club and their racial policies. We want you to come on TV." Come on TV ? There wasn't enough Clearasil in the world to get me to do that. "Uh, no thank you. I have to get back to my room. Bye." I hung up and ran back to the room and locked the door again. But it didn't matter. This became my first-ever media lesson: I don't get to decide what goes in the morning paper or on the nightly news. That night, I was introduced to the world. "And today in Lansing, Michigan, a seventeen-year-old boy gave a speech that took on the Elks Club and their segregationist practices, shedding light on the fact that it is still legal for private clubs in this country to discriminate on the basis of race …" The next day the dorm phone rang off the hook, even as I was packing up to leave. I didn't answer any of the calls, but I heard from the other boys that there were reporters phoning from the Associated Press, two TV networks, the NAACP, a paper in New York and another in Chicago. Unless it involved them offering me free food or an introduction to a girl who might like me, I did not want to be bothered. My parents were waiting outside in the car to take me back home. This much I'll say: my parents were not unhappy with my actions. When I got home, the phone continued to ring. Finally, a call came from the office of Michigan senator Phil Hart. He wanted to talk to me about coming to Washington. The aide said it was something about a bill that would be introduced, a bill to outlaw discrimination by private entities. A congressman would be calling me about testifying in front of a congressional committee. Would I be willing to do that ? No!! Why were they bothering me? Hadn't I done enough ? I didn't mean to cause such a ruckus. I thanked him and said I would discuss it with my parents (though I never told them; they would have wanted me to go!). I went outside to mow the lawn. We lived on Main Street, on a corner, across the street from the town fire station and kitty-corner from the town bowling alley. Over the din of the mower's engine I could faintly hear the honk of a horn. "Hey, Mike !" shouted Jan Kittel from the car that had just pulled up to the curb. With her was another girl from our class. I had known Jan since fifth grade in Catholic school. In the past year she and I were partners on the debate team. I loved her. She was smart and pretty and very funny. I waved. "Hey, c'mere ! We heard about what you did at Boys State !" she said excitedly. "Man, that was something ! You rocked it ! I'm so proud of you." I was ill equipped to handle the range of feelings and body temperature I was experiencing. I had absolutely no clue where to go with this other than to stutter out a "thanks." They got out of the car and she made me tell them the whole story, complete with the near riot I caused, which resulted in a lot of "right-ons !" and "far outs !" - and, yes, a big hug for my efforts. They were running an errand and had to get going, but not before she said she hoped to see me again that summer. "You and I will kick ass in debate this year," she offered, as I glanced in relief at the EMS unit parked in front of the fire station. "It'll be fun." They drove off and I finished the lawn. It dawned on me that doing something political had brought me both a lot of grief and a girl who stopped by to see me. Maybe I was too harsh on the class officer types who populated Boys State with their geek-like love of all things political. Maybe they knew a certain secret. Or maybe they would all just grow up to populate Congress with their slick, smarmy selves, selling the rest of us out at the drop of a dime. Maybe. The following year was not a good one for the Elks Clubs of America. Many states denied them their liquor licenses (the unkindest cut of all). Grants and funds became scarce. Various bills in Congress to stop them and other private clubs were debated. And then the federal courts in D.C. dealt them a death blow by taking away their tax exempt status. Facing total collapse and the scorn of the majority of the nation, the Elks Club voted to drop their Caucasians Only policy. Other private clubs followed suit. The ripple effect of this was that now racial discrimination everywhere in America, be it public or private, was prohibited. My speech was occasionally cited as a spark for this march forward in racial fixing in the great American experiment, but there were other speeches far more eloquent than mine. Most important for me, I learned a valuable lesson: That change can occur, and it can occur anywhere, with even the simplest of people and craziest of intentions, and that creating change didn't always require having to devote your every waking hour to it with mass meetings and organizations and protests and TV appearances with Walter Cronkite. Sometimes change can occur because all you wanted was a bag of potato chips. .

. I find this post an absolutely extraordinary synchronicity ! For so many years now that I really can't remember how many, it's been a frequently recurring thought that over the process of reading quite a few 'spiritually-minded' books,.... that there are some book titles that are so precise, concise, and memorable, that it wasn't even necessary to read the book. Their titles seem to say if all better than any book, (including itself), ever could. Tonight I came back late from a wonderful evening with two old friends - and thought I'd check into this site, (just to see what was happening), before nipping off to bed. Amazingly, here I find a thread sharing a thought one of the forum's contributors had had, which I had previously imagined lived alone in my own head. Moreover, the writer was asking for contributors to send lists of their similar experiences ! You see, I had just had that same thought resurface this very afternoon while my two friends and I were out hiking in the hills of Cumbria. And the topic had launched a lively exchange of the favourite titles which had resonated for each one of us . Wheww! To find this thread here,... tonight ! I find it warming to realize that there's actually other people who share the same kinds of thoughts. Maybe this seeking for answers to seemingly spiritual questions isn't the loneliest of 'sports' that I've long taken it to be ? Anyway, without further ado,... ( but MANY year of deliberation over the choices ), here's my own contributions. PLUS, a big thank you to the originator of this thread ! : * Be Here Now Ram Dass Cutting through Spiritual Materialism Chogyam Trungpa You Can Never Go Home Again Tom Wolfe Acceptance of What Is Wayne Liquorman .