There are days when it seems the universe was set in motion
for the sole purpose of creating situations and events that make me feel angry
or frustrated or miserable and on really bad days, all three at once.
Monday was one of them.
I wake up when it gets light, something my body learned to
do to overcome jet lag. A wonderful trick it is, as on my first trips to New
York I used to wake up ready for breakfast at two every morning and then have difficulty not falling sleeping over dinner. My longtitude sensing body clock works fine – as long as there
is no early morning cloud cover. Early morning Monday’s sky was pretty well
clouds and nothing else so I woke up late, which makes a bad start as something
(my regular swim on this occasion) has to be cut out of the schedule for the
day. Another bomb went off, this time in
Choueifat with the by now familiar, yet still gut-wrenching images on the TV. A
set of trivial things I won’t bore you with continued to go awry so that, by
early evening, the world had gone black and turned against me and I was
completely unfit for human consumption. So I consumed instead.
Now that same day I’d read of the circumstances of the death
of one of my favourite actors, Philip Seymour Hoffman, at the ridiculously
early age of 46. Seventy bags of heroin were found stashed in his flat. His
mother bore an Irish name (O’Connell) and I began to wonder about the problems
of us Celts, our apparent tendency to self-destruct while trying to escape from
a world that can make us revolt from even having to stay on it. William
Hamilton (mathematician), Oscar Wilde (writer), Dylan Thomas (poet), Brian
Jones (musician), Richard Burton (actor) and George Best (sportsman) were all Celts
who paid the ultimate price for over indulgence in sex, drink or drugs (and
again sometimes all three) often presumed to be attempts to escape from reality.
All of them provided insights and pleasure for the rest of us without finding
personal peace and now they’ve been joined by another.
What is it about the Celts then? Well I can’t be sure, but
Monday provided me with yet another experience of descending into the black
followed by switching the lights out. And there’s another colour that can engulf
me – red. I think of myself as easy going, I like the soft furriness of cats, I’m
normally gentle with others and their feelings, but, and it’s a big but, very
occasionally the red mist descends.
I think it was the manager’s fault. He should have ducked
when, having ripped out the SIM card and crushed it under foot, I threw the
empty phone across the shop. The details of the event don’t really matter,
suffice it to say that what seemed like hours of my life had been wasted by a
customer dis-services screw-up by a well-known mobile telephone company in the
UK. One by one, all the pet hide behinds of data protection, health and safety
and “it’s our policy” had been trotted out for my mental torture. Then it
happened, the red mist that I’d been holding back finally exploded all over my
brain anaesthetising good-sense, reasonableness and physical caution, during
which time the phone was made to fly. My wife smoothed over the threat of
assault charges, but I’m still banned from ever going in one of XXX’s shops
again. Just the sight of me walking past the same shop half an hour later
caused the manager to duck. Too late. I think it was that that caused the feelings
of remorse, guilt and self-horror to set in.
It happens every five years or so, the invasion of the red
mist followed by descent into black. Black alone perhaps once every few months.
I can cope with that, but if they happened regularly? I’d have been pushed or
fallen off the stage ages ago.
So I’m not going to blame Messrs. Hamilton, Wilde, Thomas,
Jones, Burton, Best and Hoffman for leaving too early, for I suspect they’d had to cope not just with
the black and the red but many other colours too and all too regularly for
comfort. I’ll just thank them for the bodies of work they, and so many other
Celts, left behind.
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