Bunking Off
Life's A Journey
“Oh! the sunny days o' youth, they couldna aye remain-
There was ower meikle joy and ower little pain;”
- Robert Gilfillan
My eyes were closed, the lids a golden sunlight, my days gently and drowsily melting away. My mate Dave lay next to me on the warm grassy slope with his hands behind his head. He looked skywards; the apparently unending blue stretched before him as he dreamed of ways for us to fill a summer’s afternoon.
“Why don’t we hire a boat?” He asked without turning to look at me.
This seemed, on the face of it, to be a fair and reasonable idea; we were right next to a boating lake and it was a bright, calm and sunny day. On the other hand, we were sixteen years old, this was a school day and I should be taking a Geography exam in approximately fifteen minutes time.
‘Why would we..?’ It seemed that I was a fraction too late in raising my objections. He was already up and away and, as it was generally the case that where my mate Dave went, I followed, I was soon up too.
On the northern bank of the lake, there was a sort of mock-Tudorbethan cricket pavilion, from here they hired boats and seemed to do quite well out of such a ludicrous idea. Now, I want to be clear, I don’t think that boating itself is an odd idea, it’s wonderful, even boating on a lake. When the lake in question is Erie or Como or even Windermere, it’s a fantastic idea. However, Fairhaven Lake in Lytham isn’t much like any of these, having more family resemblance to a puddle than to any of the world’s truly great lakes. It is less than half a mile long, not quite two hundred yards wide and only a metre deep in most places. There isn’t much of it that you couldn’t walk to without getting your knees wet but, somehow, boats are still popular. They’ve been popular since a group of Victorian engineers decided to steal a bit of the sea and enclose it. For over seventy years they held annual regattas here and, in the 1920s, there were even boats that would take passengers on tours of the lake; despite the fact that to walk the entire circumference wouldn’t fill twenty minutes of your afternoon. I would never have thought of hiring a boat if my mate Dave hadn’t been there but, if he hadn’t been there, I would probably have gone to my Geography O Level instead.
My mate Dave didn’t do Geography, in fact, I barely did Geography but I was signed up to the class. I don’t know when I’d last been to one of Mr. Basford’s lessons and, even when I had, I’m not sure either of us benefitted very much from my attendance. When I was there, he would often point out that daydreaming and staring out of the window wouldn’t get me far in life. As someone who has since made his money out of writing and being a police Air Observer, I have to say that he was wrong, but he didn’t deserve the level of contempt with which I treated either him or the subject he was trying to teach me.
However, in my defence, I was sixteen. What did I care about poverty in Sao Paulo or scree slopes or oxbow lakes when there were girls and beer and aeroplanes? Even those were in reverse order of interest, mainly because I had more chance of getting to taste a beer or of getting inside an aeroplane. Anyway, my lack of interest led to me not turning up to many Geography lessons and, right now, it contributed to me missing my Geography O Level. This was the exam taken at the end of two year’s study which apparently decided the course of your life. Instead, I went boating on Fairhaven Lake.
The thing is, it’s the only exam I still remember. All of the other ones which I took and, much to everyone’s surprise, particularly my own, passed, have disappeared into the mists of time. I have vague recollections of sitting in church halls and sports halls and guessing at things but I couldn’t tell you if that was English or Chemistry or Mathematics. However, I do remember the one exam that I didn’t bother going to and I think I always will. It was then that I really learned about the value of bunking off and I still believe that it added more to my life than turning up for a Geography O Level ever could.
Of course, now I’m cleverly disguised as an adult, I don’t bunk off anymore but I do still believe that we all need time to get away from stuff: from the things we are meant to be doing; from the things which are expected of us; from the things we imagine are expected of us. Time away from doing what we have to do; those things we do because we believe they are achieving something. We need time to do what we want to do, time to do things for their own sake and not because of where they’ll lead. It was Mark Twain who so rightly pointed out that “work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body ain’t obliged to do.”
I have been fortunate enough to be obliged to do some very interesting work and had, what many would presume to be, an interesting life. Their presumptions would be correct, I have been very lucky, but still most of the days are indistinguishable from all the others in my memory. That’s true for most of us, our days all begin to fade into one amorphous lump and, when we look back on our life, it’s hard to pick them apart. The days all tend to melt and merge in our minds and become one; few moments really stand out unless we work at making them memorable. If what I was doing was going to be that unmemorable when I reached my dotage, then perhaps I could change that by learning more about the places I was lucky enough to visit, seeing a few of the sights and meeting some of the people who called it home. Making some moments to remember.
Moments are more important than many people realise, our life is made entirely of moments. The secret that some people miss is that once we spend them they are not necessarily gone but can, instead, be invested for the future. Later in our life, we get to live again all of the moments that we spent well. In fact, they can be better second time around. I think it was Dr Seuss who said that we sometimes do not realise the value of a moment until it becomes a memory. Mind you, he also said quite a lot about a cat wearing a hat and some other stuff we don't talk about anymore, so we don’t have to listen to everything he says.
I know that I am incredibly lucky in that I get to visit lots of places which I can explore. I know that I am fortunate in that my eyes, my ears, my brain, my heart, my lungs, my legs and my life all allow me the freedom to do that exploring. We can all do it, though. We don’t have to travel far, we don’t have to circumnavigate the globe or go white water rafting down the Limpopo or end up, as my mate Dave did, buying a boat and sailing single-handed from Falmouth to Valencia. Just looking around at what is in front of us, being curious about the things we see and the people we meet, taking time to actually live our life rather than just passing through it; that’s enough. That, to me, is bunking off. As the great philosopher Ferris Bueller said: “Life moves pretty fast, if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
So, who knew? Lytham gets sunshine.