“Nicht weinen, weil sie vorüber!
Lächeln, weil sie gewesen!”
- Ludwig Jacobowski
Today I am celebrating simply being alive, it’s something that we often forget to do. It is so simple to just expect another day to roll around. So easy to disregard it and forget to spend it well, being the best you that you can be today.
Don’t get me wrong, I often forget. I can still be a miserable arse and overlook just how unlikely it is that I would get to see this day at all. It is unlikely, though, very unlikely. The chances of the one sperm meeting the one egg that would one day be you is calculated as being one in 400 quadrillion. That’s four hundred thousand million million. A four with seventeen zeros after it. Not only that, this had to happen to each of your parents and their parents and so on back through 150,000 generations of hominids and four billion years of life on this planet. Let us not pretend that we are not lucky to be here, seeing today.
For me, it’s even luckier. I was born prematurely in the 1960s and wasn’t expected to see the next morning. Somehow I’ve seen 19,962 of them since then. It’s also slightly easier for me to remember how lucky I am just to be alive as that hasn’t always been the case. Yesterday was Saturday 9th December. The last time we had a Saturday 9th December – six years ago – I died whilst out walking my dogs.
I felt hot all over, then a little bit dizzy and then nothing, the world stopped. There was a warm but intense light, like the summer sun seen through the last few feet of cloud as you climb in an aeroplane. The light, the warmth, the feeling of utter peace and contentment grew nearer. Then there were people; people who were glad to see me. Then I was back on a cold forest floor. I can’t tell you what happened. I don’t know if I glimpsed the afterlife or if that’s simply something a dying brain does to make things easier. I know what I believe, though.
I could never fear death. Either there is an afterlife which is wonderful or there is a pleasant interlude and then billions of years of simply not existing. Either way there ain’t much to worry about.
My wife had been with me on the dog walk and had pounded on my chest until I returned to join the land of the living. She got me to the hospital, despite my protestations that I was fine. There they concluded that I was not, in fact, fine and that I needed to go to Papworth and have a new heart valve fitted if seeing the new year was in any way an ambition of mine. My wife asked if she could bring books in for me to read and was informed that it might be better to bring magazines, ones with quite short articles.
I was in Papworth Hospital over the Christmas period, waiting not for Santa but for open heart surgery on a ward full of others with various types of dicky tickers, most far sicker than me. I was supposed to have my operation on the twenty-third but my surgeon, Mr Pedro Catarino, was called away to carry out an emergency heart transplant. He came to see me to explain why my operation would have to be postponed and looked so tired that I was glad that he wasn’t going to be opening my chest up today. I told him to go home, enjoy Christmas and I’d see him on the twenty-seventh. That left me stuck on a ward with the other hopeless cases, too sick to go home for Christmas. I woke up on Christmas morning, attached to a heart monitor in case I died during the night, to hear the radio at the nurses’ station playing Christmas songs. The first words that I heard on waking up in one of the world’s premier cardiac surgery units, and I promise you this is true, were: “Last Christmas, I gave you my heart and the very next day, you gave it away.”
After Mr Catarino’s short Christmas break, I had the operation. My lungs were entirely deflated and my heart was stopped and exposed to the open air as a fantastic consultant cardiac surgeon sewed a new aortic valve into the top of it. The op seemed to go smoothly enough, and I made it home on New Years’ Day. The recovery was slow but steady and I had a new appreciation of every single day. I cried with joy when I saw bright yellow daffodils on a blue-sky spring morning, their trumpets raised as though playing a fanfare to a new day, a new season, a new life. Mr Catarino said that with a bit of luck and some alternative lifestyle choices it should be many years before we met again and by “alternative lifestyle choices” he meant “cut down on the Fisher and Donaldson doughnuts, fatty”.
I have tried to change some of the things I do and some of the things I eat. I never thought that I was the sort of person to get up early and exercise. It turns out that I was right, I’m not, but I have changed some of my ways. I feel happier since swapping my morning coffee for orange juice. My GP says it’s the Vitamin C and natural sugars but I think it’s the vodka. There are ninety-seven calories in a shot of vodka and one hundred and five in a banana, I am trying to make healthy choices. Do you know that eighty percent of the cholesterol in your blood comes, not from what you eat, but from your liver? Anything you can do to keep that little bugger busy has got to be good them, right? Please bear in mind, I am not actually medically trained. I have, however, discovered that by simply switching cakes and chocolates and sugary snacks to apples and oranges and grapes, it is possible to quickly lose up to fifty percent of any joy you had in your life. I’ve tried to change the way I am, too. For instance, I've decided to be less condescending to people from now on. Condescending means talking down to people like they're stupid; so far it’s going really well.
Precisely six months after my operation I got the chance to visit Inverness; I was looking forward to returning. I had known the city previously, thirty years previously, when, as a newly graduated Royal Air Force Air Electronics Operator, I arrived on my first posting, to 206 Squadron at RAF Kinloss, flying on the Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft. I would go on to see lots of new places and new things and to meet new people who would go on to play important parts in my life and teach me important lessons, most of which I ignored.
We helped those in distress at sea, flying search and rescue missions far out into the Atlantic or up into the Norwegian Sea. We hunted Soviet submarines as they made their way through the Greenland, Iceland, Faroes, UK gap. We followed the Soviet surface ships of the Fifth Eskadra as they operated in the Mediterranean. We flew on exercises with the German air force and the Dutch navy. We supported NATO’s standing naval force in the Atlantic, STANAVFORLANT, in operations in the Adriatic. We did lots of things that I can’t remember, some things I can remember and don’t want to talk about and a few things where I wasn’t even told what we were doing at the time. My job was so top secret that even I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. It was a wonderful time which I appreciate more with hindsight than I had the sense to do at the time. Inverness was thirty miles from Kinloss and our nearest city.
Of course, Inverness has changed in all the years I’ve been away, for a start, the road signs are now in Gaelic first and English second. That’s fine but it does mean that you spend the first couple of days in the area reading the Gaelic before realising that you have no idea what it said and that it’s too late to read the English because you’ve passed it already. I guess that, in thirty years, I’ve changed, too. Unless you’re a vending machine or a parking meter, change is inevitable. It is the way of the universe, railing against that, wishing that things would stay the same, clinging on to things, places or people is futile. What we really need to do – and by we, I very definitely mean me – is be grateful for all the wonderful people we’ve known, the places we’ve visited, the experiences we’ve had. The German poet, Ludwig Jacobowski in his verse Leuchtende Tage talks about the bright days of the past and then says: "Nicht weinen, weil sie vorüber! Lächeln, weil sie gewesen!" Which, I am reliably informed, means: "Do not cry because they are past! Smile, because they once were!"
We should be grateful for good memories; they can show us what is most important in our life. Recalling past times can make them part of our present. We can feel just the way we felt at the very best points in our life. As for all of the bits that we would find it hard to be grateful for? Well, just be thankful that they’re over and move on. Often the very best thing about the past is that it’s in the past, leave it there. I’d had my share of both kind of moments in the years I’d been away from Inverness but today it was looking as grand as it was possible to imagine anywhere looking.
Inverness on a warm, bright, summer’s day is achingly beautiful. Returning is like spotting someone you knew at school and never gave a second thought to who you now realise is dazzling and wonderful and clever and interesting. If you walk around the streets of the city centre you are unmistakably in a Scottish city. It’s not Edinburgh, it’s not Glasgow but it couldn’t be anywhere other than Scotland. The little round turrets you find above the ground floor shop fronts leave you in no doubt. The sandy stone buildings alongside the inky river with its lush, curving banks and grey-painted iron bridges take your breath away. The skirl of the Inverness City Pipe Band who are practising in the grounds of the castle dyed pink by the dropping sun makes you proud to be Scottish, even though you’re not. When talking about Inverness, H.V. Morton said that it was painted in colours they only use in Heaven. He was right, I should know, having glimpsed both recently. Morton feels slightly aggrieved that one country should have two cities as magnificent as Edinburgh and Inverness and, despite the years that have passed, he would still feel that way today and might even add Glasgow.
Moving away from the centre, down Island Bank Road, through the parkland that lines the bank of the River Ness and then over onto the small island, the views just continue to get better and better. Over the tiny suspension bridge from the island to the tree-lined avenue that is Bught Road. One thing that I am not fond of in the summer in the Highlands is midges but they are very keen on me. There are a few people, I am pleased and humbled to say, who quite like me. There are a handful of people who don’t like me, I’m sure. The vast majority of the planet’s human population does not give a frog’s left testicle about me one way or the other, being completely ignorant of my existence. This is not so for the world’s flying insect population, they all absolutely love me to bits. Horse flies, midges, mosquitoes – okay I’ve now pretty much exhausted my entomological knowledge - but the point is, if it flies and it bites it wants to know me. I get eaten alive in the evenings so I head back to the city along the river bank and Ness Walk. However, you could be forty miles from a city centre rather than a twenty-minute stroll from the train station; a stroll where you can watch the sun begin to dip below the wooded tops of distant, cloud-shrouded hills.
I walk back towards the centre of the city down Bishops Road with the River Ness flowing unhurriedly to my right and St Andrew’s Cathedral to my left. A sign outside tells me that Jesus loves me. That’s always a reassuring thing to know, well, it is unless you’re in a Mexican prison. Couples stroll hand-in-hand along the wide pavements. The air is warm and the sun is just sinking behind the two huge, square towers of the cathedral. The road curves round a terrace of three-storey stone buildings with towers and gables and mock battlements atop bay windows. Then it’s over the Ness Bridge and back into the city centre. Not that far from Heaven.
Thanks for reading Bunking Off with Adrian Bleese. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work or read more right now here Above the Law
Me too, Linda. I've rather enjoyed quite a lot of the last six years and am hopeful of having plenty more to enjoy.
This was the third time I've read of your death - once in a LinkedIn message and once in your book (which is excellent, and readers should buy a copy)
Each time it's been slightly differently but each time has combined an element of blunt surprise and humour.
I think it's fair to say I've gained more pleasure and amusement from your death than any other I can think of - and I'm glad you're still around for me to thank you for the joy it's brought me.