Today is my son’s twenty-first birthday. It is so unlike my own which climaxed with me putting my head through a very large window two storeys up and then trying to pick up pieces of broken glass with my bare hands.
There had been a lot of drink involved beforehand of course, before the blood. Pizza and lager. Standard fare for a student on a night out (especially when it wasn’t a curry at The Raj on Bedford Place). I’d been goaded to run up the stairs to our halls of residence flat but slipped when making a 180-degree turn. Luckily I was already on the way down when my head hit the glass. Any closer and I might have gone through it and out…
For a couple of days I felt like shit. For a couple of days I was a celebrity.
There was a lesson to be learned, of course - though I’m not sure I ever did.
It seems like yesterday, and I’m reminded of it for obvious reasons; mainly because it seems like yesterday and isn’t. And because I’d love to find a way to tell my kids that life is all ‘blink and you’ll miss it’; that you should cherish the ‘now’. But that kind of cherishing only comes later doesn’t it? It can only come later with the benefit of experience and hindsight. I suppose that wisdom’s driven by when and how you learn your lessons.
In any event, I don’t think it’s a message you can get across in words. I actually wonder if it’s not about finding the appropriate sequence of words, but rather discovering that the words you need don’t exist at all. They say the Inuit have many words for snow, but perhaps there aren’t the words I need to adequately convey what I want to say to my kids.
But that’s what we do all the time isn’t it, those of us who purport to be writers: juggle with our profound but somehow inadequate internal dictionaries, trying to our best to engineer something that speaks truth to people.
No; it’s not engineering, it’s alchemy.
So we’ll go out for a civilised meal in a couple of hours - and virtually no booze will be drunk. And then tomorrow I’ll sit down once again and assemble some ingredients for my writerly potions - “eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog, adder’s fork and blindworm’s sting, lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing” (Macbeth Act IV, scene I) - and see what I can concoct, all the while trying to compensate for the words I wish I had but which don’t exist…