MEMORIES

Back in November I wrote about my wife’s and my efforts to tidy up a.k.a. declutter our workrooms. In the course of going through the mountain of papers that emerged I have come across several that have brought to mind old friends I haven’t seen for years, and only heard from in the last decade, or others from whom I only hear from at Christmas and sometimes on my birthday.

One of them, a Dutchman called Ad de Wit, I wrote to and heard from last in 2017. I wrote again this year only to be informed by a friend of his that he had died in 2022 from progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), the same dreadful illness (diagnosed in 2015) that killed my dear friend, the singer-songwriter Peter Sarstedt. I witnessed Peter’s slow deterioration over the years from his first diagnosis (wrong as it happens, as Alzheimer’s) in 2013 until shortly before his death in 2017, though it felt like a lot longer than four years. Thinking of my friend Ad, I recalled our time back in 1968, travelling together from Kathmandu to Kolkata and then to Mumbai, and up to Delhi where he left to return to the Netherlands while I went up to Mussoorie in the Sewaliks, the foothills of the Himalayas. I found a long letter from him that he wrote to me in 2012 and a postcard he sent to me in 1973.

Khatmandu in Nepal

There are other friends who have died in the last decade or two, from different things, but mostly one disease or another. That word “disease” always strikes me: the lack of ease that describes such events, particularly when it leads to death. I’m in my 80^th year now (turning 80 next October), so such thoughts have a certain poignant relevance for me and for my wife, who is a little older than me. If you ever heard my CD “Songs of Love & Time” you will recognise these sentiments in the song “My Love & I” (you can hear all my songs for free on Jango.com and Spotify and iTunes - not sure of that last one, you may have to pay to hear the whole song).

I don’t have any fixed opinion about an afterlife. It will be welcome if there is one, but irrelevant so long as I’m still alive, while there is no proof that there is or there is not such a future for us all! What I know is that there is a future for us in the memories of our friends and family, hopefully fond ones. I sent a round-robin Christmas e-card greeting to a long list of past and present friends (stamps are ridiculously expensive now, you have to think twice about who you want to send a card). One of them wrote back to tell me he thinks of me almost every time he drinks a whisky! We worked together in Munich in 2006 and used to go to a whisky bar there, where they kept more than a hundred different types, going up to one that was (and presumably still is) 120° proof. I tried it once, but only after six or seven others so I hardly noticed the increase, I was already blotto. It’s nice to know I still have a place in his memory. I hope it outlasts my mortal coil.

Memory is the one thing we all share that lasts a full lifetime, though the first two or three years usually don’t get back to our frontal lobes (Salvador Dali swore he could remember being in his mother’s womb!). I should add that I’m told even those early years are nonetheless stored somewhere in our brains. Perhaps the reported rushed review of our life that accompanies the last moments before death is a result of all that information being called up by our waning brains to remind us of all that we lived through. No doubt there will be memories of the people I hurt or ignored or didn’t realise what they thought or felt when they were with me, a lot of women from my late teens and early twenties, but also men, those years of near narcissist selfishness, especially since I went through those years in the wildly hedonistic 1960s, but probably most people if not all have their most hedonistic experiences at that sort of age, before adulthood and its responsibilities dawn on us.

Bodhisattva

I have always tried to live in the Now, as the Buddhists advise, so it is interesting to me to discover how much time I spend these days reviewing my memories. It’s not a lot of time by any means, but a lot more than when I was a teenager or really any age up until I turned 70 or so. Of course, much more of my time is my own now, I can spend the day busily occupied or I can put my feet up (metaphorically at least) and let my mind wander. In such moments it does wander a lot, not just through the memory-scape of my brain, but that is definitely one favourite place to go. Not always comfortable, often frustrating, the endless stream of bad decisions, poor performances, erratic relationships and so on and on. Chrissie, where are you now? Or Sarah or Keith or any of the many friends I have lost touch with over the last five or six decades? And why did I do that shot that way and not in one of the many much better ways I have considered ever since? And why haven’t I finished that short film script I began years ago? (Actually, that’s one I’m on to now). On it goes.

Of course, there are many, I could say countless good memories, of things I did well, of people I treated well, people I loved, of places I have lived in and enjoyed. The good thing about memory is that it tends to mellow with time, so that the bad things fade away into a kind of soft blur or they become amusing stories; most of what one remembers are the good times, the friends and colleagues who made life worthwhile and generally fun. This is not a universal experience, of course, I’m not fool enough not to realise I was born into a lucky life where I have avoided the worst of human experiences.

With all its vicissitudes, this is still a beautiful world and we live in extraordinary times as far a medical science goes and technology is largely an improvement on the days of my youth (except social media and the misinformation that plagues us). I met my oldest friend at school when we were 12 and my newest friends I met last year, playing music together. I hope you all can count such a good set of memories as I have been lucky enough to accumulate.

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