Fancy Going on a Date?

Sunday, 23rd April 2023

I like dates. Not the shrivelled dried-fruit fig-like variety, although I do like those, and not the ask-a-girl-on-one, in truth I’ve not been on one of those for many, many, years and my last exposure to one was my then girlfriend saying she’d been asked out on one and was going to go, so not those kind either. Dates in the calendar.

Today it’s Sunday, 23rd April, 2023.

I don’t like this date. It’s St George’s Day. I’m Welsh so prefer March 1st, but have lived much of my life, including most of the last dozen years, in England so it’s ok. It’s Shakespeare’s birthday (and the date of his death fifty-five years later, hell of a birthday present that one). Shakespeare’s been a big part of my life one way or another. Neither of those reasons are the reason I don’t like today’s date.

At 12.45 two years ago today, only just creeping into today’s date, my dog Zen died.

I miss him very much. 

Still.

Both my parents are dead, I have seven ‘friends’ on Facebook who are no more. The second girl I asked if she’d marry me — she said yes — died in ‘05. Yesterday, funnily enough, by date, if that isn’t an inappropriate expression. April 22nd, 2005. She would have been forty five when she died, on the day my sons’ mother was forty two, the Meaning of Life, according to Douglas Adams. Although not for Sheridan. Since November 2017, I’ve been close to death a few times. My Pulmonary Embolisms were ‘large and numerous’, in both lungs. ‘What’s the good news?‘ I asked the Emergency consultant after his list of my ailments. ‘You’re still alive, son.’ They’d already travelled through my heart to get to my lungs, so fortunately only large in lung terms, not heart arteries. My Full Blood Count of .60 in January 2018 was a killing number, and the CTEPH of the May to go with January’s PV were both killing quantities of killing diseases. Really? Break out the acronyms? Chronic Thoracic Embolic Pulmonary Hypertension, and Polysethia Myvera. It’s all Greek to me.

So why is death, and talking about death, in Western culture so taboo? And why is this cancer, for me, so different?

I read once that taboos like shitting and fucking persist as taboos into the modern age because they were activities that left us vulnerable to being taken unawares and eaten. A while ago, now, mind. By Sabre Tooth cats and the like, that kind of while ago. Unlike a man, when a woman orgasms she looses all sensory awareness — other than the obvious — thus leaving her extra vulnerable. Maybe men do too, they just don’t last as long. There’s a joke in there somewhere. So, by getting it over and done with quickly they (men, us) can revert back to awareness of the surroundings. A modern unnecessary bit of biological functionality that has led to more than one unfulfilled relationship. I think the post-coital cigarette business is a modern phenomena. Records from long ago don’t exist. And they didn’t keep diaries.