We are a social species. What makes people happy is people. Walk the aisles of any supermarket and see what Auden called “the ladies and gentlemen too much alone”. You will cover 100 miles before you hear a laugh. However, stand at the door of a pub and you will be assailed by gust after gust of laughter. Laughter is aspirin for the adult soul.
I went swimming yesterday – sober, solitary adult lengths of the pool. Swimming generates a thirst, so I stopped off on the way home at a basement pub and the psychiatric nurse was at the bar as usual, and as usual he upbraided me for having still not written a column about merkins.
To which I replied, as I always do, that I would get round to it when the occasion presented itself. A merkin is a pubic wig.
The psychiatric nurse went on to lament his lack of retirement savings and admitted he probably shouldn’t be spending so much money at the pub.
But then he said, “You’re a long time dead,” and ordered another beer, and added he only hoped he had enough left when the time came to pay for his Viking funeral. This is a long-held fantasy of his which involves lashing his corpse to a boat, towing it out on to Lyttelton Harbour, soaking it with petrol and putting a match to it.
I asked whether he planned to seek permission from the council, and he said surely even the council wouldn’t send someone to sea to douse a funeral pyre, and I said nothing pleases those in authority more than thwarting the citizenry, usually on the pretext of the two most pernicious words in the language, health and safety. So the opportunity to continue to thwart a citizen even after he was dead would prove irresistible to any bureaucrat.
Then the young Indian woman at the bar said she wanted a sky burial. I asked if that was the one where they staked the body out on a platform for the vultures to deal to, and she said yes, and I asked if they still practise that in India, and she said in some parts, and I asked which part she was from and she said Hyderabad.
I said all I knew of India I had got from watching cricket on television and it often seemed to me that the air in the great Indian cities was almost granular, and she said that would be the smog.
And I said there often seemed to be vast numbers of hefty flying insects and she said yes, hefty flying insects were an Indian specialty.
And thirdly, I said that there always seemed to be an abundance of dingy birds of prey swooping around the ground, even in the middle of vast conurbations like Delhi, and she said yes, that would be the black kite of India, previously known as the pariah kite, which lives in the cities in huge numbers and has become a great scavenger.
Whereupon the psychiatric nurse suggested that they do sky burials at Indian test matches, putting the corpse of a willing person – a cricket enthusiast, perhaps, of which India has no shortage – on a platform behind the bowler’s arm to give it a good view of the game.
This would not only give the kites a feed and a cricket fan his dying wish. It would also give the crowd something morally instructive to watch during the lunch interval and slower periods of play, reminding them time waits for no one and if you are ever going to do anything of note with your life, the time to do it is now.
But Hyderabad said a sky burial platform at a cricket ground might not get planning permission, even in India, a country that seems more at ease with death than most, given the number of corpses packed off down the Ganges every day.
And so the three of us agreed the health and safety meddlers were growing in number and impudence by the day and that we had better order another round of drinks before they sink their bloodless claws into that most wonderful of all things on God’s green earth, the pub.
