The Holiday Called Life.

I’ve always been drawn to writings about mortality, which I suppose is why I’ve written a sentence or two on the subject myself. It seems that there’s a certain type of writer – poets more often than prose merchants, I would say – who can’t help musing on the curious suspicion that the business of living has something vaguely absurd and pointless about it.

The pleasures and pains, the losses and gains, the thrills and the spills and the vales and the hills… We strut and fret an hour upon the stage and then are heard no more (to slightly misquote Will) and every grain of tomorrow slips through an ever gaping maw to become a yesterday with inexorable certainty. To quote Mr S again (accurately this time):

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death

Or to quote a latter day bard (Mr D, a favourite of mine):

… for those not busy being born are busy dying

And that, it sometimes seems, is all there is to it. You get born and set out on a walk of unknown length to death, with an infinite variety of adventure available along the way. Life is a walking holiday. Simple.

But at the end of a walking holiday you go home, so the real question with regard to life has to be: Where is home?

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Maybe I’ll write something more original when I’m feeling less washed out. The results from yesterday’s local authority elections suggest that the Tories are going to get a landslide in June’s General Election. I sometimes want to disown most of my fellow Britons.