I’m Glad I’m not a Cat!

It’s a strange title, but for me it makes perfect sense. After all, cats only have nine lives. The way the dice of Lady Luck have tumbled over the years, I would have to be a second moggy already. I am also very grateful to the aforesaid lady that she has still kept me on the planet, presumably for some further amusement. There are no objections from me and I would never consider the slightest smirk, never mind about laughing in her face.

'Oi you!' someone shouted from scaffolding on a building site when I was about nine years old. I looked up just before the deliberately thrown half house brick hit me on the forehead. At the age of thirteen, and entirely my own fault, I stepped straight off a bus whilst it was still moving. The poor bus driver and conductress nearly had instant breakdowns. The pavement was wet. Kidding you not, I aquaplaned and received nothing more than a pair of reddened knees. Oh, and a good yelling at from my dad for wrecking ‘yet another pair’ of school trousers. Many years after, my right foot was already going downwards when I saw the landmine just in time on a certain South Atlantic island. That’s three but I have other things to say.

My mother was an author and told the teenage me that someday I would also be a writer. It just took forty years before she was proved right and sadly nearly thirty since she passed away. Too late, in many ways, I realised she had been my invisible rudder, gently and skilfully steering me through the sea of life. The future is the hoped for, dreamt about, planned over or resisted entity that we actually have no real control over, no matter what we like to think. Events past can, however, very much shape the way one approaches this shifting sand of time yet to be. A singular event was one of the wisest things my mother ever said. ‘Better a good princess than a wicked pauper, but a good pauper is always better than a wicked princess.’ I’ve never been overawed by fancy titles or pomposity since the second she finished speaking. The person is the only criteria in my eyes, regardless of any other factors.

The second event was in 2004, lying in a hospital in Bari, after a heart attack. It wasn’t actually the attack itself or the nice medic; very un-Italian like, calmly telling me I had less than twenty minutes to live when the ambulance arrived. I’m glad I only found out after I had fully recovered that she was a volunteer and her day job was in the Vodafone shop. For anyone counting the meows of a feline spectre that was not life number four, there had already been a couple more in between. The event was an overheard whispered conversation in the hospital corridor. It was difficult to follow, but my Italian was good and I’m still certain I understood. A young, professional footballer had been brought in with heart problems and had died a few hours later. Battered, everyday old me was still alive and that had to mean something. As every future second becomes, fleetingly, a present one before it is transposed to the past, I try to value it, use it, to do something worthwhile.

We are all memories constantly in the making. It is not ghosts in the machine, rather the ghosts of memories that haunt the streets, towns and countryside. When you leave somewhere or someone behind, you become only a memory, good or bad. I returned to the town I had lived in several years after my heart attack. A very dear Italian friend admitted that she would often stand on the corner of the street and look up at my old flat. It had remained empty for a long time but she was almost convinced that, sometimes, she had seen my face in the window and a nod of acknowledgement that she was looking. Words, emotions and memories; it is hard to think of three more powerful things that can sway entire populations, change millions of destinies and turn a saint into a devil overnight.

Write about the future? Someone chose the appropriate topic with the pandemic that has steam-rolled through so many people’s lives, hopes and dreams during the last few months. Hard to plan when the future shape-shifts at least once a day, like trying to play poker with see-through cards. However, the beauty and curse of the human race is adaptability. What would I like for my own future? I consider myself an uncomplicated soul, taking pleasure in simple things. I know this might well cause high-browed derision from some. I’m not an ornithologist, but I’ve grown to like hearing various birds chirping away. I’m not an astronomer, but I appreciate being able to see the stars in a clear, unpolluted sky. I’m on the wrong side of sixty, but I still enjoy dragging the air guitar out in public when it suits. Youth, above all else, must be given a bigger voice and genuine, meaningful roles in the recovery of our planet. Sure they’ll make mistakes; be loud, irreverent, arrogant and stroppy. They will also be brilliant, inventive, creative and inspiring. Listen to their voices, give them encouragement and don’t slaughter hope. I’m a self-published writer. Like all of our fickle ilk, I may be cast into the bin of history or, one day, have some educationalist demand that my works are firmly on the curriculum. At least I will have left something tangible behind. Now, I can whisper my real wish to Lady Luck, if she has time to listen. It is simple; to be allowed a peaceful amble into the twilight, content that the world when I leave it will have secured a more certain and better future than it has right now.