Dickie White, and close friend, and film & TV reviewer, Cubby Begge, swap stories about broken New Year’s resolutions – Part II. In Part I, Dickie admitted that he has recommenced urinating in the sink, but was granted absolution by Cubby on the grounds that he hasn’t yet done it while the dishes were still in it. Here Cubby sets out his case for forgiveness of his own transgressions.
As my double chin slowly grows towards, and contemplates a merger with, my neck fat, I find myself forced to confront the hereafter. Who, but a man without mirrors, or access to the sort of funds that could guarantee seamless resculpting, could ever live with that chin-to-torso, bullfrog arrangement?
As soon as that big flapping beery dewlap is fully established, that’s me gone. To beer or not too many beers, that is currently the question. Is it too late to pull it all back in? Or have I, like Greta Thunberg’s teenage innocence, already gone beyond the point of no return? It seems to me that I need to acknowledge the inevitable, and so recognise that now is the time to embrace all of the ugliness that is to come.
Embrace? We know that ideas count for nothing; it is how they are executed that matters. It is all very well to decide that you will do as Tilda Swinton did in The Room Next Door, but Tilda will soon tell you that there’s much more to it than just deciding that it must be done. There needs to be a plan, and it must be adhered to.
Have you seen it, her film? I won’t spoil it – it’s more about the chat between events, than it is the events themselves… Little Tilda, facing the certainty of her death, and not wishing to endure a prolonged end of life-programme type-arrangement, first acquired herself a cyanide capsule on the Dark Web (I will probably make my own out of dill and cinnamon, wrapped in pellets of mouldy bread). Next, she settled on a strategy to choose the right moment. Here, she was smart. For one, she didn’t reveal the plan to anyone, but more importantly, she did not do as many others would, as I perhaps might have too had I not endured a life coloured by epic gambling failures (unlike many of the other protagonists in the boomer infested end of days market, I have learned the lessons of disappointment caused by waiting too long for the perfect moment to buy, sell, act, and thereby miss the best of the play); Tilda did a thing that tells me that her scriptwriters understood this naïve error as well as I did, and had her decide to perform the act just before the perfect moment arrived. For who, less attuned to the vicissitudes of a life of chance, would not say, “This moment is too good, I am still healthy, and I cannot go whilst it is all like this.” Tilda knew that the secret of good timing is to act just before the moment is ripe; and that to hang on until is, is to wait too long, and miss the opportunity. Those that haven’t learnt this lesson, stay beyond the point where it is optimal, and find themselves longing for that moment that is only in hindsight recognised as a peak. It, of course, never returns, and so you live out the end of your days full of regret, and in the context of Tilda’s predicament, having ceded control to others to manage what remains of your wretched existence.
As much as some of us would like to believe that we can continue a dialogue with the departed, nobody has actually done this yet. But were they to, and were they to pose the question to someone smart like Tilda and ask, ‘Why? Why now? You seemed so happy yesterday,’ they’d get the response, ‘Yeah, that was the point. I’d never have known another time like that, again.’
Tilda was poorly in an undisclosed way, as we all are, really. For my part, I say, who, apart from those already so ga-ga that they’re as good as dead, would choose to face society wondering whether your combover has been betrayed by the wind, or if you missed a patch when applying your bronzer foundation, or if the catch on your girdle has come unstuck, or your Tena briefs have leaked when wearing your white golfing slacks? Fuck all that. To this point, Tilda’s one error which was glossed over in the film, was to have overlooked the voiding. She wore a bright yellow trouser suit, then went to lie on a neutral-coloured sun lounger, accessorising with neutral, platform sliders. After cyanide? When the legacy should reveal you to have been a person of incredibly shrewd percipience, you throw it all away on being found in soiled troos? Imagine if it started before you got to the lounger, and you’d run out over your sliders, and smudged the edge of the lounger? It’d take a while to come back from that, especially when you’re dead, and can no longer put your case. Imagine if the person detailed to deal with the aftermath of your exit, had died themself, before they’d worked round their way round to forgiveness? Your legacy could remained stained for ever with their words of condemnation. Your selfishness, to leave in your best rig-out, which might reasonably have been expected to have been inherited by the cleaner; spoiling the nicest day of the year, with her filthy doings. Why couldn’t she have just gone and dissolved herself in a bath of acid, like a normal, decent person would have done?
Had I made the film, I’d have had Tilda go out into the lake over which the hired cottage looked, on one of those pedalos with a banana slide on the back, before popping the cyanide. That way she could slide cleanly into oblivion, before, err, cleaning herself in a solvent-based forgiveness.
Dickie’s judgement: Cubby needs to start wearing scarves wound tightly round his neck, such that, if they do not hold at bay the humiliating physical lapse, it is but a short walk from there to finish the job off, which can then be passed off as an unfortunate accident, say for example, if he was to get the trailing end of his scarf caffled up in the doors of a passing bus, or the automatic shutters of a shop, or something.
Dickie White's Diary 