A Surprisingly Dark Conclusion.

So given that this is the final entry in this relentlessly well documented pilgrimage, lucky entry number thirteen, I have decided to crown its ultimacy with a quick note on death. A little morbid perhaps, but here’s why.

After managing to guilt my boundlessly kind mother into collecting me from the airport, we had a very interesting chat on the way home.

(Apart from her missing the arrivals lounge, reversing and smashing a brake light on the car behind, before doing a runner on a very angry fellow road user, the pick up went very smoothly. I hope I’m still such a fervent renegade at 63!)

Turns out she avidly followed my travels with a mixture of enthusiastic parental interest and disapproval at my various bouts of vulgarity, as one may expect, but one thing she picked up in particular was something I wrote in Hampi, “If I die, please know I died happy.” I think she understood more than I had anticipated she would.

“I think you are going to die young you know Timothy,” she said to me with a sigh, but not really a sigh of despair, instead one that disclosed more of a grudging acceptance!

I have considered the fact, at various times from quite a young age, that death isn’t actually that bad a deal for the deceased party, sans any associated pain involved, or possible (and I suspect implausible) afterlife. Indeed my various near death experiences at the hands of the sub continent put me in mind of this actuality quite sharply. What is so bad about death exactly? It seems obvious to me that non-existence on it’s own merits would be an entirely neutral affair.

Famously the suffering lies for those left behind. As I have moved through India I’ve met some really great people, (as well as some others,) many of whom have got an honorable mention or more over the weeks. I am also lucky enough to have a wide base of friends and family spread over the surface of the earth, whom I love dearly.

Some I feel privileged to have met and spent time with. Some I have found great comfort and support in. Some I don’t know why I like at all, and am mystified and often irritated as to where my affection towards them stems from. Most of the above I have had a a lot of fun with over the years in various guises, which is of course at the centre of all I hold valuable, rightly or wrongly.

I’d like to think that if I died they’d be pretty bummed, and of course vice versa. Such is the nature of forging connections with others- we are compelled (I hasten to say designed) to do so by our very nature, however painful it is when those connections are inevitably severed, death being the ultimate form of severance.

I’ve attended more funerals in my life than weddings. I used to out this down to bad luck, but recently I realised that it is in fact a statistical inevitability. Not everyone gets married but everyone dies. In addition to this everyone has their own funeral, but shares a wedding with someone else (just the one other generally speaking.) So we should expect over the course of our lives to attend at least twice as many funerals than weddings- a fairly morbid prospect.

Of course some people get married more than once, but any successive occasion past the first is generally a muted affair, unless your Katie Price or something equally dreadful, so the difference this makes is marginal- I wasn’t even invited to my own sister’s second wedding!

So probability aside, at many of the funerals I have attended there has been the general vibe of a “celebration of life,” rather than a gathering of communal mourning. An attempt to put a positive spin on a something that is in essence an irredeemably sad affair.

Bollocks to that- at my funeral I want people to be fucking sad. I want weeping in the streets, the screaming and tearing of clothes, the donning of ashes and sack cloth. I want hour long silences, annual services of remembrance and a series of statues commissioned over significant locations over the course of my life. You all better be fucking devastated, doomed to wander the earth as scarred husks of human beings for the rest of your empty, Timless lives!!

I jest. The universe would undoubtedly find something else to revolve around. In fact what I want to pick up on is that underlying positivity. It seems to me that it’s not always justified. Not every life is well and fully lived- that much is platitudinous. This observation implies however that some are, or so it seems to those of us left behind, from whatever perspective we feel we have managed to gain on such matters.

The most recent funeral I attended was that of my best friends father, an important figure in my life, especially since the loss of my own father, and a loss to the world I felt quite forcefully. I was pretty upset, not least for the pain caused to people I care a lot about. However it was the first funeral I have attended that I found a genuinely uplifting experience.

Andy Perry, the vicar of St Mary’s, and general Patriarch of Poole, anchored the occasion commendably with his usual brand of measured contemplation tempered with genuine compassion, but I found the most moving contribution was Richard’s two sons speaking with such affection about their father.

I wouldn’t dream of trying to expound just what a life well lived involves, I wouldn’t even presume to know where to begin, but during those ten minutes it was abundantly clear to everyone present that this was an archetype of one such life. That I found great comfort in.

It seems insane that you can say that about someone that died so young, contemporarily speaking, and so tragically. I found myself wondering in the months that followed what insights one can draw from such a surprising consensus.

How the hell does this relate to India Tim? Tenuously, but my thought processes often run along such lines, and this one was fairly dominant towards the end of my trip, in the hours I spent alone.

In the earliest entries I wrote a bit about how nice it was to stay with Paddy and Islay, the warmth and hospitality of their Indian home away from home, becoming a really pleasant place to spend a few days, (before the real madness began!)

Later on in Goa, I ran into a few interesting characters. Namely the drug addled plethora of lunatics that frequent the beach bars, descending as ungracefully as is conceivably possible into middle age. Their total detachment from reality was a sobering chapter in the trip- a pathetic tribute to the ravages of such poor life choices.

What I found really surprising was my reactions to these fairly polarized episodes. I’ve always seen myself as a bit of a nomad. I’m fairly incapable of staying in one place for any considerable period of time, or forging any relationships, romantic or otherwise, that counteract either convenience or immediate enjoyment.

This innate restlessness I took as signifying a deep seated desire for detachment from any permanency in my life, but I am starting to think that I overestimated the efficacy of this part of my psyche.

Will and I were in Hampi one day, contemplating whether it was time to take our thrashed and trashed bikes back to the shop and deal with the angry, and inevitably expensive aftermath. He looked at me with his usual malevolent grin and replied, “fuck it, lets let our future selves deal with it.” So we had a beer instead.

It was I thought, a hilariously lateral and refreshing take on the self and the passage of time, but really that line of thought sums up what really is so bad about dying. It’s not just the person who is lost to the world, but their future selves, their ambitions, and potential.

Leaving India, as I posed myself tiresomely familiar questions about the future with all this fresh in my mind I realised that in fact, there was something within me that wanted a future akin to Paddy’s, and not that of the nomad, who generally has a future akin to Eric the terrible’s in store, informing travelers 20 years or so younger, of how they can talk to dolphins with a squeezy horn on a stick.

I’m not just talking about losing my mind, although that terrifies me more than anything. I often think of myself as an old man in the future, (as old as I can plausibly make it too anyway, perhaps 31 if I’m lucky,) looking back on my life and the decisions I made. Not so much a path I chose thus far, as a mineshaft I stumbled into, and am still plunging uncontrollably down, replacing gravity as the active force with my personality.

Meeting a lot of local people in India you still see the remnants of the Caste system, a kind of social hierarchy developed from idea’s of reincarnation. For those still living in adherence to this near demagoguery, a life well lived is a much simpler concept. Basically it involves fulfilling your role in society with an appropriate level of aptitude, be it a shopkeeper or a Rickshaw driver etc, and hoping for a better rebirth as reward.

A mentality far removed from what we are accustomed to. Breaking out of the shackles of such impoverished roots, in a sort of Alan Suger-esque fashion, is an archetype we actively strive for, the converse being true of those from more privileged backgrounds that somehow manage to throw their anthropological head start away, winding up in wasted anonymity.

We in “The West” are blessed with a freedom that is both great and terrifying. The world is our proverbial oyster. Even little girls from council estates in Newcastle can grow up to be fame obsessed, dubiously talented, borderline anorexic, piss-sirens. Surrounded by regrets, apathy and dissatisfaction, our margin for error is terrifyingly enormous!

(Incidentally I have really come to hate calling Europe and America, “The West.” Hence the citation marks. Direction is surely a relative concept, especially on a planet that is most definitely round, such as our own!)

What kind of things would I regret? What decisions would I be happy with? These kind of considerations have driven me to all manner of ill advised tom-foolery in the past, but ultimately who is to know.

What I do know is this. There was a warmth about Paddy and Islay’s home lost in the relentless heat of Goa. Maybe the solution to that innate restlessness is not out there to be found in the wilderness of the unfamiliar at all.

God, I’m starting to sound a bit old. Don’t worry, I’m not going to be settling down anytime soon, I’m in the alps again for God’s sake! I do however want a chance to live properly- for the ineffable evidence of a life well lived to be of great comfort to people at my own funeral. I’m not there yet, no matter how happy I die. It’s a work in progress.

Perhaps not such a shadowy wanderer at heart after all. A poignant thought to end on, for me at least.

Quite regardless of whoever has happened to read any of this blog I have hugely enjoyed writing it. Thank you if you have taken an interest, I hope I have made you at least smile wryly at a few of my ill advised misadventures and fatuous social commentary. Please just go visit India- it’s big, beautiful, chaotic, at times fucking mental and above all utterly unmissable in the widest possible sense. Also the food is awesome.