Life

Diego And Me

#adventure, Dubai, Emirates, football, Life, maradona, time

What did Cervantes famously say? The road is always better than the inn? What was his intention with this use of metaphor? Interpretations vary, though I perceive the meaning to be bound up with the notion of each life as a journey plotting a unique route. When we think only of the destination we forget that the true and essential value of that journey lies not in where we want to come to rest (for that in itself signifies senescence and ultimately death), but rather in everything we missed while tear-assing between start and finish. Ask anyone who has trekked all day among the mind-blowing peaks of the Himalaya only to rest at day’s end in a teahouse whose rooms are basic at best. Did I push my body further than ever on that mountain pass only to rest my weary head on this paper-thin mattress in this frigid room? Was that what drove me on? To put it another way, don’t obsess on the future outcome only to miss the majesty crowned in the moment.

Granted, most journeys are punctuated by frequent stops along the way. A life worth remembering, for me is a life plotted well enough to be divided up into sections – stories nested in larger stories. There’s a tonne of metaphors that can be applied to this structuring of life: milestones; chapters; key stages; or epochs. Obviously, we use metaphors to package decades of life, each part a little, if distinctive, bundle of a greater whole. Of course, it’s easier to swallow the whole when you’re taking bite sizes one at a time. I say this because in Diego Maradona’s death I remembered certain monumental events of his life and how these events reverberated with important events of my own life. He is, of a fashion, an accidental yardstick with which I get a certain measure of my life. In his death I see my past life unfold.

If a human life is no more than the passage of the sun across the sky on one solitary day, then it stands to reason that a life can take a similar trajectory to another. Now no one’s saying they share the same sky with Diego for he owns the sky. What i am saying, however, is that there were times i crossed his skyway. And I’m not talking about bumping into him at an airport, but rather seeing three key moments in his life as an index of my own life.

The first was Mexico ’86. I was fourteen and head over heels in love with the beautiful game (which in those bone-crunching days on boggy fields was often anything but). Growing up in a land whose people supported any team that wasn’t England, when that quarter-final against Lineker’s men in white was aired live from the sun-drenched Azteca Stadium in Mexico City, we sat around that gogglebox absolutely transfixed. We knew all too well the flair and the cunning that was so unashamedly the nature of being an Argentina player. Maradona was everywhere except England accepted as the greatest gift to the game since Pele. In fact, in that era England was not the international footballing hub it is today. Like the spirit of Brexit, the culture of the game south of the border was insular as it was proud. While England could rightfully claim to have conceived the modern game of Association Football, by the 1980s it was the Latins, in particular the Brazilians and Argentinians that were really giving form to the modern game. England was mired in the old ways: the long ball; the crunching tackle; defensive power; the brain-damaging header. It was ungainly as it was anachronistic. Oh, and there were the chipped, concrete terraces. They were overspilling with angry young men who identified as both casualties of Britain’s industrial demise and warriors of a redefined tribe; as prone to violence in the name of their club as Thatcher was prone to the brutal euthanasia of a country riddled with industrial cancer. All in all, it was ugly on the home front. And into that melee entered the Golden Kid, el pibe de oro, a tousled-haired general from the barrios of Buenos Aires (which felt like another planet to us) who was immune to the bullshit dealt out by defenders, whose saw the game as performing art instead of the usual bloodless battlefield ethos of the English, who codified the game in the nineteenth century when games like battles were governed by gentlemen’s rules.

Maradona’s response to the humiliation of a Falklands War fought between Argentinian boys and grown English men four years earlier was to deliver national humiliation to the once indomitable power of Albion. And we fitbaw-mad laddies from north of the border could not get enough of him. Maradona as a figurehead had come to symbolize the struggle against old yet dangerous lions for all of us living in little countries. When Maradona put Burruchaga through with a deft flick from his magical feet, the World Cup was Argentina’s. That dysfunctional nation at the bottom of the world where footballers grew tall and bountiful as Pampa grass had vanquished another monolithic power, this time Germany, with their height and stature and relentlessly boring game of vorsprung durch technik. Beauty had conquered the beast. Maradona, the little master with thighs like a buffalo, against Rudy Voeller, the goal-poaching bandit with the terrible moustache. Like I already stated, Maradona’s Argentina won for all the world’s underdogs, all the little nations that stayed little in their perennial struggle against the mighty ones.

He lit the torch paper, inspiring all of us. So much so, that in the summer of ’86 we played more football than there were daylight hours. In ’86 we learned to play the game as it should be played: not with ferocity but with grace and skill on the ball. It was all about mastery of the ball, and this was his gift to every aspiring boy on Earth. While in England, dribbling was what babies did, elsewhere (and in Scotland no less) dancing the ball past midfielders and defenders was something to be lauded. That change in the whole aesthetic of the game was down to Diego. He, not Pele nor Garrincha, was the pathfinder.

Six months later, my Dad came home one day with a letter in his hand. In it was written, Dear Such and Such, Impressed by your abilities, we would like to offer you a promotion….in England. That was that. Nine months later I dragged my Maradona feet south of the border still harbouring dreams of running rings round Englishmen just as Diego had done. I joined the local club in a rural, primarily rugby-playing, area. The local boys, raised on English beef and Yorkshire puddings, were physical opponents, and they did not have much time for what the Argentinians called la gambeta (the dribble). With disdain for Maradona, the cheating bastard, each attempt at flair, of creative passing and dribbling, was ended unceremoniously. I spent half my time on the deck, as I recall, having been scythed down or slyly ankle-tapped. So physical and harmful to slender dribblers on the left wing, my skinny legs couldn’t take the punishment and within a year I had quit the county league game altogether. Not two years had passed since Maradona lifted the World Cup and my footballing dreams lay dashed on a cold, mud-clotted park alongside their owner.

Ten years after Mexico ’86 I flew to Buenos Aires for the first of what would turn out to be a few times. ’96 was a key year for both Maradona and me. While he was ending his career as an unfit Boca Juniors player, I was commencing mine as a dilettante with a taste for the sunlit bottom of the world. Within weeks I had been inculcated into the ever-widening sphere of the Boca hincha (meaning fan). My nearest and dearest furnished me with a blue & yellow Boca shirt, alongside the other million things she gifted me. From our little enclave on the Atlantic coast 400km south of Buenos Aires, I watched the Boca-River derby and could not believe I had gone twenty-fours years without realising that the game of football meant more to these people here in the south of the world than it did to those people up there in the north of the world. The atmosphere there on the TV en vivo y en directo was unbelievable. Fans clung to high fencing with one hand while swinging their camisetas with the other. Their skinny flaco cuerpos cooked in that cauldron under those floodlights. I was flabbergasted. Compared to our fairly orderly system of collective behaviour, these Boca fans you could liken to gibbons or vervet monkeys behind the cages of the zoo. And I mean that without malice. I had never witnessed passion for a club nor for the game itself. Passion, but not like that, no. The pitch of Boca’s Bombonera was claustrophobic with high fencing and near-vertical terracing. The weight of half the nation bore down on those players in a space electrified by expectations. And watching them play the short game in packed spaces was breathtaking. Whereas we in the north loved nothing more than the ball screaming into the top corner from 25 yards out, the South Americans took a whole different approach to the form that beauty would take en route to goal. They would rather walk the ball into the net, so long as they had put together a complex string of passing interplay in order to reach the goal. In that sense, for them the road was better than the inn. It didn’t matter how it went in, it was in the nature of the journey from goalkeeper through the midfield to goal that had those hinchas rocking the bars of their giant enclosure in rapture.

At the time, few Brits travelled to Argentina. English wasn’t even widely spoken. The nearest to a sentence in English was a lyric of the Beatles or the Stones (Argentina adored the Rolling Stones almost as much as another English import: the game of association football). I was immensely privileged to be there at any time, but particularly at the end of Maradona’s stellar career as a playmaker. His final games, like much of his life, frustrated his millions of acolytes. For him there was no crisis quite like a drama.

The third and final vague intersection of his life and mine would occur twenty-one years after the Argentina episode. In this subsequent chapter of life both he and I had taken a similarly nonsequitous direction, this time to the deserts of Arabia. I was stationed – though not in the military sense of stationed – on the Indian Ocean in an obscure town on the frontier of Oman and the United Arab Emirates. Diego, the journeyman, for that is what he had become in a largely wayward and bizarre coaching career, had landed a job coaching a second-tier team in the UAE called Fujairah, eponymously named in honour of the town, naturally. He was paid handsomely by the Sheikh of the Fujairah Emirate to do one thing and one thing only: earn the team promotion to the top tier. Even a man of formidable talents as Maradona could not replicate his deeds on the pitch with his discipline as a manager. He was struggling to raise his squad’s game. The legend-effect was no magic dust and by the time I took my seat in the stands of Fujairah FC’s stadium, Diego’s team were nudging toward the promotional play-offs, but not without the drama, the agony and the passion that followed him everywhere.

It was, as is the custom where hot desert meets warm ocean, like a sauna out there. The wet-bulb temperature was ludicrous. Nevertheless, we sweated it out just to catch a glimpse of Diego. And there he stood on the touchline, all five foot five of him. Trying to play down the significance of that moment, I tried not to gawp at the figure who lit up the world’s TV screens in ’86. Never in a million years did i imagine that Maradona would wind up here in Fujairah. Never in a million years did i think I would, for that matter. My gaze fell on his pitiful physique. Yes, the thunder thighs were still evident, as was the magnificent mane of salt&pepper hair, but his body had ballooned. He was bloated, washed up like a dead porpoise ready to burst on the beach. As the game got underway, this being a play-off decider, the tensions rose. Things were not going well for Diego’s Fujairah FC. They knocked the ball about like Sunday League players. Their finishing was impotent. But we hadn’t gained access to the game with the false hope that we’d be entertained tiki-taka, Barcelona-style. It was all about Maradona. It always was. He paced up and down that touchline. Me, I was seated yards away, so close I could see the sweat beading in his furrowed brow. He paced up and down like a man possessed by the ghost of a bear that lost its mind after a deranging lifetime in a zoo enclosure. The more the game went on, the more his fury rose. He could barely walk. His spine arched backwards to reveal a belly swollen by beer and bifstek. His locomotion was so stilted you’d think he had splints bandaged tightly onto his knees. But even in his fallen pomp he looked every inch the Napoleon of the football field he was born to be. He was flawed as he was magisterial. When the ball bounced out of play, landing right next to him, I took a deep breath, thinking he would do that magic trick with the ball where he booted it high into the stratosphere, go off and attend to something unrelated before returning to the same spot moments before it hit the deck only to boot it high into the air again, ad infinitum. This feat might sound easy on paper, but it is not. Instead of dancing feet, we saw a man who struggled to stop the ball with his feet. And when he kicked it back to one of his players, he was a rigid as a tin soldier. In thirty years he had gone from quicksilver to a wooden stick figure pieced together at the joints with rusting pegs.

In that failed kick of the ball I remember seeing how time makes fools of us all. I saw myself, what I could do the ball back then, and now, how sclerotic we had both become.

The Year is 2020, So Where is the Vision?

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Humanity bumbling along, governing bodies staring longingly into their former selves à la Dorian Grey and his cloaked mirror, and so-called policies as ham-fisted as a fist full of, erm, ham. Yes, the list just rolls on and on in this the only year in history dedicated to a field of vision deemed as clear and perspicacious as you can get. Oh, the irony of it all! We might be languishing in the year of our landlord, 2020, but we as a race do not enjoy the accompanying 20/20 vision that makes a bleary-eyed rookie into a hawk-eyed fighter pilot.

Let’s start with the only thing that really matters, and no it’s not us. Dorian Grey’s older self would be disappointed to hear that admission. That thing I speak of is the world around us. Let’s face it, it’s the only world we’ll ever have and the only living one within about, let’s say for argument’s sake, ten light years, or 58 trillion 590 billion kilometres, if you’re claiming on mileage. Wilderness, as most of us are aware, is being co-opted for agronomy and industry to serve a human population that is beginning to resemble an infestation or worst still a bacterial culture gone rogue in a planet-sized petri dish. This is happening at a rate for which there is no excuse. We are eating ourselves out of house and home and the only ones not seeing that are those with their craw stuffed full of nature’s bounty, as well as unschooled ignoramuses, for which there are many even if the the doyens of political correctness admonish us for calling out all the provincial thinkers in our swelled ranks. We have known for much of my own lifetime about the concomitant risks in taming the wild places: what is lost cannot be recovered in a timeframe that humans understand. Every Tom, Dick and Harry, however hard of hearing, must know that extinction is forever. We’ve known the phrase slash and burn for decades and, encoded in it, all its barbaric implications. Even though the debate has taken on new and violent terms of reference, eco-vandalism is going on in spite of our knowledge of it and complicity in it. All the while it seems the more dire the prognostications, the more wanton our behaviour and the more debased our greed for the things that have kept the world hitherto in balance. I have lost track of the number of times I hear the term ‘sixth extinction’. Now if that were insufficient to jolt us into redefining the boundaries by which the human race exploits the natural world, i do not know therefore what is sufficient. The more the mainstream media reports on how we’re approaching a tipping point, a point of no return, the more the average family’s material needs appear to multiply. While global population ploughs upward to an 11-digit figure, our celebrity culture boasts of its procreative prowess by inviting the media to snapshot their opulent lives in rural Sussex with six children in tow. Why make the implicit link between many offspring and material success in the knowledge that this is a false correlation? I mean, throughout most of history large families have more often than not been synonymous with extreme poverty, and not opulence. A Prime Minister of Great Britain with six offspring (that we know of), chaired with the task of finding a common voice to bring down the human impact? Gimme a break. What kind of vision is that coming from the stuttering mouth of yet another high-flying free-market mercantilist libertarian who believes in the greatest markets for the greatest numbers?

While the correlation between modern industry and atmospheric-changing carbon emissions has been better made, we continue to miss the point. If you want to trace the problem back to its genesis, jump not onto the bandwagon of climate change. Look again, use that 20-20 vision and you’ll see that Attenborough has been whispering truth: it all comes back to global human population. It’s out of control and from it everything flows. Rampant human overpopulation is the taproot down which a pestilent tree of Man grows. Wild habitat is stolen to tend the needs of a burgeoning population (in Africa and Asia) who all aspire to live as postwar Americans have. Forest goes tree after tree, species after species. We know all this. We know that nothing hosts biodiversity better than a forest found 20 degrees either side of the equator. We know the secrets to finding cures for human ailments lies within their mind-blowing array of biota. We know that to have space to grow row after endless row of oil palm trees to produce better soap and all manner of packet food to feed ever-growing numbers of hungry mouths and to wash evermore grubby little faces, we first have to collapse an ecosystem perfectly evolved to provided a pyramidical shelter for every manner of creature, plant and fungus from here to kingdom come. We know that without canopy cover the thin, reedy soils of the tropics turn infertile, into dust under the blazing sun. So why do we, as a race, persist in laying the groundwork to seed our own miserable demise? Why clear-fell whole countries only to fatten cattle for their mass slaughter to give some Lazy Joe a nutrition-depleted, ready-made burger? Not content with turning the complex machinery of nature into a monocultural wasteland where even the public are forbidden to go, we’re even ramping up operations on livestock farms to expand the export market for meat into a China that’s seen the largest middle-class in history emerge within the past thirty years. Even their tastes are changing to embrace a completely cruel and unsustainable world. Bye bye Taoism. The only consolation we can draw is that 800 million Hindus refuse point blank to jump on the cattle train, not that Mother India is a shining beacon of environmental custodianship.

Living in 2020 without the corresponding vision is not totally unlike the proverbial overflowing bucket of liquified manure that spills out to all quarters. It’s not just the disappearance of tropical and sub-tropical forest, nor the disappearance of broadleaf temperate forest that we in Europe have mourned for a thousand years. It’s everything, everywhere. The human cancer has gone metastatic. Desert is growing everywhere between latitude 20 and 30 north and south, yet we turn a blind eye for most of us do not live in a desert, nor have so much as stepped in one. Grasslands have already been co-opted, but that’s old news now since Buffalo Bill Hickok shot six million bison on the Great Plains as a way of spitefully starving the Sioux. Ice is going, yet while we mourn its melting we overlook that if it were advancing – as it has dozens of times in the past two million years – we wouldn’t find it so brilliant white or cute. As for the oceans, well, not only have we gone from trawler to factory ship as if to underscore the intensification of the end for all who partake in the feast of misery, we continue to sully the waters around our coasts and then some more. We’ve created a floating mat of congealed plastics that swirl around in the North Pacific and is reckoned to be the size of big ol’ Texas. A remarkable feat of human ingenuity if you ask me. Only outdone by the crass stupidity of knowing that fish stocks (even the term ‘stocks’ implies monetary value and property for humans) are near exhausted, so how about we build trawlers the size of small passenger liners with hooked lines trailing off the stern, some long enough to reach the moon and back, which was in all fairness the last decent thing we ever did to get one over on nature. Scrape the seabed for a catch that justifies the distances the fleets (mainly Chinese) will go in order to bring home the ocean’s bacon. They know the damage wrought by this crude method, but do they care? They must know that hardwired into their rapacious business model is the reality that what they’re doing is finite and temporary and smacks of the kind of short-term strategic planning that is no planning at all. Rather, the dragnet of modern fishing fleets represents another instance of short-sightedness that can never equate to the far, crystal clear vision that 20-20 provides.

A discussion about the absence of vision in the year where the two words best eclipse, cannot be foreclosed without mention of political will and leadership. It does not require radical insight to see that leadership around the world is characterized by a near collapse in the manner of vision needed to see the living Earth through the 21st century without any more bodily desecration than is strictly needed to lead a low-impact life. Leaders are followers. Whom they follow is up for argument, but you can bet that the pursuit of profit and unenlightened self-interest lies right behind them. Britain and the U.S. are grotesque examples of nations who have known visionary leadership in their illustrious pasts and who have now descended into a near-existential breakdown because the current crop of leaders are singularly lacking in the kind of millennial vision that sees a hundred years ahead, and not the next hundred days, fearing the imminence of their own destruction, which is the lot of the modern politician. Where are the leaders that the world in crisis demands? Where are the new wave of articulate young voices? Where is the unity of purpose in it all? Of course, worshipping the making of capital and looking to those early 21st century capitalists as pedigree for the type of leadership our damaged world needs is going to end badly. The credo of unlimited economic growth built upon the conquest of nature (as espoused by Adam Smith back in 1776) is a dangerous one, setting a course for yet more planetary destruction by a species whose boots have gotten too big for their feet, whose eyes have grown too large and covetous for their sockets, but whose vision has dimmed. Contrary to the saucer-sized eyes they think is needed for a bigger, bolder vision, they’re missing the whole point: its smaller, less covetous eyes we need, but eyes that penetrate the darkness we currently find ourselves lost in.

To Live With a Loss That Has No Purpose.

animals, Buddhism, death, dogs, ethics, fate, free will, human mind, kindness, Life, Meaning, meditations, Menaing, Musings, Natural Law, natural philosophy, Reflections, Religion, stoicism, thoughts

So, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer bloke.

We often use the verb ‘to stumble’ when employing metaphor in describing mishaps on the road to personal progress. For instance, ‘I was doing so well to make this dream happen until i stumbled into trouble.’ Thing is, we don’t often apply the term literally when describing the very moment that things took a definitive turn for the worse. Take this example: ‘He stumbled on the escarpment and fell to his death‘. Exceptions prevail, of course. Sometimes people stumble literally and the ensuing fall is even more consequential (and somewhat more inexplicable) than if the stumble had been figurative in a metaphorical sense. What happened the other night was not exactly a stumbling block on the road to Middle East Peace; being real and not abstract it was arguably more compelling than that.

Soon enough we’ll come back to this nice bloke for whom it happened to. It must be foretold that I’ve got this far in life without throwing the towel in by consoling myself that we inhabit an orderly, law-abiding universe. A chaotic, lawless universe is too hard to countenance. In this universe of mine watchful, seemingly benign forces act upon our individual conduct to pave our way with either help or hindrance. You might call this ‘the blind watchmaker’ syndrome. A classic call to monotheism’s central tenet that God is everywhere and judging. He maketh even that which He cannot possibly maketh. My take is more Tao of Physics, more Oriental holistic, more interconnected subatomic networks with inbuilt natural laws of justice than your run-of-the-mill divine, omnipotent Father-figure there to restore the cosmic balance of justice in favour of the kind and compassionate over the cruel and selfish among us. Intelligent design? Only in so far as subatomic matter is mystically connected to each other despite time and vast distance. Protons telekinetically agreeing that so-and-so is worthy, through honourable conduct, of synchronicity with benevolent time. On time’s elevator, the good don’t even need to punch in their desired floor. The lift knows where to take them. Whereas, the black of heart, for all their frantic prodding of buttons on the console, the elevator nevertheless spits them out precisely on a floor where only woe can find them. These we call the natural laws. You get what you give, no more, no less. Except my story betrays this as fanciful thinking dreamed up by those who need to know that behind every senseless action lurks a just reason. My story tells of how our foundations can be shaken by events that have no purpose other than to reaffirm the popular, secular belief that shit just happens. If everything happens for no other reason than to provide no other reason, then please stop the whirring cosmos for i want to get off.

My neighbour, for want of a better word, was coming home two nights ago. Now his home is rather unconventional. To get there he has to park his car by a canal bridge in a hushed little village full of fairytale thatched cottages, then walk a considerable distance through the quarter-lit gloaming along the black waters of the canal towpath. The towpath is narrow and the banks steep. On one side foliage arches over like a line of tall, bowing hunchbacks. On the other is the water, sullied and still like a river of weak tea with a dash of milk. This garden path of his is neither for the frail nor the faint of heart. Seeing that he answers to neither of these calls, he was walking home with his six month-old pup, Patsy, off the lead with shopping bags in each hand. The Irish terrier, still in that delicate stage of training, would ordinarily have been on the lead but for the fact that the shopping won’t carry itself. Learning to walk independently and by his side, she was beginning to make great strides toward obedience.

Emerging from under a small brick bridge, he put one foot in front of the other, feeling his way through the rapid darkening. As if from nowhere his toe stumbled hard against an exposed tree branch and the forward momentum of his body coupled with the weight of the bags sent him headlong into the canal. Head first he fell, scattering his shopping everywhere, disappearing under the stagnant water. When he emerged from the shallow water he panned his vision around but she was gone. The dog had hightailed it in fear. Now this ‘flight-mode’ is not unheard of in young dogs once spooked by something. Their calm demeanour snaps, leaving their primitive instinct in the driving seat.

All night he paraded up and down the towpath, calling her name, coaxing her to come back. The following morning I got wind of her disappearance and so, without hesitation, joined the hunt. We combed the coppiced fringes of the canal, straying into neighbouring fields, all the while calling her name gently. By now a proper search party had been raised. People being people, dog people being even more divided by canine opinion than non-dog people, theories starting flying thick and fast. She’s gone to ground, some said. The fear has triggered her amygdala into making her cower timorously in the undergrowth until such time as hunger snaps her out of this fugue state. Other theories centred on her terrier nature. She must have found a drain pipe. Others still wondered if she had run and run and run until, young and utterly bewildered, she could no longer find her way home to her master and their boat. I asked the owner what his instincts were telling him. She’s gone to ground, he averred. Agreed, we vowed to resume the search the following morning, though I knew his search would go on undaunted throughout the night.

The following day came and, well, nothing. So again we theorised as to where a panicked puppy might go. We covered a radius of maybe five kilometres in all directions. Meanwhile, other kindly souls had mounted a search and rescue effort. Word was out. Even a local drone pilot wanted in on the action. By the end of the second day I could see his facade of bravery start to crumble. It’s all in the downward sloping of the eyebrows, exposing these two vertical furrows leading up from the bridge of the nose. Again I asked him, what do your instincts tell you? She’s in warm room somewhere beside an old lady who’s picked her up. There and then, a crack appeared in his sixty-eight years of tough stolidness: English passion, I call it. I don’t want to entertain that thought, he said. I have to stay positive. Granted, in such a rural area, where could she have got to? No main road for miles. Only a mainline from Bristol to London, but she wouldn’t, she couldn’t, clamber through the thorny brambles, scramble up the track ballast and onto the lines. Too gnarly, too steep, too pointless for even a pup with no sense of anything other than love for every living soul.

He kept a vigil, returning precisely to the spot where the stumbling had taken place two nights previous. The owner even left a scent trail of his socks, his t-shirts, her basket, blanket, every last little clue he could muster to coax her back from her ‘safe’ place in the undergrowth to their safe place on the boat. I watched as his initial optimism turned in on itself. Two days cowering in a damp bush without food? This theory was beginning by now to sound wishful. By the end of the second day, my thoughts turned to the likelihood that a six month-old Irish terrier, a rare and desirable pedigree, had been snaffled by a lucky passerby. She had to have been sequestered by someone, being such a ditsy and trustful little thing. Question was: what manner of character would this passerby possess? Would they be honest and self-effacing enough to know that this was someone’s prized possession? Or would they be a finders-keepers-losers-weepers type who justifies their deceit on the grounds that property is nine-tenths of the law, whatever that means?

This morning i awoke late. Powering up my phone i received a ping. It was him. He wrote to thank me for my help, but that it wouldn’t be any longer needed. She was found late last night dead by the rail tracks right next to his boat on the other side of a thicket of oak trees. She must have found her way back to the boat but took a wrong turn and ended up trotting along the tracks alone in the dark, afraid. She could hear him calling her but was stricken and helpless to go to him. So light and frail, she was struck by either the London train or a freight train. Her – and his – only solace was that her death would have been instant.

I told my mum, who has loved and lost dogs. She answered, life can be cruel sometimes, son.

Why do terrible things happen to good people? Why must the most vulnerable have to live in fear? Why is love taken away from us only when we’ve found it? Where is the natural justice in all this? I refuse to believe we exist in a dimension where senselessness and meaninglessness is a defining feature. That said, today my eyes are welling up wondering if my grip on an orderly reality is slipping and that, in the end, it’s shit that happens and no one knows the f&ck why.

The Buddha implored us not to get too attached as it would only cause suffering when weaning occurred. He must have known, however, that as humans our attachment to objects – both animate and inanimate – can be both profound and wholly natural. Within this paradox we must make our last stand. This is our eternal condition.