Making the most of it

Back from Edinburgh on the 17:00 from Waverley, following a precious weekend with the woman I love.

Just before leaving, a pal IM'd to say that the mother of a good and long-standing friend had died. I made contact with the living on the way down through some long text messages. It's not the kind of thing to talk about in an open carriage. There is a funeral soon, at a time when I'm supposed to be recording a podcast. Should I go? I spent a long time staring out of the window at the dark countryside, remembering too much and wondering... the scythe has been too sharp, too close, too often. Two journos I knew over Christmas - my age.

My friend's mother I remember most as a Rabelaisan woman, full of good humour and earthy wit, cut with a pleasure in culture and her truly remarkable husband. My friend says I'd be good company for him, just at the moment. I can't imagine what he's going through.

BBC2 is playing a Bach sonata. The insouciance of that genius is overwhelming.

I am properly overwhelmed.

There are two answers to finding oneself clutching a mote of time drifting the endless, not knowing which sunbeam is the last. One is to bathe in the light, soaking it up, riding the eddies and screaming in delight like a kid on a rollercoaster. I like that one a lot.

The other is to gather what one can, outside and in, make something new and push it back out to the void. telling the cosmos that we can do things that it unaided cannot. Life is the making of pattern, treating the chaos as a playground of possibilities, mapping the infinite terra incognita, scrawling Kilroy Woz Ere on the walls of the cave. Banksie's holy work.

I like that answer even more than hedonism, but it's harder work. It needs faith, courage, ego, discipline - and the ability to listen to a Bach sonata without feeling like a nebbish. I'm not over-endowed with most of the above. It also needs friends: creating, like dying, is ultimately selfish. Nobody can do it but you. Yet that selfishness needs to be buoyed up by those around you, by evidence that what happens, matters.

I think I shall go to the funeral and fly the flag for the human spirit.

I hope, selfishly, there's no Bach.

Then, it might be time to decide what to do next.