From the driver’s seat I overheard talk of a friend forced to cancel a rendezvous. “It was a terrible nosebleed, his T-shirt’s soaked in blood.” Apparently this happened often. Surgery to seal the nasal capillaries was a possibility. I felt sorrier and sorrier for my friend.
I also began to reappraise him. Very likely these recurrent severe nosebleeds arose from a serious cocaine habit as a younger man: it’s common. There’s nothing louche about my friend, he’s a dedicated professional, but I’ve always thought of him as no stick-in-the-mud, relaxed about the lifestyles of others. This helped explain. Now I re-imagined him with a troubled but exotic past.
It was by chance I tumbled later to the fact that it was not my friend but his young son with the nosebleed, and the boy certainly does not have a cocaine habit. I had simply got the wrong end of the stick. As I’d never have raised the subject with my friend I would otherwise have spent the rest of my life thinking him a recovering addict.
If when the last trump sounds we were to be taken through a comprehensive audit of our lives, all misapprehensions corrected, with what cries of horror would we greet the corrections! Hadn’t you realised he was in love with you, did you miss the signs? Did you not know she resented you? He was jealous, couldn’t you see? No, you fool, he wasn’t the baby’s father: George was. No wonder your career stalled, your boss always thought you’d had your fingers in the till.
I disliked Meshak Mabogoane throughout my school days in Swaziland, secretly believing he’d stolen my best fountain pen. Years later I found the pen at home. But I never saw Meshak again, and now he’s dead.
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Missed beauty
Burgos Cathedral, built in the French gothic style, massive yet delicate, florid yet with a kind of purity, is one of the wonders of Europe. We lingered on the great, stone-paved forecourt, staring up at a façade like carved lace. A figure went slowly past, head down, tap-tapping with a white stick. The cathedral in all its splendour towered above him.
Blind people don’t need sympathy but rather admiration and support. But this time I did feel sad: sad not for him (his life may be as happy as mine) but for what he must miss. Unable to see, he was seen. And what if I, unseeing but seen, am stumbling, head down, past beauty unknowable to me?
The holiday’s booked
Through 2,000 miles of holiday driving we listened, captivated, to two audio books. One was my Times colleague David Aaronovitch’s Party Animals: My Family and Other Communists; the other was Robert Harris’s novel, Conclave. Before, I would have told you I found communism and Catholicism a complete bore and could never get caught up in papal selections or the niceties of internecine strife on the British left. But by the end of our journey I began to know what it would feel like to be a Catholic, and how it felt for David’s immigrant family and their great idealistic common cause.
Funny money
A national park is to create its own currency, the Lake District pound. Our parks have suffered huge funding cuts and this move, with guaranteed parity with sterling, should help local traders. It could also enable the area to print the funds it lacks, adding (negligibly) to national inflation. Bristol, Brixton and Totnes have tried, with varying success: all essentially attempts to beggar-my-neighbour.
In the 1980s in Argentina a whole province, Jujuy, having run out of money from central government, did the same. Travelling through, I ended up with a wallet full of “Jujuy money”, useless elsewhere.
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We see here a lesson in the fundamentals of all money: intrinsically worthless, the paper a promissory note whose value depends on whether people trust. If they do, the issuer will never need to redeem it because the note will circulate onwards carrying its
own value.
At university I took some obviously rubbish wine to a bring-a-bottle party. A year later I spotted it, unopened, at another party: now a kind of currency. It could have contained sea-water.