BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN

There is nothing quite like the death of a close friend to spin one’s bearings. One minute you are there with him in his garden and he’s talking about his business and plans to replace his car. The next minute the earth you are tossing down on his coffin just a short walk from that same garden is soil he departed many days ago.

Suddenly everything alters. Perhaps not permanently, as permanence requires a greater shock than the death of a chain-smoking sexagenarian. As shocks go this is hardly a boom, more an unexpected reverberation.

Still, it came out of the blue sky of summer and down the phone with its fair share of illusoriness and incredulity. A stranger – one of his family members – delivered the news in still stunned staccato on a Sunday night and then the call, like our days of human friendship, seemed abruptly over.

As the new season starts, he is neither there to tease nor congratulate. His fingerprints still warm over shared elements of our lives, a subset that now seems somehow isolated, stifling, as if the exchange of our commonalty depended wholly on a unique reserve of oxygen that can be drawn upon no more. The Chivas that only he drank sits alone on the shelf, ready to gather dust eternally. I see the messages we exchanged which ended in June and the time he was last online, minutes before his heart halted; our last chat relegated by algorithms as new chats with the alive occur; our association switched off like a light or a hoover or an electric toothbrush.

The reverberation still echoes.

Each day my surroundings, passed through in the car, melt at times as if in a Daliesque painting…

The beautiful woman walking to the inn, conceitedly discounting the glances of manifold male suitors. Why glance? Life is so brief she may as well walk in gorgeous and leave wizened via life’s fast-spinning revolving door, without ever being the target of any further glances. The middle-aged mother peeking enviously at the young mother breastfeeding her new-born, not realising that the young mother will be her soon, in a flash, so any envy is futile. The father playing in goal on the beach wishing he had the knees to dart between his young sons and have them see him score a worldie – reversing time as it were – just as his father played in goal and witnessed him, his beloved son, score that worldie on the beach at Pwllheli in ‘79.

You see, time does not reverse. It marches on. If my friend’s death is the common and inevitable denominator, one asks what point has the numerator? Life continues to accelerate as if stuck on fast forward. What is the point of time if time has no point?

The grass may always seem greener in the distant field but how reachable is that place? And then the next distant field and then the next? One minute we walk along life’s plain only to suddenly drop off it into some unknown hole? At least Sisyphus knew his fate with some certainty.

Silver linings?

I suppose there are two advantages to learning of a sudden death such as that of my friend:

First, History seems full of life. Now the days since William the Conqueror walked this land do not seem so countless when one has a long friendship ended by death by which to measure life. As one tours the customary museum that summer holidays seem always to usher in, the dates on exhibits seem that more tangible and the faces that more real.

Second, the church gets a visit. It had been a while. The great, alluring magnet to the hypocritically judgemental – the organist now serving time for fiddling and the friend’s father who punched his wife between confessions – congregating lost its allure somewhat. But light still shines in celestial ways in churches through stained-glass windows while the smell of hot liquid wax helps fast solidify a cosmic bush-telegraph for those with even the faintest flicker of faith. No need there for other humans – going to church does not make you a good human any more than standing in a stable makes you a horse.

There must be more to this show? The curtains may draw but their hindering of light surely cannot be permanent?

Work, goals, love, desire …

There is little time to dwell.

Only the weak need a pity pot.

‘Dust off, march on, seize the bloody day’ he would have urged and so I bloody well will.

Farewell my friend.

Dominic Wightman is Editor of Country Squire Magazine.