Sam Cutler

Yesterday I was sixty seven. One of those strange ages  lost somewhere between the polarities of sixty five and seventy - “neither fish nor good fried herring” as my  long departed grandmother would have mordantly observed  had she been around to witness the event. It was appropriate that my sixty seventh should have occurred on a Wednesday - a day I have always felt to be marooned between weekends  and lodged between two equally strange days; Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Tuesday one remembers the previous weekend, on Thursday one looks forward to the coming weekend - on Wednesdays ? One floats without direction and simply gets on with it ! It’s a non descript day a Wednesday, characterless and without charm, one that simply gets consumed in order to get to the main course of the rest of the week.

Sixty seven ? A numerologist would no doubt make a meal of it and give me endless encouragement to see the numbers as of great and lasting significance, but such matters leave me cold. Perhaps I should have had my palm read and I would have done so had there been a Romany within hailing distance of me in Sydney Australia. The last time I had my palm read was way back in the seventies in Kerala India. After a faily conventional reading squatting in the dust beside the road the palmist asked if I had any questions for him and was disappointed when I bluntly told him no. Surely you must have a question ! Everybody has a question. I decided to tease him a little, and bluntly told him no, I am NOT having question baba. The palmist became more and more agitated, so to put the poor man out of his misery I relented and asked a question. How old will I be when I die ? Without hesitation the man replied, eighty one.

I paid him his few rupees and the day went on as before, hot and dusty and with very little happening in that languid torpor which is the way of India. A man with glasses came and squatted beside me. He began a long series of questions, and was in effect interrogating me in that charmingly offensive and direct manner at which Indian men are masters. I answered his questions with little enthusiasm and the conversation, such as it was, ground to a halt with our words forced into a hot and dusty contemplative silence. He then asked if I would like to know what had happened to the poor unfortunate who only five minutes previously had read my palm. Nothing stirred and the heat was decidedly oppressive so I agreed to listen.

The palm reader had apparently been a man of some significance, for he had read the palm of Mrs. Gandhi, the autocratic daughter of Nehru. She was the Prime minister of India.  Not only had he read her palm, he had told her that her life was in danger. He was dismissed from her regal presence and sent back from whence he came and no-one thought anything more about it. Unfortunately, three weeks later, Mrs.Gandhi was to die in a hail of machine-gun fire from her Sikh  body-guards - she had made the unfortunate decision to attack the Sikh’s Golden  Temple in Amritsar which had enraged the Sikhs. An investigation into this unfortunate event occurred and the security people looked back at who had met Mrs. Gandhi before her assassination. The palm reader, and his dire prediction  (which had been spot on!) was immediately swept up by the security services  and he spent a very uncomfortable month as a guest of theirs in a secret prison in New Delhi. Upon his release he scuttled back to his village in Kerala hoping to lead a quiet and uneventful life and determined to never read a Prime Minister’s palm again. In the village was where I had met him. This was the man who told me that I should die at eighty one. As they say in the lower circles of London - I must admit the man had a bit of form !

So there I was, neither fish nor good fried herring, on my sixty seventh birthday, and l spent some time thinking about my life in the light of what the palm reading baba in Indian had told me long ago. Fourteen years to go !  That seemed about right to me, and the age of eighty one seemed a perfect number at which to ‘depart the mortal coil’. I have seen many people die of old age and it is really quite sad and tragic to watch the ‘natural’ decline of someone who has reached their late eighties. I’d rather die ‘compis mentis’ than completely batty ! I want my brain to still be around when I die, because to me dying is as important as living and both should be done with a modicum of style. So sixty seven was put into perspective - a small and unremarkable milestone along the path. I sat in my friends garden and wondered what I should do with the day. Having made up my mind I had done enough already I went on to decide that I would do as little as possible. A glorious way (once in a while) to spend a day !

The hours passed delightfully with me contemplating my navel and not caring a jot about anything of significance, least of all my own birthday. I was returned to the chronological ‘here and now’ of the calendar by a phone call from a friend inviting me to dinner and La Traviata at the Sydney Opera House ! Within an hour I was all dressed up and ready to go - lapis lazuli cuff-links, black velvet jacket, polished shoes - looking good. I dined with a friend at the Opera house with the bill being sufficient to have fed a family in India for a year and the food was excellent. Jorn Utson, the architect, had built not only a fine Opera House, but a magnificent restaurant with views across Sydney Harbour which made the food melt upon the palette and effortlessly sink into the stomach  like the ripples of the many passing ferry boats as they came and went to Circular Quay.

La Traviata was ‘chocolate box’ opera - a beautiful spectacle of lushly crinolined ladies in nineteenth century Italian decadent settings. The heroine was dying of consumption (what we know as tuberculosis) and was a ‘grande-madame-horizontal’ loved  and admired by all. Especially the rich Baron, her protector, and Alfredo who seemed so besotted that he insisted on wasting his inheritance on the whore. Alfredo’s father begs the lady to release his son …… I shall not go on, these stories after all are SO unconvincing ! It is a requirement of Opera, like poetry, that one should bring to the feast a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ and so it was that I passively enjoyed the sad and improbable tale which ends with the woman’s death and her lover being granted permission to marry whomever he might be fortunate enough to find, and to live happily ever after. Albeit, without the woman of his dreams who has just expired in his arms !

Walking down the entry steps of the Opera House my mind returned from supra to mundane reality. I had parked the bus in a loading zone being unable to find anywhere legal to park such a large vehicle, and more or less abandoned myself to getting a very expensive parking ticket. This had been six hours ago ! When I arrived at my bus, lo and behold, no ticket !! A wonderful birthday present and I gave thanks for the inefficient parking inspectors. Then I remembered, it’s Wednesday ! It was also now officially winter in Australia. The wind had been blowing; for Sydney it was quite cold. The inspectors would have been parked up somewhere themselves, drinking coffee smoking cigarettes and having a good old argument about football or whether the Australian cricket vice-captain should have left an overseas tour to come back to Australia to support his girlfriend who was in a spot of bother. She is conventionally referred to as “an underwear model” and is something of a contemporary equivalent to Violetta in La Traviata except she doesn’t have tuberculosis. I could go on, but the antics of modern day sportsmen and their ladies are as labarythine and assinine as those depicted upon the Opera stage. Who cares !  I’m pleased to say that parking meter attendants do ! With that happy circularity in mind I jumped in the bus and drove away - and sixty seven floated towards midnight and being over - ‘neither fish nor good friend herring’ as my old grandmother used to say but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

© sam cutler 2010