When Summer Wine Runs Out

A sad showing this evening at the Beaker Last of the Summer Wine Club, of the episode "Magic and the Morris Minor". It's not, by quite a long way, the best ever episode of that amazingly long-lived series. But it's the last episode to feature Bill Owen (aka Compo).

Goodness knows how, between using doubles and filming in front of blue screens, Alan Bell got that last programme out. And Owen's timing, though still funny, is terribly laboured and slow - unsurprising in a man in his 80s who was dying of cancer.

I watch the episode and think of the loveable if disreputable urchin - barely past bus-pass age - of Short Back and Palais Glide or Of Funerals and Fish 25 years earlier - unable to resist jumping on a wall or climbing a tree. I consider the pain and tiredness that the programme must have brought on even before his illness. And I do feel a sense of great regret.

Thus passes the glory of the world - from a sprightly 60-year-old to a dying man of 85. Happens to all of us, of course, if we live that long. But let's jump on walls and climb trees and gather rosebuds while we may. You're a long time dead and, if you believe there's a bloke at the pearly gates with a clipboard, I doubt very much if the correct answer to the question "did you ever walk along a wall or climb a tree" is "no - that's terribly childish and uncivilised."

Immortal by not dying

A Steve Taylor lyric of the 1980s came to mind this afternoon:

"Immortality's what I'm buying
But I'd rather be immortal by not dying."

It was the death of Robert Ettinger that reminded me. The sort-of-late Robert, in case you're wondering, was the founder of the cryonics movement.

 Mr Ettinger's theory is - to say the least - coldly logical. If he weren't by now deep-frozen, he would have no chance of living again on this un-reconstituted planet. Whereas he now has the chance to be revived by friendly futurenauts who will - he hoped/s - reprogram his DNA, reverse his cell damage, soup him up and fit him to live forever.
Obviously, the "forever" is a slight over-estimate. Nothing in this current universe lives forever. Time's arrow just keeps on pointing forwards, until the point at the extremes where the energy would not be available to repair the machines to keep Bobby E's body lasting forever. A resuscitated Ettinger would hypothetically last a long time - an unimaginably long time - but Anno Domino would still win out in the end.

All round it strikes me as more likely that, at some future point of civilisation breakdown, you'd be thawed out due to a long-term power outage, at which point you might make a TV dinner for some desperate 22^nd Century post-Apocalyptic survivor. Or just melt and rot. Either way, it wouldn't matter much, what with you being dead and everything. But in my mind, the cryonics movement is most strongly associated with Dennis Potter's shocking, imaginative Cold Lazarus. And if you've seen that spooky closing work of Potter's, you'll understand the worry that, if you came back, you'd find yourself floating in a tank, wired up while TV producers try to make a documentary out of you. Or some wally bringing you back to life, just to say "I am the Ultimate Prankster! I have power over Life and Death! And you're not one of the lucky ones..."

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/cold-lazarus

And not to mention the unfortunate tale of Trygve Bauge's granddad...

It's a very modernist view of life, and death, that Mr Ettinger had/s. That infinite progress would one day eliminate death - and that the people of the future, against all the evidence of the 20^th Century, would be benevolent with their technology. It's a view that already looks touchingly dated. Still, good luck to him. For myself, I'm going with the immortality that you might gain by dying everyday, and I'll hope along with the closing thoughts of Daniel Feeld.

Will there be any stars, any stars in my crown
When at evening the sun goeth down?
When I wake with the blest in the mansions of rest
Will there be any stars in my crown?

A meditation for All Souls' Day

And so what do we make of All Souls' Day, in our post-Christendom paradigm?  In an environment where the most popular funeral songs, as previously discussed, are such songs as Robbie Williams's "Angels" and Celine Dion's "My Love Must Go on"*

The Roman Catholics use the day to remember the souls that are still in Purgatory, fighting their way to the surface, as it were.  But for most of us, in these days we have lost a sense of Purgatory.

And souls.

Now the aim of the Beaker People is to meet people where they are, and allow them to give a name to that place.  To help them find their spiritual voice.  So if we meet them where they are - where are they?

Firstly, they seem to be rejecting the sharp certainties of atheism.  Just as well for us, being a religious community and all that - it would make us totally redundant and even more pointless than we often seem to be already.  But whatever else they believe, they don't think Auntie Vera has actually ceased to exist.  They seem to have an implicit belief that Auntie Vera is somewhere, even if she is not physically around.

Naturally we'd have to rule out any mention of a resurrection.  How are we going to explain that?  Especially to a generation that finds the best way to deal with the dead is to convert them to more manageable ashes.  And while many people seem to believe in reincarnation in theory, we find they don't really want to go into the details.  After all, that would mean considering the possibility that, Uncle Ernest having come back as a chicken, they ate him for tea. 

We also find it best not to dwell in any detail on the concept of heaven.  It has a nasty habit of reminding people of hell.  And we don't want to go there, if you see what I mean.  Just allow that a few people - Hitler, Stalin and Mao, for example - are in hell and where would you draw the line?  You start drawing lines and suddenly you're talking about judgement and sin and salvation and all kinds of other things we really wouldn't want to get into.

No, the best place to assign the spirits of the dead, on the whole, would appear to be to a kind of insubstantial, almost-heavenly place, where the dearly beloved ones are held in a kind of - if you will forgive the misuse of the word - limbo.  A kind of commuter suburb of heaven, really.  Based on the vague recollections of other people attending seances or medium shows, most people see this as where the dead live.  Our former friends and much-missed family members are probably best imagined sitting in someone's ectoplasmic front room, on a rainy day in the 1970s, just after "The Big Match" has finished, for all eternity.   Without even a set of dominoes to relieve the boredom.  No wonder the Dead spend all their time, if the mediums are to be believed, worrying about how their budgies are doing, if their niece's bad back is bearing up and whether they switched the gas off before they died.

And so we nod sagely, and encourage people with the assurance that their loved ones are "in God's hands".  But we make sure we aren't too specific about what exactly God is doing with those hands.

So on All Souls' Day, the Beaker Folk will light a tea light for all the dead people we want to remember.  And we will desperately hope that when we light one for Uncle Ernest, Auntie Gladys won't be too upset, because we didn't light one for her - because if we did that then Cousin Wilf would want one as well.  And before you knew it we'd be lighting one for every dead person we'd ever met (before they died, obviously).  Because where would you draw the line?  Honestly, it would be like writing Christmas cards.

Have a contemplative All Souls' Day.  Wherever you are.

*with special thanks to Albatross for his remembrance of "Please Release me", and to David Keen for his (hopefully satirical) suggestion of "Living in a Box".  Oh - and to Anonymous and  Sally for "Smoke gets in your eyes".