In common with the other species of animals with whom we share this planet, human beings exist in time. Our bodies today differ from the ones we inhabited ten years ago, which again differ from those of each of the preceding decades we've been alive. And the 'we' inhabiting them changes even more rapidly. Not only do we add to our store of knowledge over the years, we modify the way we perceive external reality. When I was a small child my father told me that the world was round - he should of course have said spherical. Children are logical beings and I took him at his word, picturing the world as being like a dinner plate. In the summer we used to drive from Portishead to Weston-super-Mare at the weekends and stroll along the promenade. I imagined that all of Somerset's lanes and roads, like the ones we drove along, eventually ended up on the promenade which I envisaged encircling the world like the raised rim of a dinner plate. Finally, our emotions are in a continual state of flux, so giving the coup de grâce to our having a constant identity.
The Deity, according to the theologians, is different, existing in an eternal present outside space and time. Thus in the Catholic take on the concept, because he is God as well as man, Christ's earthly actions also exist in an eternal present. His blessing bread and wine at the Last Supper and his crucifixion exist contemporaneously and eternally, and when a priest says mass he is connecting to those two events and transubstantiating the bread and wine into the flesh and blood hanging on the cross.
And last Saturday at my seventieth birthday party I moved towards that godlike state of existing in an eternal present as all the stages of my life from the age of eleven were really, and substantially, and simultaneously present.
First there was Chris Vincent (pictured above), accompanied by his wife Di. I'd been at school with Chris for seven years from 1954 to 1961 - arguably the bleakest years of my life and only made tolerable by my close friends: Chris, his twin Roger, Mike Jefferies, and John Osborne. Roger and John, alas, never made their three score years and ten.
Then there was Dave, accompanied by Sue, who I first met when we were eighteen year old undergraduates at Keele - in stark contrast to school four of the happiest years of my life.
I moved to Norfolk in 1971 and first met Jeff (pictured above), who came to the party with his wife Helen and daughter Molly, when I was living in Hunstanton.
Having originally intended to stay there for three years I ended up working at the Tech in Lynn from 1971 to 2003. As the working environment deteriorated with the advent of Thatcherism, my friends Ed, Frank, John and Chris Bell (pictured above) helped keep me relatively sane. Ed, Frank and John were accompanied by their wives: Uschi, Daphne and Viv. Chris came with Glenda, his former partner, my former student and Candy's former teacher!
In 1975 I moved to the Fens' living successively in Middle Drove, Elm and Upwell. Richard with his fiancée Jane, John and Joy Simpson and Milshen (all pictured above) are friends we made then.
Finally, in 2003 we moved to Italy and soon made friends with Tony and Shona, pictured above, and Maggie and Phil, pictured earlier on with Chris Bell.
Whatever our view of the prospect of an after-life peddled by the various religions - getting pissed on mead in Valhalla, getting laid at a bunga-bunga party in the Moslem version, or standing around in a nightie playing the harp in the distinctly tedious Christian heaven - we can all agree that our children and grandchildren confer a kind of immortality. Three of my five children and one of my four grandchildren were physically present at the party:
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| The Richards boys (minus Josh and Olly) |
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| Candy, the hostess |
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| Sophy |
My elder daughter, Sophy, got as far as Dubai airport where some Emirati jobsworth prevented her leaving the country. However, she was still the life and soul of the party: she had very generously paid for all the wine we consumed. So although - thank heaven -she wasn't really and substantially present in the wine like God in the mass, she was symbolically present, like Christ in a Protestant communion service.
And the party's other midwives were of course:
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| Pat |
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Pat's sister, Deborah
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All of the seasons, covering the last fifty-nine years of my life are brought together in this glorious film of my apotheosis:
The photos of the party which don't appear in this post can be found here:
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