The Road To Nirvana : Civil Engineer In The Process Of Being Transformed Into Car

The Road To Nirvana, Businessman In The Process Of Being Trandformed Into A Car/Ka : Makeshift Studios 2012



You ever think about the discontinuity?

I heard some news this week about a character who features in one of my earlier blogs If On A Starry Spring Night A Traveller.  In the sterile surroundings of a motorway services just off the M6 this man's life unravelled before me.

He was a civil engineer and had travelled his whole life for his work.  As a young man he had worked and partied hard, married, had children, separated.

He had moved north from Manchester to work on a project on the east coast of Scotland and had taken up residence in Edinburgh.  His wife had become estranged from him and they had gone their own routes.

As we sat, that evening in Costa coffee, we had chatted and wiled away time until we returned our cars and gone on our journeys, he was heading south, I was travelling north. He had, I recall,  this wonderful rippling moustache that he kept playing with.  His eyes - and eyes they say are the road to the soul - were the windows to his being. Behind the laughter, was pain.

He spoke affectionately about the Italian girl he had met in the Scottish capital and they had set up home together.  He referred to her as his 'Italian beauty' but their fate was written in crossed destinies.

In time he received the offer of a job that would take him south once more, they discussed it, but she told him flat that there was no way she would leave her ailing mum to go and live in Manchester ( actually Michael eventually set up home in Blackburn when he moved south once more).

He moved south alone. 

All we ever really have our memories I suppose, and that's the thing about life, there really is no present because as soon - in that micro-second - we have lived it...it has gone.  Time, for us all, is really a monster that eats up our existence as we make plans for greatness which, somehow, never arrives.

He met his ex-wife in Manchester by accident as they both waited ona train.  They had never divorced in the intervening years, and that meeting re-lit the fire they once shared.  For the next 18 years they would share their life together again, attending parties, family gatherings, weddings and funerals.

Sadly, I received an email from Michael's wife, Jennifer, this week, to tell me that he had died.  We had swapped emails in Costa, and he wrote to me after I published the blog to tell me that he never thought anyone would have been interested enough in his life to write about it!  He thought he was a pretty ordinary regular Joe, but, of course, none of us really are...

Michael had suffered a massive coronary while working in Leicester, he was 59...

How could I have imagined while speaking with Michael on that starry, spring evening, that he had already been dealt all the cards he would have to play with?

You ever think about discontinuity?

To Michael.

(Author's note : Change of plan the blog 'Absence of Light' I have decided needs to be held back and re-worked.  I am still travelling so I have scheduled 'The Money Parade/Cybereconomicpunkland' as the next blog - next week some time!  I have just finished an Illy coffee - my all -time favourite and I am now about to return to the road)