Have a Cigar

Your flesh may be weak but your fillings will live on
You are a man. You’ve reached a certain stage, a certain status. You have a few bob. You can afford a few things, antiques, a hand made suit, a big house which you spend lots of money on to make it nice, a permanent house, not the fly by night flats, bed-sits, sofas, you’ve been used to in the past. No more tatty rags or man-made fibre; no more Ikea, no more boot sale watches or second-hand Rosé. You desire permanence, the heft of heavy furniture, gilt frames, Renaissance art, a Mercedes, Harris Tweed, a Monte Cristo cigar; these things have pedigree; they are somehow mahogany-ed brown like the weathered skin of the frequent flyer, the habitué of the Bahaman beach. They ooze arrival, status and forever.

But then you muse; how infrequently you got to sit behind that big roll top desk, how few the occasions your arse polished that smoker’s bow, how little time there is to ponder on your luck and vision, to dwell amongst your possessions.

Then it occurs; these things will last longer than you: the Rolex, the suit, the Queen Anne dresser, and the Georgian house. The furniture and the house have already been around for centuries, the Rolex will last two hundred years if you look after it. Except you won’t be around to look after it and neither will the man who made it and neither will his son. So why do we demand such levels of weight and durability? Why do we yearn for that permanence? Is it because of the unpredictability and fragility of our own existence?

Is this the true extent of our immortality, physical accoutrements? In the absence of a statue dedicated to you, can you only live for longer than your allotted time by owning things that will outlast your own frail flesh? Do you desire for your DNA to become embedded in the grain of the oak around you?

Your son might inherit the house and the furniture (Alan Clarke scoffed that the ingénue Michael Heseltine had been forced to buy his own chairs and tables). He may even wear your suit and your Church’s brogues. More likely they’ll go to a charity shop or up in a back yard bonfire. He will surely highly prize the Rolex and might even talk wistfully about it and you whenever anyone comments on you or it. He may even get misty-eyed when he looks down on his weighted wrist, the hand beyond it gripping a 12 year-old Scotch. For a few fleeting seconds, he may ponder on the solid engineering and beauty and your desire to have owned such a thing.

What he may not consider or ever know is that the day you bought it you already had a vulgar little tumour growing inside you that determined that before many more sweeps of its face by the second, minute and definitely by the hour hand, you’d be cold in a grave or heated to extinction by the flames of the Co-operative furnace and that all that would be left would be the fabrics of longevity, the furniture that, God-willing worm-free, would survive, the wood and wool that had seen the ages pass like a brief interlude.

There may even be a dog, a great slobbering Labrador with a heart of gold that had worshipped you, panted at your feet waiting for you to hurl the stick, a stick that became more like a branch and harder and harder to chuck more than a few yards; until the walks diminished and then eventually ceased, until such time as the dog pants at the feet of a new master, its memory greyed, its disloyalties like those of a gold digging whore, transient, fleeting and venal, bound only to a bowl of food and a warm hearth; the dog they bought you late in life as a companion knowing all the time that there was every chance you wouldn’t see it grow out of the folding floppy skin of puppy-dom let alone into seniority.

The Asprey jewellery, the Purdey guns, the Jermyn Street hat, the dental implants; these are things of permanence, exquisitely manufactured to last a lifetime, in fact more than a lifetime, certainly more than your lifetime.

And so before you are interred, they remove from your wrist the ticking watch and the indestructible gold, from your finger the eternity ring, from your three hundred year- old safe the fading handwritten deeds to your ancient house. And all that is left intact of you while you slumber below is the perfectly functioning pacemaker, a titanium hip or two, the gleaming ceramic teeth and maybe if you are a woman, or at least a woman’s remains, the perfectly pert silicon implants, perhaps a few fillings and a small pile of bones; bones that were built of short-lived sperm and capricious egg, bones that have more resistance to the ravages of time than the clothes, the timepiece, even the towering brick built edifices we hold in trust for someone else’s future, certainly longer than the memories of your once-loved ones, who with the passage of time only now love you in those few fleeting moments of fading nostalgia when they grope to recall your face, how you spoke or what you ever did.