‘Life is all memory,’ said Tennessee Williams, ‘except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.’ Those of us who have struggled over the years to live in the moment will know exactly what he meant.
For one instant at about 7.30 pm on Wednesday evening, and for possibly the first time in my life, I saw that moment coming, identified it for what it was, and lived it for just long enough to be changed by it.
It was the last match of my cricketing summer, an impromptu evening fixture against the Parsee Gymkhana touring team from Mumbai, over here for the first time in 133 years, and as delightful as you would hope and expect them to be. They had batted first and, in their elegant, wristy and noisy way, they had scored a competitive 152 off their allotted 25 overs. We were half way through our reply, I was out in the middle with my old friend Richard, and the game, which we went on to lose narrowly in the quarter light, was tantalisingly in the balance.
I am routinely, and justifiably, self-deprecating about my own cricketing skill, so I am probably not out of order to say that on this particular evening, I was as good as I could be, even nuzzling up to the outer layers of competence. I had captained well enough, fielded okay, taken an almost insultingly easy catch at slip and even taken a wicket, caught and bowled, with my comical little ‘nothing’ balls. I had been batting for about twenty minutes, and had got through that painful period that every indifferent cricketer goes through of thinking they will be out to the very next ball. I had even hit two rather pretty shots, a deflection to fine leg, and a rasping on-drive for four. It was after this latter boundary that I experienced my ‘moment’, where everything went into slow-motion and I caught the beauty of it all.
And yes, of course there was beauty in the surroundings, in the quintessential Englishness of Lurgashall village green, the late sunlight on the hot air balloon passing over from Ebernoe, and the 1928 Bentley sitting out there beyond the boundary. And yes, there was the beauty of being part of a brotherhood of people I loved to be with, the prospect of a cold lager once the match was done and of having one of my sons on the field with me, and the other watching. But, whilst they all contributed to how I felt, something rather more elemental was going on; profound, even, if to describe it as such didn’t confer on it a seriousness it simply didn’t have.
No, what I discovered was the gift of freezing time, and then of living in it. You may be able to do this at will, but I can’t, which is why it is a significant life event. I stared back towards the pub and the spectators whilst the Parsees were shifting the field around, and I suddenly realised that people had been wrong all along, you couldhave it all, just so long as you knew what ‘it’ was, and didn’t put it in a cage of time. And you could do it over and over again, so long as you ignored your own expectations. Suddenly, it didn’t matter that it was my last game of the season, that the first chill of late summer was on the ground, or, for that matter, that I was fifty-nine, and it might not last for ever. There was a seventy-seven year old bowling at me from the other end, for God’s sake; I had eighteen years left in me if I kept taking the pills. Do. Enjoy. Repeat. Do. Enjoy. Repeat. Just concentric rings of alrightness bubbling away into the outfield.
Later on what struck me was not the things I was thinking about, which was very little, to be honest, but what I was not thinking about. Like me getting out, fires in the Amazon jungle, or the idiot zealots on all sides of every divide who make political life so miserable. Normally, my brain’s trick was to feed tiresome qualifications into moments like this, but that evening it behaved.
But to whatever brought on the feeling, I am deeply grateful. Tomorrow, as we all know, is not promised.
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