The truth is liberating. It rushes through you like a smile. So forget all the besieging nonsense about wellness and self-care and fad diets and, oh my god, mindfulness, along with any other therapy, nostrum or philosophy that is supposed to do you good but that is always in the long run just a bid to get your money, and go to the pub.
The pub wants your money, too, of course, but for one thing it doesn’t pretend otherwise, and for another thing, it will actually do you good, which distinguishes it from everything else on the above list.
Auden called "the ladies and gentlemen too much alone".
You will cover a hundred miles before you hear a laugh. Stand at the door of a pub, however, and you will be assailed by gust after gust of laughter. Laughter is aspirin for the adult soul.
I went swimming yesterday, sober solitary adult lengths of the pool. Swimming generates a thirst so I stopped off on the way home at a basement pub and the psychiatric nurse was at the bar as usual, and as usual he upbraided me for having still not written a column about merkins.
To which I replied, as I always do, that I would get round to it when the occasion presented itself. A merkin is a pubic wig.
The psychiatric nurse went on to lament his lack of retirement savings and admitted he probably shouldn’t be spending so much money at the pub.
But then he said "you’re a long time dead" and ordered another beer and said he only hoped he had enough left when the time came to pay for his Viking funeral. This is a long-held fantasy of his which involves lashing his corpse to a boat, towing it out on to Lyttelton Harbour, soaking it with petrol and putting a match to it.
I asked whether he planned to seek permission from the council, and he said surely even the council wouldn’t send someone to sea to douse a funeral pyre and I said nothing pleases those in authority more than thwarting the citizenry, usually on the pretext of the two most pernicious words in the language, Health and Safety. So the opportunity to continue to thwart a citizen even after he was dead would prove irresistible to any bureaucrat.
Then the young Indian woman at the bar said she wanted a sky burial. I said was that the one where they staked the body out on a platform for the vultures to deal to, and she said yes, and I said did they still practise that in India, and she said in some parts, and I asked which part she was from and she said Hyderabad.
I said that all I knew of India I had got from watching cricket on television and it often seemed to me that the air in the great Indian cities was almost granular, and she said that would be the smog. And I said that there often seemed to be vast numbers of hefty flying insects and she said yes, hefty flying insects were an Indian speciality.
And thirdly I said that there always seemed to be an abundance of dingy birds of prey swooping around the ground, even in the middle of vast conurbations like Delhi, and she said yes, that would be the black kite of India, previously known as the pariah kite, that lives in the cities in huge numbers and has become a great scavenger.
Whereupon the psychiatric nurse suggested that they do sky burials at Indian test matches, putting a willing corpse — a cricket enthusiast, perhaps, of which India has no shortage — on a platform behind the bowler’s arm to give it a good view of the game.
This would not only give the kites a feed, and a cricket fan his dying wish, it would also give the crowd something morally instructive to watch during the lunch interval and slower periods of play, reminding them that time waits for no-one and if you are ever going to do anything of note with your life the time to do it is now.
But Ms Hyderabad said that a sky burial platform at a cricket ground might not get planning permission, even in India, a country that seems more at ease with death than most, given the number of corpses packed off down the Ganges every day.
And so the three of us agreed that the Health and Safety meddlers were growing in number and impudence by the day and that we had better order another round of drinks before they sank their bloodless claws into that most wonderful of all things on God’s green earth, the pub.
• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
