| Loneliness of the Long Distance Biker
- Excerpt 2 |
 |
| When I got back from taking two canal
boats to the Black Sea, I met this girl, got married, had a
baby, got married and then my dear beloved father died. Dad
actually came to the wedding, but in his Cremation Box, and
he sat next to Dave, one of my two best men. I remember having
a long conversation with the Head Cremator at Dukinfield Crematorium
about cremating Dad myself. Farmer Bruce reckoned I'd require
two tons of a good hardwood like oak, if a temperature of 1100
degrees were to be raised, which is what would be required to
dissipate eight stone of water and two stone of bone, which
is what, down from 182 pounds in his stockinged feet, Dad had
become. He also got smaller, like me, which should I have wanted
to float his pyre across a lake; it would mean the boat would
be a less extensive build. The man at the Crematorium told me
that it was illegal but didn't know why. I did. The National
Forest would have been ravaged by a thousand DIY funeral pyres
stretching from Sheffield to Leeds. The M1 would be in perpetual
smoke and motorists would be breathing in generations of deeply
loved uncles, until when you hit the M62 and cross the treeless
plain, the wood runs out. It happens all the time in India.
However normal I wanted to be, everything I was doing took me
away from what I thought I could be. I dreamt often of marrying
an air hostess who lived in a cul de sac. I went out with one
once who worked for Dan Air and it didn't get past the first
week. Yet, as much as I strived for normal, normal wasn't what
was required to do my job. Normality was a distraction. Normality
would have killed me and however hard being different is, at
least it meant I wasn't dead.
|
|
|
|
|
