Another friend's 40th tonight. This time on a boat down in Kingston (well that's where it started - no idea where we went). I am now going to have a few nights without getting drunk. I am too old for this debauchery. Though tonight I didn't go too crazy.
I got a cab home and arrived to find an unusual spectacle. There was a van in the road blocking our way and loads of people in white forensic suits were swarming around it. In my slightly merry state the first thing that it reminded me of was ET and I wondered if an alien had been discovered hiding in my street, then I got a bit more realistic and thought that maybe it was something to do with terrorism or serial killings, not that I suspect any of my neighbours of harbouring extremist tendencies, but then it's always the people you least expect, so all my neighbours are by that logic likely to be Al Qaeda cannibal killers.
I walked by the excitement which centred on a house on the other side of the road, a few doors up. As I reached my gate one of my other neighbours (one of the few I actually know to talk to) appeared out of the shadows and told me what was going on. Apparently the man who lived alone in the house had not been seen for a few days and the police had gone in and found that he had died. "Do you know him?" my neighbour asked, naming him and telling me he was quite a fat ma. Shamefully I had no idea who he was talking about. Presumably I must have seen him at some point in the last five years, but I couldn't bring him to mind and I certainly had never spoken to him. Apparently another woman at the other end of the road had died recently too and it wasn't so long ago that the crazy shouty woman directly opposite me (who I wrote about arguing with some guy a few years back - though can't find the entry) stopped shouting for good. Living in my road apparently does not guarantee you eternal life.
It was odd to have this frisson of excitement over something so sad. But it was all in a day's work for the forensics men, they were walking into the house, chatting and laughing, maybe because they see this kind of thing on a daily basis and so it can't get to them any more or maybe because when you're about to go and examine a decaying, corpulent corpse you have to have a laugh to keep yourself sane.
I went back into my own home, wondering if one day those men might come to find me. So many of us live on our own now and I suppose it happens more and more often that a body lies undiscovered for a while. So I empathised with this man who I didn't know and couldn't recall, who I had shared a street with for half a decade, though ultimately I only felt sorry for myself and not for him.
