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58 years old, he was.
Happy 88th birthday to Bill Cosby. Happy 58th Birthday to Me. Happy 28th Birthday to Malala. Generation by generation we're getting better. There's a minus 2 year old out there who is going to do something very special.
A lovely lazy (for me) birthday day in my parents' garden, with my family. After lunch everyone else had gone in and I lay back in a reclining chair looking at the blue sky.
Two white butterflies flew into view, circling one another, surely in love. They spiralled higher and higher in each other's orbit and I thought what a wonderful courtship display it was. I envied those insects. How wonderful it would be to be carried away with romance like this, that you literally fly high into the blue sky. Nothing can stop you. Carried upwards by adoration of each other. What a thrill. I was utterly beguiled.
Then one butterfly broke away from the other. Playing hard to get or had its paramour down something wrong. Surely part of the dance of love.
But no. That falling butterfly kept falling and then plummeted to the ground, falling into next door's garden. I could only assume dead.
It had either been one Hell of a fuck or more likely they hadn't been lovers at all. The besotted butterflies were in fact bitter enemies and had been fighting, not flirting. Never. had I misinterpreted nature so badly, never had a poetic heart been so rapidly crushed.
It turns out that butterflies are very territorial and though they look like butter wouldn't melt in their mouths, they are vicious killers. Of their own species.
I have no idea how. What weapons does a fragile butterly have in its arsenal that it can dispatch another (admittedly fragile) butterfly so easy. Are they biting each other with their butterless mouths or kicking each other in the butterfly goolies?
If a butterfly landing on your shoulder means a dead relative is visiting you then what the Hell does a butterfly dying in front of you mean? A dead relative double dying?
Or a dead relative kicking or biting or flicking the shit out a dead enemy of yours.
Or just nature, red in tooth and whatever bit of a butterfly is capable of murder.
I already can't remember the face of the woman who won, but the crying face of the loser is in my memory banks (even if I can't directly bring it to mind).
I was actually gunning for 6-0 6-0 as soon as it looked like it was possible. I pretended to be in the crowd shouting "You're rubbish at tennis" and booing the loser.
Ernie admonished me. "How would you feel if it was you that was losing like that?" he asked.
Like I said, we're getting better generation by generation.
