One good reason we have to die

Because we’re alive. Well, some of us are. Others of us are, as Marvin Breed puts it in Cat’s Cradle, ‘born dead… Sometimes I think that’s the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.’

Kurt Vonnegut – cantankerous, wise-cracking, chain-smoking livewire that he was – is gone now, and it’s a loss to all of us that he’ll never again take wonky aim at some absurdity in our own crooked natures and, in a shower of shells, find that sweet, dark spot. He was an awful lot of things, but one thing he certainly wasn’t was dead in any aspect.

But like he says in this interview, ‘there are a number of dead people out there… but, fortunately, you don’t have to go to Heaven to talk to some of them. A lot of them have left us amazing things on paper, and so their lives persist here anyway. Wonderful words. Beautiful music. Stunning things that resonate.’

So many other people are paying far more eloquent tributes than this sketchy attempt, but in my own wonky way, I want to say Kurt, thanks for all the wise and lunatic conversations you’ve left behind so that we don’t have to go to Heaven to keep having them with you. Thanks for all the foma.

Things I learned this weekend

Technology is fallible.
So is Michael Eavis, even if he is a very nice gnome man. Luckily we did manage to get tickets to what will probably turn out to be my last Glastonbury for a very long time – but only by cheaty, conniving means.

Karmically, I’m now expecting a deluge of biblical proportions to turn the ground to thigh-deep slop, to fight all weekend long with L, and to miss every band I went to see because of how long it takes to schlep from stage to stage in the aforementioned sucking mud. Still, that’s pretty much a blow-by-blow account of Glastonbury ’05, and I had a blinding time then, too.

Be gentler than you think you need to be.
Because you might think it’s funny to prank your still-tender sister by telling her you gave her number to the foxy waiter. But when you don’t admit the joke she might cry, and then you will feel terrible.

Nice + nice does not necessarily = excellent.
Sunday was bright, sunny, and at a whopping 18°C, almost hot! So lovely outdoors was it that I decided to walk for an hour across the park to my friend’s house instead of getting public transport. Lovely, no?

Also, that morning I’d discovered to my delight, that patisserie-standard strawberry tarts are very easy to make. Hooray!

Walking in the sun + eight custardy strawberry tarts = not very bright. Still, I have kind friends who generously pretended not to notice that the filling had started to sweat some sort of fluid, prompting the strawberries to flee in horror down the sides.

It was a lovely walk, though.

God hates America.
According to the crackpots in this documentary. Hey, God, join the queue!

Just kidding, some of my best friends are American, etc.

The Spartans were… Scottish?
Well, one of them, at least. Others were Australian (and formerly appeared in excellent ‘dramedy’ series Sea Change) and some were American. Plus, the mighty Persian army was led by Ru Paul!

That’s history according to Larry ‘Sin City’ Miller’s 300, anyway, and as everyone knows, the movies never lie. Remember Pearl Harbour? We’d all be speaking Japanese if it wasn’t for America! Our nations thank you, Josh Hartnett.

Wowsers. What an educational weekend.