| Like everyone else, I’m getting older. This means two things. First, each day brings me, unavoidably, that much closer to death. Awareness of this fact – the inevitability of our eventual demise – is as much a part of what makes us human as opposable thumbs or the use of verbal language. Second, and with equal logic, each passing day adds to my personal history, the wake of events and memories I leave behind me. And so it is with everyone: every day, our future grows shorter, our past becomes longer.
I mention this, for we’re entering that holiday season – the double whammy of Christmas and New Year’s – when reflections on the past and hopes for the future are thrown into sharper focus than usual. Taxes may be due in April, but it’s in late December that most of us undergo some sort of psychological audit as we check our "personal credit rating" at the end of yet another year. Out of the red and into the black, for once? Or will it be another round of drunken resolutions to do better next year?
Actually, what set me off on this whole train of thought was the recent news of the death of George Best. In case you didn’t know – and there’s no real reason why you should – Best played soccer for Manchester United back in the 1960s. But that’s a bit like saying The Beatles played pop music during the same decade: true, but hardly sufficient. Much as boxing was never the same after Ali, for a handful of years (1963-69), the youthful Best played soccer like no one else on the planet could play soccer, and in doing so he transformed the game almost beyond recognition.
And now he’s gone. At the age of just 59, Best finally succumbed to a lifelong and well-documented battle with alcoholism. I have to be honest, however, I have no real recollection of Best as a player. How could I? He made his professional debut the same year I was born, and while he was performing his wizardry on the field I was probably busy watching Tales from the Riverbank instead.
But all the same, "George Best" – the icon, if not the actual player – loomed large over my childhood, a sort of yin-yang symbol of "potential fulfilled" and "talent wasted." More than that, probably, he remains even now a cultural marker of my formative years, helping to locate just who I am.
This fact caught me by surprise, for I hadn’t really thought of Best in years. Yet there he was, casting a shadow over my life. And on hearing of his death, a series of unconnected – or, at least, disconnected – memories ran through my head….
Watching Best host a tea-time TV soccer program for kids some time in the early ’70s. Aged 10 and playing in goal for our school soccer team. Practising with a friend in our back garden in the pouring rain. The house we lived in at the time, a semi-detached in the outskirts of Bath, England. Some time later, leaving that house after my parents divorced, unsure at the time which (the move or the divorce) upset me more. The years of tension and misery that had preceded the divorce. Attempting now, all these years later, to reconcile that last memory with happier memories of watching George Best teach me how to kick a soccer ball….
This is the nature of memories. Not neat and linear, marching from past to present in orderly fashion, but chaotically spiralling around one another like water down a drainpipe, evading our grasp. More than 80 years ago, French novelist Marcel Proust made much the same point in Á la Recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). Referring to the act of memory, he wrote:
It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture [the past]: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.
Proust isn’t talking about remembering specific events or "things," but rather the sensation of the past that lies beneath (or perhaps surrounds) those events themselves. For him, it was the taste of a petite madeleine (a cookie-like pastry) that did the trick. "An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses," he writes, "and at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory…. [T]his essence was not in me, it was myself."
And so it was with me and the death of George Best. Unbidden, and unexpectedly, the news triggered all manner of memories for me. But more than that, for a moment at least, I was transported back across three decades to re-experience in its fullest sense the life of a 10-year-old. A mixture of happy and sad, for sure, but like Proust says, "it was myself."
Christmas came early for me this year – thanks, George. |
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