Sam Redlark

When I cracked open one eye this morning, I could hear the wind pawing at the garden . The television was on, but the volume had been reduced to zero. I will often do this in a state of semi-wakefulness, now that the off button on the remote only seems to function intermittently. A prolonged infomercial for mattresses, that are manufactured from foam springs, was playing, as it always does at this time of day. Maybe the intent is to capitalise on the vulnerability of those reluctant early risers, who feel they should have slept better and for longer. Still in bed, but now partly uptight, I observed, through the larger of the two windows in my bedroom (I never draw the curtains) the leafy boughs of some tall trees, on the adjacent golf course, churning in slow motion against an overcast sky. My thoughts turned to the headless trout that had been left to defrost on top of the small fridge, next to the washing machine, and how a new mode of cooking it would be required if a barbecue was o...

  The Terracotta Man was the colour of a plant pot. He was the shape of a Buddha, who has meditated his way out of the lotus position, in favour of something less taxing on the spine – a semi-reclined pose on a sun lounger. His true age was indeterminate, lost somewhere within the soft folds of his morbid obesity. As a broad estimate, I venture that he was between 60 and 80 years old. His only concession to the social nicety of clothing were a pair of pale-blue shorts and a white strip across the bridge of his nose, that was supposed to protect it from sunburn, though it only covered a small cross-section. During the summer, he was a fixture on the angled balcony of his ground-floor, seafront flat, facing perpetually towards the east, in readiness for the next sunrise. His first outdoor appearance heralded the onset of Summer. His departure, usually sometime during September, marked the end of the season. One day, as I walked past the low-rise block where the Terracotta Man liv...

When was the last time that you shrugged in real life, or were present when somebody else did? And was it before or after the most recent appearance of Halley's Comet? Shrugging as a gesture has fallen into disuse, rightly so in my opinion. It is a glib embodiment of half-baked defeat that is, in and of itself, defeatist to the core; a method of using your entire upper body to communicate to other people in your vicinity that, not only are you an idiot, but that you are also shaking off any responsibility to mitigate your ignorance. I have resorted to shrugging in the past and, in doing so, have caused irreparable damage to my immortal soul. Whether this wilful self-injury is sufficient to deny me access to the Kingdom of Heaven, after my death, only time will tell. At present, if I was given an option between expressing my helplessness either by shrugging or by punching a wall, I would bear the skinned knuckles and keep my dignity. I would also pay for any damage that I caused to ...

  A few days ago, my Great Uncle Perce passed away in hospital. His death did not come as a surprise. In August of this year, he had turned 105. He had received his customary birthday card from the Queen – his sixth – which he had given to my Father. His final days were quiet. His lungs were unable to draw in enough oxygen to sustain him. In the wake of his final shallow breath, an immense archive of knowledge and experience was irrevocably stricken from the living memory of our species, and lost in time forever. Friedrich Nietzsche advised that one should aim to die at the appropriate time. In most cases, whether one has succeed or failed in this endeavour is left to the retrospective judgement of others. My great uncle would probably have been the first to agree that he had lingered on this earth for too long. He was the unwilling inheritor of a double-edged set of genetics that maintained a tenacious grip on life, regardless of its quality. His body simply didn't know how to die...