The Old Dutch Sailor

Today I thought I would write. I was uncertain however, exactly what I should make my topic today. My initial thought was to write about something that has been of concern for me for the last four days. I find myself in a conundrum with the sensation of something about to collapse about my ears. I’m not entirely sure what that something may be, however I know for sure that it is not welcome. I received some news on Saturday past that, although something I already knew it, I had been successfully not thinking about. Now I can’t but think about it and I find myself enraged. Namely because the individual concerned was previously someone I had respect for, as consequence of his being close to a dear friend of mine (This is all jolly vague, isn’t it). However am in a pickle as to what to do. Just forgetting doesn’t seem to be working.

I will not though, make this blog about my own personal troubles. That would be far too sombre. Perhaps, when I calm down and can confront the issue rationally I will compose a little piece about the matter with all the nonsensical examples and witless flourishes that you may have come to expect if you read this blog regularly (or even occasionally). Instead I will tell you a tale that occurred to me a short time ago. It begins below:

‘I’ve come so far in my life, so far, and as my time comes to its end know this: I want to die in a little house by the sea’, the Old Dutch Sailor said, looking around at the kind faces about him, nodding and smiling warmly. ‘I want to be in a terraced cottage that looks out over a little stony beach to the sea. Like on the postcards, you know. With little square windows and a colourful front door – green … or maybe red. And a little path with some flower beds and a bit of lawn beside it that lead down to the promenade on which were pulled up four or five salty fishing boats, piled high with nets and lobster pots.

And I want to be able to hear my wife coming up the stair with a lovely pot of tea and watch her come into my room, tray in hand, and give me my cup of tea. I want to die in the rickety bed that I made myself, from driftwood bought in off the beach and a blue and white quilt over my lap; with my wife by my side and my children sat around the bed. And I want us to chat and laugh until I’m done, then I want to sit in my bed with my wife and kids and I want to gaze out of the window, with its cosy curtains, at the sea as it washes to and fro on the beach, and the clatter of stones and the smell of salt drift in through the window. And as I look out to the sea, at the waves with their white tips and the buoys and boats bobbing in the bay, that’s when I want to die. Right then.’

He looked around him at the kind and friendly faces of those sitting around him in their colourful robes and sighed.

‘I suppose I shouldn’t have come to the top of this bloody mountain’

The monks kept up their sympathetic nodding and smiling as the Old Dutch Sailor died, dissatisfied. They didn’t speak Dutch.