Living in the Moment

There used to be a time when I took the opportunity to do stuff on Bank Holiday weekends, but that was when I was doing a shitty job (which was doing its best to kill me) and they represented a much needed break from stultifying routine.  These days, I just chill out and see them as a time for total relaxation.  Today, for instance, I only ventured out to buy a newspaper.  Upon reading said edition of The Guardian, what do I find myself confronted by?  The entire G2 supplement devoted to looking forward to Autumn, that's what.  For fuck's sake, I thought, it's August Bank Holiday, we've still got another week of the last of the summer months to go - to be pedantic, though, whilst meteorological summer ends on 31 August, astronomical summer won't end until 21 September, giving us another month or so of the season - and these killjoys are going on about autumn?  Can't we just be allowed to enjoy what's left of summer before being forced to think about the falling leaves, not to mention temperatures and declining daylight of autumn?  That's the problem nowadays - people are always looking forward to the 'next thing' rather than enjoying what's already in front of us.  Or maybe it isn't the time we live in having changed rather than the fact that as I've grown older, I've learned to enjoy living in the moment.  When you are young, you can fool yourself into thinking that the future is infinite and full of opportunity.  When you get older, the future doesn't seem so inviting and not so bountiful.  You realise that it is getting shorter all the time and that rather than racing ahead of ourselves, we need to be enjoying the here and now.

Which is why I ended up spending the afternoon on the sofa, with the back door open to let in the late summer warmth, and watched a film.  To be precise, I watched It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) again - it's a quintessential Bank Holiday moved, beloved by broadcasters in my childhood because it was long enough to fill up an entire afternoon.  I can't deny that I enjoy it more now than I ever did when I was young.  It isn't that it has become any funnier over the years, (in truth, despite its spectacular set-pieces, it is still only mildly amusing), but that I increasingly find myself empathising with the Spencer Tracy character, the cop who, beset by domestic woes and the prospect of a crappy pension, eventually decides to abscond to Mexico with the hidden loot himself.  Hell, I've been there, toiling away thanklessly in a shitty job, feeling underappreciated and put upon by poor and inept management, (luckily, my work pension and final settlement turned out to be better than I had expected, allowing me to ease into a very early semi-retirement).  Many was the time that I idly thought about ways I could somehow escape from it all - even if that meant acting illegally.  Getting back to Spencer Tracy, watching the film again today, I ended up identifying with his character to the extent that I decided that the ending was all wrong - the movie should have culminated with him escaping, with the money, over the border to Mexico, with a final shot of him relaxing on a Mexican beach, sipping a cocktail, before the credits rolled.  But, the film was made in an era when prevailing convention dictated that characters shouldn't be seen to profit from unlawful or immoral acts.  This, it instead ended, as it always does, with him in custody on the prison's hospital ward along with the rest of the cast who had caused chaos pursuing the loot.  Which, despite everything, still seems unjust to me.  Sure, I know that he was trying to abscond with stolen money - but it had been stolen fifteen years earlier, the thief was now dead, the company it had been stolen from had undoubtedly claimed it back on their insurance so, really, who was he harming?  The taxman by not declaring it?  I can't help but feel that natural justice dictates that he should have got away with it.  But maybe that's just because I'm in a mellow mood because it's a Bank Holiday...