Sad Times

Despite all the modern methods of near-instantaneous communication, we only heard today that a good friend of ours died a week ago. So, these are sad times for his wife, family, both European and Thai, and his friends – he was Finnish, married to a woman from our village. In fact, he was only here a month ago, and we met up for a few jars as we have done every year since we met seven or eight years ago.

He was fit and healthy and proud of recently having defeated diabetes by losing weight and changing his diet, which had  become an easier thing to do this year because he had just passed his sixty-fifth birthday and retired from his full-time job.

He was Finland’s top nuclear power station safety designer, but had been coming to our village for his holidays for twenty-seven years. He told enthralling stories about those long-off days in the village, before there was street lighting and lethal violence was rife, but would readily discuss any subject that came up in our conversations.

The last thing we talked about was Quantum Physics. We both agreed that we would like to know more about that gripping topic. He would now have time, for the first time since leaving university, to study whatever he liked out of interest rather than necessity for his work, which he took extremely seriously.

You may be wondering why I haven’t mentioned his name, but I don’t like to yet, because it took his family a week to release the news to us, and perhaps they don’t want anyone or everyone to know yet. I have checked the family Facebook page and there is no mention of his passing.

The village is a-buzz with rumours about it, but no-one seems to know any more about these sad times than I have written here.

He was an agnostic and I am a Spiritualist; in that last debate we had about Quantum Physics, I suggested that every body, not only living bodies have an Aura, or even other more ethereal bodies and that that could account for how quantum physics allows for a thing to be in two places at once.

He found the idea fascinating and we talked until the shopkeeper threw us out at midnight. We hugged, and shed a tear in  tipsy friendship, neither of us, nor his wife, realising that that would be our last physical meeting on this world.

As I said, sad times indeed for many people. I wish his wife and family strength and courage.

All the best,

Owen

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Podcast: Sad Times (not available, sorry).