Life, Shakespeare tells us, “is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” Start with the preceding link, head on down the rabbit hole of the world wide web and I’m sure you will come across all sorts of erudite analyses of Macbeth’s despairing words as his story (Shakespeare’s version, anyway) heads towards its bloody conclusion. Personally, I take a much simpler lesson from all this. “Real life” is a terrible template for a story. It has no narrative arc, no plot. It begins and ends, of course, but what goes on in the middle is a random mishmash of cause, effect, unintended consequences and bolts from the blue. There is no underlying rhyme or reason. The art of the biographer or memoirist is to take the roiling, senseless mishmash of life’s many events and, by judicious cherry picking, manufacture a narrative arc out of it. Life is a plotless mess. But it can be mined for stories.
As a for instance, being a person of a certain age and temperament, I am just back from a cruise on Cunard’s Queen Victoria from Southampton, England to Lisbon, Portugal and back. My intention was to eat, sleep and write (what else are vacations for?) but my spouse had other ideas. “Get out and about,” she said. “See the world,” she said.
“Or else.”
Having experienced “or else” before, it seemed prudent to stop writing long enough to see what Lisbon had to offer. A lot, it turns out. It is a visually stunning city of narrow cobbled streets clinging to unrelentingly steep hillsides that overlook the Tagus estuary, easily wide enough and deep enough to accommodate an entire fleet of cruise ships many times the size and draft of the legendary Titanic. Having been leveled by an earthquake in 1755, it has an architectural coherence about it that most cities lack. It is oddly reminiscent of Edinburgh’s New Town, which was built at roughly the same time, though, having been built by Portuguese rather than Scots, it is a New Town of vibrant color and wrought iron balustrades, raised to the sky in a settled expectation of sunlight.
Having climbed high enough to reach the botanical gardens, we ate lunch at the awesome Pica Pau restaurant and made our leisurely way down to the waiting ship, roughly an hour before final boarding.
Which is when I discovered that I’d left my backpack at the restaurant, backpack being shorthand for passport, laptop and a variety of other things it might be best not to lose. As I write this, it occurs to me that you might reasonably be asking what I thought I was doing lugging a laptop up hill and down dale during a shore excursion. Honestly? I have no good answer.
An hour to get there and back was tight but doable thanks to the wonders of modern technology. My wife boarded the ship and I returned to the quayside, all set to summon an Uber.
Which is when my phone died, plunging me back into the 20th Century. Suddenly, I’m a monolingual alien stranded on a distant planet, with no easy means of communication. I wandered out of the docks and into the nearby streets where I managed to wave down a taxi. It’s a taxi. They’re used to tourists. And they all speak English.
Except she didn’t.
Now, I knew I’d left my bag at Pica Pau Restaurant, but only my phone knew the actual address: “Avenida Somewhere-Or-Other” wasn’t going to cut it. Fortunately, it was only a few yards down the road from an entrance to the botanical gardens. Which had had an enormous sign over the entrance.
“Jardim Botanico,” says I, all mock confidence and we are on our way. Desperate not to lose my best chance of getting back to the correct cruise terminal (Lisbon has more than one) frantic hand gesturing and repeated use of the phrase “cinco minutos” managed to convey to my bemused driver that I’d like her to wait while I ran to the restaurant, collected my beloved bag and ran back. For a panicked moment I thought she’d gone, but she’d thoughtfully turned the car around ready to return me from whence I came. A BIG tip later and I was back at the ship, with a whopping twenty minutes to spare before they pulled up the gang plank. Disaster averted.
Which is a fun story, right? The sort of thing you’d love to place in your raconteuring library under the heading “Stupid Things I Did On Vacation.”
But this is life. There are no endings, happy or otherwise. No plot. Three days later, about to board a train at Kings Cross to take me home to Edinburgh, I discover that I’ve done it again. I’d left my recently recovered bag (and laptop and passport) in the back of a London black cab, which had long since disappeared without trace. I’m not prone to meltdowns these days, but I had one right there and then, within spitting distance of platform 9¾. Stupid, stupid, stupid! And nothing I could do to retrieve the situation beyond a hopeless act of form-filling on the Transport for London website.
Thank God, therefore, for London taxi drivers – and their wives. On the train, several hundred miles north by now, I receive an email at my author address from Robert M. He’d found my bag in the back of his cab. His wife, having figured out my name from its contents, had googled me. Apparently, I’m not so difficult to find these days and they’d been prepared to make the effort. Thank you Mr and Mrs M! A thousand thank yous! I will be forever grateful.
But this is life. A tale told by an idiot. No plot, no arc. Only episodes. Without a doubt my next act of stupidity is lurking around the corner.
I just hope that it doesn’t involve my backpack.