CLIMBING

The massive green girder arches away from me, up into the night sky. It must be getting on for one o clock. They turn the floodlights off at midnight. There’s just the red light on the very top of the arch. It is a warning to aircraft to keep away. But to me, it beckons seductively.

I crouch forward and grip the edges of the steel on either side. This is no good. I can’t feel the metal properly through my thick woollen gloves. I pull them off and throw them over the parapet. As if on cue, the moon slides out of the thick cloud cover, and I watch the gloves spiralling lazily downwards. Floating down, down. I am not very good at judging distances but it is a long way. And then I see them alighting gently on the water. Yes the tide is in. I thought it would be.

It’s funny how it is the little things in life, the ‘accidents’, which make all the difference. I mean you plan and plan, and have got things all worked out, and one day you walk down a street and bump into someone, a perfect stranger – and everything changes. Do you believe in coincidences? Or do you prefer Jung’s notion of synchronicity: When an inwardly perceived event is seen to have correspondence in external reality? Buggered if I know.

I take hold again of the steelwork. God it is so cold. But at least I can get a good grip now.

The girder, which forms the main left span of the bridge, is about eighteen inches wide. I had thought this would feel like crawling up a pavement, but I am surprised now how the width seems to have shrunk alarmingly. I inch my way slowly, forwards and upwards. The bolt heads sticking out of the metal give me a reasonable foothold, but I was never a climber, and I did not realise how difficult this would be.

I was talking about my mother earlier. Well I didn’t exactly bump into her as I was walking down the street, but she certainly had a great influence on my life. And, by extension, on the lives of those people I met later on. Funny, but I’ve never thought of it like that before. And of course, she is still influencing us all, even though she has been dead for years. But isn’t that what life is like? We all influence each other. I often think we are like pebbles on the beach. We get our shape by bashing into all the other pebbles around us; have the corners and sharp edges rounded as time goes by. Of course, we haven’t got as much time as the pebbles on the beach. Unless the process continues in the next life. If you believe in a next life. I want to. Believe in a life after death, I mean There is so much to do. You can’t fit it all into one lifetime, can you.