Enjoy Until . . .

# 29

   Governments around the world have had a variety of concerns on their bureaucratic minds this week. Several, I hear, are running campaigns to discourage ‘celebratory gunfire’; fortunately not something frequently encountered in England. The dangers of firing Kalashnikovs into the air, Libyan-style, should be evident to anyone capable of releasing the safety catch. Gravity insists that what goes up must surely come back down. It’s not rocket science – or rather it is, but only at the most elementary level. A spent bullet, having reached the apogee of its trajectory, begins to descend from somewhere high in the sky. Returning to earth, it will achieve a terminal velocity of around 91 metres per second. (That’s close to 300 feet/sec before VAT). And terminal it most probably would be if it were to land on some unfortunate’s head.

So please, chaps, let’s go easy on those triggers.

   Meanwhile, here in the UK, it seems that research has shown the citizens to be easily confused and our government – unreliably watchful on our behalf – now wants to save us from getting baffled by ‘Use By’, ‘Sell By’, ‘Best Before’ and ‘Display Until’ date-stamps on packaged food. I wonder which of these we are thought incapable of understanding? They all seem to have quite plain and reasonably specific meanings. ‘Sell By’ and ‘Display Until’ are obviously stock-control parameters. Admittedly, ‘Best Before’ is slightly vague but the meaning of ‘Use By’ is pretty clear and it is possibly almost as effective as the traditional scratch and sniff techniques on which we previously relied. In these litigious times, we must not forget that the ‘Use By’ date is cited to protect the manufacturer rather than the consumer. With only a minor revision it would read ‘Sue By’ – so let’s have no more confusion in that regard.

   The predilection for date-stamping things is now extending away from food into areas where it is needed even less. You could apply ‘Tolerate Until’ to priests, politicians and all manner of similar irritants. I bought a bouquet of flowers in Sainsbury’s the other day and only later did I notice that the wrapper bore the dictum ‘Enjoy Until…’ Cut any flowers and their inevitable decay is accelerated, but the manner and visibility of the transitions from bud to full bloom and ultimately to withered stem reveals their essence, their poetry, indeed their ‘poiesis’. Do we really need to be told when to stop enjoying this process of revelation? And even if that were the case, how might we arrest our enjoyment on the date prescribed by Mr Sainsbury? Should we perhaps poke our own eyes out? And how does he decide the date of ‘Until’? Is it ‘until tomorrow’, ‘until the twelfth of never ’ or ‘until hell freezes over’?

Where is Auden when you need him? Imagine if Wistan had suffered the patronising indignity of finding an ‘Enjoy Until …’ date, rubber-stamped on his cut flowers. Rest assured, he’d have given them an Until for their money:

“…Till China and Africa meet,

And the river jumps over the mountain

And the salmon sing in the street,

‘I’ll love you till the ocean

Is folded and hung up to dry

And the seven stars go squawking

Like geese about the sky.

‘The years shall run like rabbits,

For in my arms I hold

The Flower of the Ages,

And the first love of the world.’

But all the clocks in the city

Began to whirr and chime:

‘O let not Time deceive you,

You cannot conquer Time.

‘In the burrows of the Nightmare

Where Justice naked is,

Time watches from the shadow

And coughs when you would kiss.

‘In headaches and in worry

Vaguely life leaks away,

And Time will have his fancy

To-morrow or to-day….”

The lines quoted above are from ‘As I walked Out One Evening’ by W. H. Auden and there is more besides if you didn’t already know of it.  During an evening stroll, Auden’s narrator hears two other voices declaim on conflicts between Life and Time. Auden’s habitual stoicism restores a measure of calm in the final stanza, without resort to celebratory gunfire:

It was late, late in the evening,

The lovers they were gone;

The clocks had ceased their chiming,

And the deep river ran on.

Read or re-read all fifteen stanzas and see if that doesn’t take the mind off gunfire, shopping and date-stamps for a while.