I spent much  of Monday and Tuesday on S dec. This was not the Sun deck of a cruise ship but the Same Day Emergency Care unit at St Thomas’s Hospital.  I think it’s part of A&E,  Accident and Emergency.

Chest pains on Friday morning, for which my GP had prescribed antibiotics, were still troubling me on Monday morning so I was referred and off I went.

There was a long queue out of the hospital, down the path towards the street under a sort of tent. It took about two hours to get to the front of the queue. A doctor and a volunteer came along the queue; the volunteer reassuring, the doctor assessing and pulling out of the queue those who needed immediate attention.

On arrival I was assessed at Triage. From then on all was efficient and straightforward. I had an electrocardiograph done by a friendly Sicilian who didn’t really like London and could not understand why any sane person would live here rather than New Zealand! 

Then I was sent to SDEC for all the usual things; blood pressure, oxygen levels, pulse and temperature. Lots of blood was taken by a charming Brazilian who put up with everything I said about hating needles. I asked her not to say, “It’s only a scratch,” and she didn’t. I have a very low pain threshold! In due course chest X-rays were taken and another ECG.

The doctors asked me detailed questions to which I knew some of the answers. I have some memory. Thankfully they had access to all my medical records which were probably more accurate. I was allowed to go home at about 7 in the evening.

When I went back on Tuesday morning there was a CT scan. There was a long time waiting for results. Sometimes I sat on the chair in my cubical. Sometimes I lay on the examination bed. I was impatient with the waiting. The staff were very patient with me. I chose to have the curtain of my cubicle pulled back so I could watch the action.

Doctors kept a check on me and if I had a question someone came and answered it. I was offered food and drink. I don’t know whether the unit was particularly busy or not. All the cubicles seemed occupied. The staff spent a lot of time at computers and I’m sure they were not playing computer games.

Over those two days I saw people of such varying ages, ethnicities, educations, abilities, statuses, incomes, religions, political views and beliefs working together with good humour, and efficiency. They were a team working together as a team for their patients’ well-being. 

Then as now it strikes me that when we humans have a shared goal, perhaps especially if the focus is outside ourselves, it is amazing how well we can get on and how much we can accomplish together. 

I don’t know why it took time in SDEC to show me this as  I see it every time a team plays or an orchestra performs or, for that matter, every Sunday when people gather at St Agnes Kennington Park to worship God.

P.S. All the results came back negative which was really positive. It looks as though the GP was right from the beginning. And, thanks to that referral and SDEC, I also had a very positive experience.

‘Leave while the party’s going well,’ was advice I was given when I first began going to parties. I didn’t but it was sound advice. 

I have also discovered that, whatever the party  while the food, drink, host and setting are each important, the people make a party.

Over thirty years ago my elder daughter when asked by a bemused older friend, ‘What is Simon’s attraction to Thailand?’ replied, ‘I think it’s the people.” And she was right.

At breakfast at my hotel in Bangkok a couple asked if they could move from their table and join me at mine. Of course I said yes. It turned out this was their first visit to Thailand and they realised from my relationship with the staff that I was a regular. They wanted to know what they should do during their time there.

I asked how long they had been in Thailand and what they’d done so far. Two days and two tourist excursions. What was their impression I wondered. “The people are so lovely, and polite, and they smile!” They told me, enthusiastically. I agreed.

My last evening in Bangkok I had nothing planned. Then a friend from Berlin suggested a  Michelin starred restaurant for dinner, Aksorn in Chaeron Khrung Road. He knew the chef. It looked good, not far from where I was staying and understandably expensive. I thought, ‘what the heck’ and went for it. The food was superb and so was the setting – an outdoor terrace on a warm evening.

The chef joined me. He was Australian and had lived in Thailand for forty years. Within minutes we were talking about things trivial and important as if we’d known each other for years. We ‘clicked’. Thanks to him and so many others I left the party that is Thailand while it was at its best. 

Going home from a party is often boring. I never like leaving Thailand especially when it is warm there and cold here . My journey back to London was not great. Emirates was ok but various things didn’t  work. The staff were lovely.

And, as it is after all parties, it’s wonderful to be home.

My paternal grandmother, born in England in 1871, collected unusual epitaphs. One I remember was of a certain ‘Lady Jane’. It listed her virtues, of which there were many, and concluded, ‘She also painted in water colour For of such is the Kingdom of Heaven’. I’m afraid my water colours are not of a standard to get me in.

A much more poignant epitaph on the gravestone of a child’s grave, read, ‘If so soon I was to be done for I wonder what I was begun for.’

The sister of a young man whom I met when last in Sri Lanka two years ago, and with whom I have remained in touch by WhatsApp, has sent me a message. She used his phone and told me that he’d died of an asthma attack. He was twenty one. There was a photo with the message. It was of his body dressed in a black suit and with white gloves laid out for the funeral ceremonies. He looked serene. I had never seen him not wearing a covid mask.

‘If so soon…..’ indeed; Or as Donne said ‘Every man’s death diminisheth me’

It seems to me that unless we are prepared to see ourselves as only fully human in community, that is in relation to each other, we’ve missed out on what it is to be human at all.

In this context community is not those we choose as community – our friends – or even the community that is family who we don’t choose. It is anyone and everyone we happen to encounter along the way.

That encounter may help us to be more human or, if it doesn’t touch us, we are truly profoundly diminished. Lives, however short, are never a waste unless they are untouched by love and we are untouched by them. When untouched by them it’s our lives not theirs that are the lesser for it.

And through this I think I’ve become more aware than ever that death, even untimely death, is never a waste or failure. It is as natural, part of nature, as is birth. It is what happens. 

My continuing assertion is, “It’s not what happens to us in life that matters, it’s what we choose to do with what happens to us.” That includes allowing sadness to deepen our own realities and understanding, to become more fully human.

The encounters of this cruise, some significant some simply enjoyable, have reminded me of the most important encounter of my life. More than fifty years ago I was invited to tea by an Aunt who lived in Fendalton, Christchurch, New Zealand. It was for me to meet a visiting cleric from England. I was fairly recently ordained. I have no idea how my Aunt had met or knew the cleric but she did and I went.

The priest was John V Taylor formerly General Secretary of the Church Missionary Society and later Bishop of Winchester. At the time I knew little about him. While my aunt went to boil the kettle or prepare the tea John Taylor and I talked. I was going through a difficult patch and said to him that I wasn’t at all sure that I was following ‘God’s Plan’ for me. He explained that there wasn’t just one plan and that wherever and however I was there was always a plan, God’s plan, for my fulfilment. That was a help.

I went on to say that I felt as if I was always walking on a tightrope trying to keep my balance and in danger of falling off; that I was neither rich nor poor, right wing nor left wing, Catholic or Protestant, in everything living somewhere in between, nothing one hundred per cent clear or certain, and that at a Church conference in Sweden in 1968 I had been described as ‘Simon Compromise Acland’ and that that was not a compliment. 

He said, “But Simon you are walking on a tight rope. That is life.” 

That was no help. And I complained, “But what if I fall off the tightrope!” And I added, “I don’t believe God is a safety net waiting to catch me.”

“No,” he said. “God is not a safety net.”

“But where is he?”

“He falls off with you.”

I never met John V Taylor again but on this cruise I have chanced to come across a copy of the Order of Service for his funeral at Magdalen College Chapel, Oxford, in 2001. Printed inside the cover is this.

Apart from the bad moments, John believed the Christian promise that personal life goes on beyond death. Yet he felt strongly that our gratitude should not be greedily conditioned by that hope, preferring as an ideal this prayer, enclosed in a letter to Victor Gollancz from a fellow-student just after the outbreak of the First World War, following their last term at Oxford.

‘To have given me self-consciousness but for an hour in a world so breathless with beauty would have been enough. But Thou hast preserved it within me for twenty years now and more, and hast crowned it with the joy of this summer of summers. And so come what may, whether life or death, and, if death, whether bliss unimaginable or nothingness, I thank Thee and bless Thy name.’

From ‘God of a Hundred Names’ by V. Gollancz

Eating alone in public brings with it joys that often have little or nothing to do with the food. While beginning my evening with a gin and tonic at the pavement terrace of a restaurant in the Suriwong Road I was interrupted, happily, by two women of a certain age from California who had arrived in Bangkok two hours earlier on their first ever excursion beyond the United Sates of America. 

They were enthusiastic and charming and full of wonder and curiosity about everything. As part of a tour group they were going to be well looked after in terms of the places to visit but, this being their first night and free of the group, they wanted to experience a little of the ‘real Thailand’.

I think that any experience of anywhere is ‘real’ within its own terms but I didn’t go into the philosophical basis of my ideas on that and after we’d chatted about Thailand its history and culture I pointed them across the road to the food stalls and market of Patpong and reassured them that Thailand in general and Bangkok in particular is remarkably safe. They went happily on their way to encounter this new reality.

Later, while eating at the food market, I had a long conversation with a waitress I’d seen a few times before. She had established that I was a grandfather, eight times over, and was single. She had informed me that she had sons of fourteen and ten and was also single. This evening she told me that she thought we would make a good couple and that she was not interested in any short term arrangement. 

After some conversation  between her delivering beer and bowls of food to various tables we agreed that it probably wasn’t going to work and that we were each ‘good’ people. She also pointed out to me that the braces on her teeth were not to straighten her teeth but were a fashion statement and showed that she could afford to have her teeth straightened if she needed to, which she didn’t.

At a neighbouring table were three young women, Eastern European or Russian I think. The back of one of them, she was naturally beautiful, was covered by a tattoo of a skull with guns behind it. When she turned to take the paper table napkins from my table to theirs I saw that her mouth was disfigured, to my eyes, by over enlargement with Botox. More fashion statements.

Later I was joined at my table by a fifty five year old Saudi man carrying a can of Coca Cola. The place, being very crowded, he had nowhere to sit. I indicated that I was happy for him to join me. Discovering country of origin and age seem to be acceptable ways of beginning a conversation. He was unfazed by my eighty two years and told me he was leaving Bangkok the next day to return home. He wanted to go out on the town and invited me to join him. I regretfully declined on the grounds that it was ten o’clock and past my bedtime. He bade me a fond farewell and went off into the night. 

Altogether a rather ordinary evening of eating alone in public in Bangkok.