I went to the Edinburgh Fringe festival a couple of weekends ago with my dear friend Shiri.

It was brilliant. We caught up with Katie’s (my bestie who was visiting recently) friend Sam who I met while Katie was here and I loved her so we’re friends now. She’s an actress and we caught her improv show, which was fun. Like an actual actress! How cool is that!

We also met a guy From Seattle named Sam. It was a weekend of Sams. I wrote a limerick about him because that’s what I do now when I meet people –

I once met a man from Seattle,
I was happy that he did not prattle.
We met at Ed Fest,
I asked what he liked best:
A puppet show that was a battle

So we mostly went to great shows but we also went to one that wasn’t good, at the insistence of Seattle Sam. It was a puppet show about puppets dying. Yes, as you might have guessed from the limerick, it was a battle to watch. People laughed, we didn’t really get the jokes, they were crude and meaningless.

But one of the puppets was there through whole thing: the narrator, an old man who talked about the ever-moving, ever-changing phases of life. Seasons come and seasons go, time is transient.

He told of a man who feels every death in the world as if it’s a personal loss. If a man dies on the other side of the world, he is sad because he imagines it is his own father. If a woman dies, he imagines it is his daughter. The narrator explains:

What is the source of this poor man’s grief? It is the unbearable truth of the world. And because it is unbearable, we have closed our hearts to it, so long ago that we have forgotten how to open them.

Have we closed our hearts off to some of the world’s unbearable grief? It’s possible, I think we may tend to minimise a lot of things, a lot of things are more normalised now we can see it all on tv. But you can’t take everything on as personal or you’ll never get out of bed.

While most scenes in this show were insufferable, this old man popped up every now and then to discuss humanity and the world. And as it reached the end, he got more tired, and in one of his speeches, he loses momentum, he whispers his last words as he sinks to his knees, his final thoughts barely heard by those listening. He falls, his final resting place on a black box, in the middle of the stage, everyone silent.

Moments after, a big menacing creature ambles out. While rather scary, it has a look of quiet resignation on its face, almost as if it is a protector. Human sized, it reaches down and it picks up the small fallen wooden old man and then it pauses for a moment, turns around and looks straight at me. Not just out into the audience, not just to my side of the room, it looks at me. And for a few brief seconds, death and I look each other right in the eyes.

And I knew it meant me no harm. And if my time were to come, it would be there to take me in its arms and carry me away.

Yes yes, I’m not religious, I don’t believe in spirits or death being a big menacing monster who holds you in your final moments. But there was something rather reassuring about this moment. We are not far from the big monster many times during our lives, sometimes more than others. It was Epicurus who said:

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here…

Having said that, I think I’ll try to keep the hell away from old mate death for as long as possible thanks, because I’m busy, I’ve got lots of things to get done before we meet again. And there’s nothing actually reassuring about dying, death is death, none of us want to die, and it’s not nice on all counts. But it was nice that it took the time to wander past to say hello, and kept on moving on its way, leaving me with a reminder of how lucky I am to be alive.

Sound like an analogy for something?

Anyway, the other bit of life wisdom from the festival was from a play about the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now this one we actually did enjoy. The poignant line from it was:

Home is not a place, it is a thing that you make. That is Freedom.

Aah. There you go. It is true though. Where I grew up will always be home, but so is London. And other places have been too. Home is made by the people you surround yourself with, and the life you make for yourself, and the freedom that gives you. So thank you to all the people who have contributed to my feeling of home throughout the various places I have decided to settle throughout my life.

Anyway, I highly recommend the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, I had a fantastic time. I will be back every year.