Confused, as I often am nowadays – only yesterday I took my valerian drops in the late afternoon, thinking I had woken in the middle of the night – I am having trouble distinguishing between Snow White’s seven dwarves and the Seven Deadly (or Cardinal) Sins. What I am looking for is a way to describe the sensation that overwhelmed me when, not long ago, a friend told me had had spent the last month, during which I had been no further than the corner shop, bowling across Europe with his gorgeous new lady friend.
It was not envy I felt as he rattled on, but full-blown jealousy. The green-eyed monster had me in thrall and, as I shut the door on my erstwhile and soon-to-be-again friend, it would not have surprised me to find I had turned green.
But, wait a minute, I told myself. Remember your age. When you were in your sixties, as he is now, you weren’t only bowling around Europe, you were also in Turkey and Egypt and Mexico and taxi-ing around India, and had a home-from-home in a farmhouse on the North Yorkshire Moors.
The view from our window there surpasses even the sight of the Taj Mahal at dawn, and sitting in front of that window with R, listening on the radio to Seamus Heaney reading Beowulf, is one of the most precious memories in the memory bank that now sustains me.
It is a consolation to find other friends of my age have been shocked by the strength of their feelings when hearing of things now beyond their reach. It is not the wistful longing of one who has made the wrong choice at a high-end restaurant. It is something more akin to those other hard-to-distinguish Capital Vices (yet another name for the deadly sins) Greed and Gluttony: desire for more of what one has already had.
We seem to have pretty much forgotten the turmoil of love affairs and marriages and the ups and downs of a working life when we envy friends in early middle age as they take off for Sicily, Thailand or wherever, disregarding the fact that we now have trouble getting up off a chair and would find it hard, if not impossible, to put up with the discomforts of serious travel.
Best to remember the biblical warning that ‘envy makes the bones rot’ and, to be grateful that when we were travelling the world was not generally known to be hurtling towards extinction.