On Saturday When a coping mechanism is needed

YOU wonder how people cope. It’s a question that must be asked millions of times a day by countless individuals, especially in a week like this. How do you cope with losing a loved one amid bestial carnage? How do you cope when your street and family is strafed or bombed?

We’ve experienced moments of limited but devastating terrorism here in the relative safety which has existed this side of the English Channel for nearly eight decades, but nothing anywhere near approaching the horrors we’ve seen on our TV screens this week.

There are places where bad news never seems to be followed by anything but more bad news. Look at Afghanistan. What happens to them when there’s a slight lull in the political mayhem and killing? They are hit by a devastating earthquake.

So how do they cope? I have no idea. Some people use the word ‘stoicism’ but it doesn’t seem to go anywhere near far enough.

Sometimes when I watch television news I find myself wondering if I’d lose the will to live if I had to endure life in one of those terrorzones. Maybe some do, but most people don’t. The one thing all sentient life seems to share is the strong desire to keep on living for as long as possible, no matter what the circumstance.

I suppose we Westerners end up fighting our own small battles. We can find ourselves struggling to find reasons to survive as our own individual worlds fall apart. I know a person who has had so much bad news recently it’s difficult to understand how they are able to carry on day after day. Marital failures followed by the death of young family members, all crowned by a debilitating illness which seems set to go from bad to worse… How do you cope with that?

I’m sorry. It’s the weekend and an editor once said to me: “Try to be cheerful in that column of yours, Hespie. No one wants the weight of the world on their shoulders at the weekend.”

He was right. One way of dealing with bad news is to take a break from it – and many of us living in a peaceful place like the West Country have the luxury of doing that on a Saturday morning. So I’ll steer away from the dark corner where we began. But I still wonder about that question: how do you cope?

I was pondering it the other day while sitting in economy class on a long-haul flight. A tiny man came to sit next to me and, given the cramped seats, I was pleased to observe the diminutive extent of his bulk. He turned out to be a cheerful chap, despite the fact that he seemed to live a lonely and somewhat limited life – which he told me about in great detail.

He was a cook in a canteen at an airport, which is where he obtained discounts so he could afford occasional flights to his native hills far, far away. The more he talked, the more I realised just how solitary and joyless his life was – and I was beginning to feel sorry for him. Until…

Until he flipped open his phone, while asking if I’d paid for any women during my travels around his home country. It takes a lot for the old Hesp jaw to drop, but down it went as we flew somewhere high above the India Ocean. Because nothing would please my diminutive friend more than to show me softporn photographs of the girls he’d been paying for of late. I nearly choked on the packet of three Cheeselets which were helping the warm gin and tonic to go down.

“Only thirty five pounds a night!” he grinned, tapping a cracked screen which was portraying a buxom lass.

Now, I am not a prude. A bit of bare female flesh doesn’t bother me – indeed, quite the opposite. But it was the unexpected nature of what, for him, was a high point in an otherwise monotonous existence which brought me up short. Because I had been asking myself that question. ‘How does this man cope?’ How could he survive a life which, by his own admission, was so depressing and tedious?

He’d told me about his loneliness and despair. He’d painted a picture of the thankless low-paid job he’d endured for so many years and the cramped London bedsit where he lived alone.

Now I’d been shown the answer. He paid for his brief moments of salvation. He saved money so that every now and again he could purchase a temporary light at the end of his own dark tunnel.

I do not know what the women thought of his deal with the Devil. They were not there to ask. I have always imagined that prostitution is a sad and sordid state of affairs for everyone involved – but the little man seemed happy enough as he sat there at 37,000 feet, beaming with pride and delight.

Humans have coping mechanisms. Most of the time. But there are occasions when you wonder if any process in the universe is capable of assuaging nightmarish levels of grief and despair.

Some will turn to God. But, not for the first time this week, I found myself wondering if there is such a thing.