Gertie on the incredible lightness of being

Last night this nice bloke gives this talk about nothing. He calls it insubstantiality.
He says I don’t exist and neither does Syd. He talks about how you look up at the sky and it’s all blue and lovely and dotted with white clouds that look like bits of cotton wool. You thinks about angels sitting on them playing their wotsits.
But when we was flying to Toromolinos they wasn’t like that. More like being surrounded by a grey fog. Then, back on the ground, look up, cotton wool again.
The bloke says we‘re a bit like them clouds. He talks about quantum whatsisnames. All about atoms and energy.
I say we’ve all got our little ways though. Like Syd. He loves his Charlton Athletic: every Saturday there he is at the game. And I never misses East Enders. And Friday nights we always goes down Tesco’s together.
I say together but are we? Syd and me ain’t really been together for a long time, not since the kids left, or before that even. When we first met we was together then. Couldn’t get enough, though we didn’t speak.
I don’t have a lot of time to bother about it ‘til this fella brings it up last night in this Buddhist howsyafather. Such a lovely speaking voice he had – sort of gets you going, I’d say.
He made me think about dying. I fancy one of them cardboard coffin thingumies in a nice little forest. Then the maggots could eat me up like in that song, Ilkley Moor Bar Tat.
In apples nowadays you never find a good maggot like you used to. It takes the danger out of eating a Cox’s Pippin in bed when you get famished in the middle of the night. I blame the supermarkets. I bet if they get hold of me when I’m done for they’d have me sprayed with preservative and wrapped in cling film. Special offer, Syd and me, two for the price of one.
If I did have maggots I’d be spread around, recycled, like they say is good to do. I’d go into the food chain, maybe even go back up to the stars where we come from.
I dare say Syd would remember me too, though maybe not as fondly as I’d hope.