Such stuff as columns are made on
Wednesday, 17 June 2026
Joe Bennett is an award-winning Lyttelton-based writer, columnist and playwright. He is a regular contributor.
OPINION: An elderly gentleman rang, but I didn’t catch his name because the sound quality on my landline gets worse every year. This may be my hearing but I suspect it’s a policy of the phone companies. They hate us fossils, would like us to migrate entirely to their lucrative cellular networks.
They’ll win in the end, of course. I get fewer and fewer calls to my landline and most of those are scamsters pretending to be from a bank or phone company. I tell them how exciting it is to be talking to a real live criminal and would they mind holding the line while I fetch my cellphone to dial 111.
This elderly gentleman was no scamster. He said he had an idea that I might like to use for a column.
People often offer me ideas for a column. A few light a bonfire in my head and I use them straight away and acknowledge the source. Most, however, bed down in my skull and add to the general compost. Meanwhile on a blotter pad on my desk I maintain a list of my own ideas that may one day be worked up into something: chance events, scraps of language, oddities of any sort.
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(On that list in front of me right now is the triplet “sneeze, cough, yawn”. For it struck me yesterday that all three actions are involuntary, all three are common to mammals - but not, as far as I know, to reptiles, insects, fish or birds - and all three are onomatopoeic. Sneeze sounds like a sneeze, cough’s a cough and the word yawn opens the mouth unstoppably wide. There has to be a column in all that.)
But anyway, I asked the elderly gentleman to tell me his idea and he said that in his elderliness it had struck him that sleep is nature’s way of preparing us for death. Whenever you go to sleep, he said, the lights go out, and it’s simply a matter of faith that they will ever come back on again. It’s like a warm-up for the main act, and he seemed to suggest it was a subtle form of comfort.
Several things came to mind, the first of which was that the poets had got there before him, pre-eminently Shakespeare. Sleep, says Macbeth, is “the death of each day’s life”. Or Prospero in The Tempest (an over-rated play, but crammed with the best of Shakespeare’s later poetry): “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
Most famously there’s Hamlet:
To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d.
But most of all I was struck by a coincidence. For on my blotter was a note I’d written that very morning. It said, in full, “waking – being born”.
For I had gone to bed too late, and had to get up too early. The room was cold, the bed warm. Getting up held little appeal; oblivion held plenty. So as I struggled out of the womb of the bed and hauled myself onto my feet to join the world, it came to me that every morning is a form of birth. And “when we are born”, said mad King Lear, ”we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools“.
Naturally, I thanked the elderly gentleman for his suggestion, but had to warn him it was most unlikely I would write a column about it.