THE DASH: A DERANGED MEDITATION ON THAT TINY HYPHEN BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH

Image by Martin Foskett / Knelstrom Media

​It was drizzling again. Not the polite sort of drizzle, mind you—the kind that seeps into your socks like some unwanted council tax demand, silent and sopping. I was standing outside the Co-op with a half-crushed packet of Hobnobs in one hand and a lukewarm Costa in the other, watching pensioners shuffle past like phantoms in a budget ghost story. A dull Thursday in July. Cloudy with a chance of existential crisis.

Somebody'd scribbled on the community noticeboard: "Live like the dash matters." At first glance, I thought it was a low-budget advert for Slimming World. But then it hit me like a bad trip on discount mulled wine: That dash on the gravestone is everything. Not the birth date (who remembers theirs anyway?) and, indeed, not the death date (unless you have morbid fan clubs like those of Diana or Elvis). No, sir. It's that tiny little scratch in the middle that holds the whole circus together.
THE GRAVESTONE IS A LIE, AND SO ARE YOU​
What is a life, really, but an absurd series of blunders, victories, petty hatreds, ecstatic kebabs, and tax forms, all jammed into that one teensy hyphen carved into granite? You are not your birthday, and you are definitely not the end date unless you're keen on becoming compost. You are the dash.
The dash is the drunken karaoke in Magaluf. It's that time you tried to make money selling vape juice out of your car boot. It's the fleeting kiss behind the school shed, the two divorces, the three-day juice cleanse that ended in a McDonald's car park with tears and fries. It's the anonymous charity donation you didn't Instagram. It's Tuesday morning when you didn't scream.
And it's yours. Only yours. You own the dash. But most people—poor souls—lease it to fear, to bureaucracy, to whatever the hell's trending on TikTok.
THE INDUSTRIALISATION OF EXISTENCE
We've industrialised the soul. Manufactured living. Plastic emotions, pre-packaged milestones, mortgage plans that'll outlive your own teeth. We are told the dash is meant to be neat. Predictable. Birth, school, job, spouse, house, bills, death. If your dash doesn't fit the brochure, there must be something wrong with you, they say.
But let me tell you: The dash was never meant to be tidy.
Your dash should be a Jackson Pollock of madness and meaning. It should bleed. It should laugh. It should offend the accountants and worry your in-laws. The dash is your one ticket to howling at the moon with no repercussions, to start a company selling whisky-scented candles or to become the first man in Essex to yodel professionally. Why not?
Because one day, someone will look at your gravestone, squint past the moss, and see those two dates. And they'll wonder what the hell happened in between. Will they find a legacy or just paperwork?
DANCING ON THE TOMB OF MEDIOCRITY
Here's the cruel poetry of it: you don't get to choose your beginning, and odds are you won't pick your ending either. But that middle bit? That's the Wild West, baby. That's your playground, your fight club, your canvas smeared in curry sauce and stardust.
And yet we tiptoe through it as if it were a pension seminar. We ask permission to be happy. We schedule joy between emails. We defer our wildness for "someday," like fools queuing for a bus that exploded years ago.
I once met a woman—mad as a moth in a lampshade—who told me she spent her twenties chasing men and her forties chasing peace. When I asked what changed, she said, "I realised the dash doesn't extend itself for regrets." Too bloody right.
THE FINAL RECKONING
Picture your own funeral for a moment. Go on. Make it cinematic. Think of the playlist. Who's crying? Who's pretending? Is your dog there, looking noble? Now, what do they say about you?
"He always paid his council tax on time"
"She made excellent lasagne"
"He once punched a pelican in Greece"
Which legacy would you prefer?
Because that, dear reader, is the dash. Not the facts. Not the forms. Not the faded photos in a loft no one wants to clean out. The dash is action. Memory. Risk. Absurdity with purpose. Passion with no apology. A long, wild scream into the void that says, "I was here—and I mattered."
A FINAL TOAST TO THE DASH
So here's to the dash. May it be bold. May it be messy. May it be filled with mistakes that made you laugh and decisions that made you human. Let it be written in midnight ink and cider-soaked notebooks. Let it contain revolutions of the personal kind. Let it never be small.
Because the dates? They're just placeholders. Numbers on a stone. But the dash?
That's where the living happens.
Now go. Do something ridiculous.