Ice and Fire....

Not sure how I ended up here. It wasn't the plan when I set off today.

Alone in a heaving restaurant in Strasbourg in February.

It was partly the cold: minus 10 and dropping - a walk in that kind of cold can only last so long before it becomes an endurance test.

And partly something else. A thought that needed....that needed, well, thought. Something that struck me in the middle of a frost-bitten park where early-arrival storks clattered beaks in noisy mating rituals and we slipped and slid on paths of sheer ice under a low, blinding sun.

A thought that shocked me into stillness.

They found me a table, squeezed me in, between a greying man in a suit reading a French-language newspaper and a couple in love, feeding each other spaghetti.

It is noisy and busy and people are devouring jugs of wine, steaming plates of choucroute, baeckeoffe, shining steaks, perspex bowls greasy with salted frites.

They have their coats and bobble hats and scarves on as they tumble inside, into the heat of the restaurant, into sanctuary from the kind of weather outside that eats you up, that turns you inside out, that keeps your eyes on the pavement so you can keep your nose in your coat. The kind of bitter that scratches your face, hunkers you down, the kind of cold you can't imagine on a summer July day.

In here we turn ruddy-cheeked.

There are old ladies gesticulating wildly across the table - one has her hair in plaited pigtails wound over the top of her head. There are business meetings, business cards exchanged, ipads and Macbooks showing flow charts and Excel sheets, tourists chaotic with shopping bags and cameras.

Conversations rise and fall, the kitchen clatters, the waiters are a smart, efficient blur of black and white. There is a small kerfuffle at the next table as one of the young lovers knocks over his glass of red in his eagerness to reach out and touch the face of his girlfriend.

 The strong, hot, milky, foaming coffee is bitter.

Any place would have done...a place with a table to write on. Because sometimes the urge is unbearable, unstoppable like the foam-tipped waves that suck and surge around the sheer cliffs at Flamborough.

I chose your coffin.

That was my thought in the park. That came out of nowhere and hit the solar plexus like a boxer's right hook.

 I want to say it out loud. Perhaps to stop the world in its tracks, perhaps because it carries on regardless.

Why now? Why think of it now? Cursed mind with its own secret ponderings throwing things up to spoil the day.

I chose your coffin.

The black-suited, black-tied, funeral director; stiffly formal, trying to be informal, with his click-shut folder, A4 pages stuffed into plastic holders, each page a different option, a colour, a finish, handles and whatnot.

Light, dark, elaborate, plain, fancy-handled, varnished; page upon page upon page upon page, getting grander and grander, more elaborate. And he carefully, gently, lifts and turns, lifts and turns, each time smoothing down the plastic with a sweep of his hand, not meeting my eye..noting the descriptions, the finish, as if we're choosing a bookcase.

Until I put out my own hand and I said 'Stop. Please'. And I turned the pages back, right back, to the first one. To the plainest simplest one, made of light oak - or was it beech? 'That one' I said.

Yes, that one. The box that will carry my dead child on his final journey. Decision made. How simply done. How easy I must have made it for that kind, awkward man. No weeping, no wailing, no tearing of hair or gnashing of teeth. Just 'That one'.

I remember the thought process. You were a child; a child of simple pleasures, a child of light and joy and the very thought of....of what? Of you being encased in heavy, swathed grandeur? Yes, that's it. It didn't fit. It wasn't you, I thought.

And we moved on.

I see the moment in the park for what it is. An aftershock. Unexpected. Landed from nowhere. One of the 'waves' that those who are paid to know these things tell you about.

They come and they come, these waves...sometimes gentle, joyous ripples of memory in a sparkling sea, sometimes seismic spume-tipped breakers that wash you away, and there is nothing to be done but let them carry you to where they will...to ditch you on a shore where you emerge battered, storm-tossed, but alive...alive!...and able, somehow, to carry on.

Because that's what happens....it's not bravery....or strength...it's just what we're genetically programmed to do, to crack on.

So I don't do what I want to do which is to sweep away the tray, the coffee cup, the teaspoon, sugar, the silly little wrapped-up lump of nougat they always put on the saucer; to sweep away the steak and chips of the fella next to me, sweep away his wine and the table and the spaghetti and the sucking, spooning lovers and crawl under the table and weep and weep.

I don't do that. And it passes as I watch people enjoying their lunch. Wondering, as I always do, what waves  may engulf them, too, from time to time.

Five years and this still happens. Not as much, not half as much, but it does.

And inevitably, one wave brings another, brings another. And when the waiter brings the bill I'm surprised because I'm splashing with you in the fountains at Alnwick Castle gardens, walking the desolate beaches at Bamburgh, staggering and stepping back to keep our balance, to hold you up, when the tide briefly catches up with us and the water covers our shoes, marching in time, like soldiers, back to the cottage over windswept dunes, drizzle in our hair, fingers numb with cold.

Watching your Mary Poppins DVD; taking that last photo, us together, holding the phone away towards us in my right hand, the image blurry as a result; me all red nose and heavy cold, you with your rosy plump cheeks and Dr Who tee-shirt.

The picture is still on my mobile phone and I fumble for it and my heart lurches at it. So I write and write and it is as if steam pours from the pen.

Ice and fire made up your last day: a bitter, bitter February and you, consumed by the crackling, spitting logs in the open fire of Alnwick's Barter Books, rosy cheeks redder and redder. You watched in wonder.

Ice and fire. Ice and fire. Our last day together. And a few days later I chose your coffin.

Could I ever visit that place again? That place of vast, sweeping beaches, a great castle silhouetted against a wide sky, a place that is more myth, legend, to me now.

The dunes where I made calls to tell desperate faraway friends as the wind snatched my voice away. The dunes, the sand, the sea, the sky, over and over.

I chose your coffin.

There is wine and cheese and the man at the table next to me has left. My coffee was finished long ago and the waiter hovers, anxious to clear the way. All the languages of the world are here. People are cheery, busy, moving on, living.

I close my notebook, pay up.

Outside..and the sun has dipped lower and the freezing air whips our breath away in great foggy gasps of steam.

At the tram stop there is a noise from the skies, a huge skein of geese, flying high in a v shape, then another and another.

Their calls are clear, desolate, telling of far off places, of wild tundras.

They foretell longer, warmer days..they foretell spring.

xxxxx