Bedside Manners...

It is a small gesture...yet it carries all the love and compassion in the world.
A hand placed gently on a shoulder...and left there. A slight movement to and fro as a mother might make to comfort a child.

Few words are said. A quiet, murmured 'Je sais, je sais' (I know, I know)'

Tears roll silently down the face of the woman receiving the gentle words. The pain is all-consuming today. The hopelessness and loneliness too. 

She sits in a metal chair by her bed, attached to a drip. Her feet are bare and her toes are blue. The table at her bedside has no cards or flowers or fruit, no photographs, no books or magazines; just a jug of water.

She has no visitors. The staff told us this, and we know it too, because last week, in a moment of clarity, she told of a dead daughter, a dead husband, dead friends.

'All gone' she said. And the hugeness of her loneliness and her emptiness and her sadness made it difficult to know what to say. But we held her hand, and talked of her garden and of springtime and of birds and sunshine and told her we would see her next week.

The staff here in this busy Brussels hospital are attentive and kind but swift of foot and quick to move on. They care..but don't have the time to spend too much time doing it. 

So others are stepping in to fill the void. A group of volunteers - the man with her, Arnaud, is one of them - gather at the hospital three times a week, organising themselves into a rota.

They push a trolley round the geriatric wards, offering tea, coffee, the occasional little cake when supplies and funds allow. Above all they offer the single most glorious gift they have within their power to bestow. Human kindness.

The woman Arnaud tends to has not opened her eyes today, she makes no effort to wipe away the tears that have settled into the wrinkles of her thin, gaunt, shadowed face. But at his presence there is a change in her demeanour, a relaxing. Her head tilts slightly towards his hand and it's clear she knows he is there.

Around them is the bustle of a hospital ward at visiting time: nurses, orderlies, daughters, sons, grandchildren, illicit mobile phone chatter.

Yet there seems a bubble separating this man and this old woman from the rest of the world. A peacefulness. We leave them there, together. 

'We do what we can, we can only do what we can...if we can make just a little difference....' he says later. 

 In the next room we find a patient roundly berating a cleaner doing the rounds with one of those big circular sweeping floor polishers. She's cross because she can't hear the TV. The cleaner rolls her eyes at us and carries on regardless.

The woman's mood changes as does the subject of her ranting, when she finds out I'm British.

'Why you have Camilla?' she says. 'Why? You are fools to let her into your royal family. Camilla is bonkers...I Do. Not. Like. Her! Nobody like her! Why you British like her?' 

She speaks in carefully enunciated but staccatoed English. 'Bonkers! Bonkers! She bonkers, you English bonkers to let her in!'  and then she twirls each index finger at her temple. 'Bonkers!' She snorts and sniggers and gives such a stonking belly laugh that we have to readjust her oxygen mask.

 She pauses a moment, reflects.

'...But Kate is sweet, I think...' and an afterthought, 'will it be a girl or a boy?'

She sits bolt upright, demurely accepting a cup of cafe noir, pressing her lips to the hot liquid.

A Parisian unwillingly in Belgium. She came 53 years ago to be with her now-dead husband but hates the place. Any attempt to put the city in a positive light results in a dismissive wave of the hand and a sound that could only come from a Parisian...a kind of scornful 'pffffh'.

So we turn the conversation to the city she describes as 'the greatest and most beautiful in the world' and her eyes shine as she speaks of Montmartre, the Champs Elysees, her memories of the Eiffel tower, of a childhood heady with sunshine and joy. 

Then she adjusts her flannelette nightie and fingers the ruffled neckline. 
The ward is oppressively, fuggily hot. The world outside seems a long way away.

'I know where Diana died, I go to the bridge and I remember her,' she says, lowering her voice, gesturing that I move closer to her. 'I think they kill her,' she hisses conspiratorially.
She takes another gasp of oxygen and her chest rises high and falls.

In the bed next to her, a woman lies hollow cheeked, open-mouthed, eyes wide but seemingly unaware. She groans, coughs sharply, spittle flying from her mouth.

Her arms are heavily bruised, her bare, skinny legs protrude from the sheets. One of the volunteers, Adilah, is with her. She gently adjusts the blankets and wipes the moisture from her cheeks. She takes her hand, more bone than skin and gently rubs it between her palms.

The rest of us move on and find Marlene sitting in a chair next to her bed. It's her birthday, her 92nd. She's here because she had a fall at home and has a pot on her arm and leg. She's fretting about who will do the gardening and how she will manage when she gets home.

 She points at the ceiling when she talks about her long-dead husband and we celebrate her birthday with a cup of tea and a petite Madeleine in a plastic wrapper.

'I lived through two world wars,' she says, in a voice that suggests  'so think on!' And we do. 

And the hours pass and the team moves from room to room, ward to ward, chatting, consoling, supporting, and it is an honour and a privilege to be with them.

At the far end of the last ward is a woman so tiny and dainty she is almost doll-like. The small hospital bed seems huge against her.

She is reclined, just so, on top of the blankets, in a floral-patterned, quilted dressing gown fastened up to the neck. She has purple fluffy slippers on her neatly placed feet and her hands are carefully folded across her middle.

She might appear serene and calm - but her eyes give her away. They are filled with anxiety and something else...hope. She looks constantly to the window, as if thinking she might see something, or someone, important there.

Then, as we approach the bed, she sees me and everything changes. She smiles with what seems to be relief - a huge, delightful gummy smile.

'My daughter, my daughter, I was so scared you would not come. I was so scared...' And she repeats this. 'so scared so scared so scared..you have comeyouhavecome...at last...'

And I don't contradict her and I sit on the bed with her and hold her hand. And she talks and talks and rambles and chatters and I cannot understand all she says...but she grips my hand with such strength and her eyes shine.

With Arnaud's guidance I lift her to a sitting position, gently feed her juice through a cup with a spout, and hold her paper-thin hand as she speaks to the daughter who is not here, through me.

It is hard to leave her and to release the iron-like grasp on my hand, but I do, gently, and tell her I will be back to see her again.

As we leave I look back at her, perhaps to wave. But it's clear I am forgotten. Her gaze has shifted, hopefully, longingly, to the window once more.

xxx 

* For more information on the hospital volunteering programme and other ways to volunteer visit www.servethecity.be.
 "A movement of volunteers serving cities in practical ways & inspiring people to be givers in this world. We believe that many people doing small things together can make a big difference in our world"

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

Putting a Sock in it...

One of the best things I never did was go to Diana's funeral.

Quite extraordinary when you think about it. Imagine, a front row seat (kind of ) at one of the biggest events the world has ever seen..and I said no.

And people look at me with incredulity when I tell them. When I say that, instead, you and I sat at home, watching it on TV, and you took off your sock during the minute's silence and put it in your mouth. As if you knew there was no way you could keep quiet without it.

You were five then - though not five, not really. Still a baby who needed feeding, changing, pushing about in a push chair, prone to temper tantrums...and 5am waking.

I remember us in the front room of our little home, me on the floor, nose pretty much pressed to the TV, you on the couch in the sunshine surrounded by toys (you didn't move about much then - I could vac the whole house and mow the lawn and you'd still be there, an hour later, merrily beating up a playgym).

I remember sitting there and glancing at you as the Westminster Abbey choir reached its agonising, unbearable heart-rending crescendo. And you put one finger in your ear, shouted with what sounded like joy, and glugged from your juice cup. And as the world wept I knew, right then, that this would be one our most precious moments together.

A moment in time printed as if in tableau, as if painted, like a Leonardo fresco, on some deep part of the mind, but never losing colour, never losing light, no cracks appearing over long, interminable years without you.

The world fell silent and you put a sock in it. Worth all the tales I might have been able to tell about rubbing shoulders with the great and good, about being a player on this world stage... 

Why did I decline? Because I had been away from you without you for two weeks, because Diana's death meant I'd spent another weekend in the office, another weekend away from you and I needed you with me. Does that make sense?

Precious hours. 

I think I knew, you see. I think I always knew that we wouldn't have you forever. Don't tell me how I knew? I'm not even sure if I acknowledged it to myself. No doctor ever said your time on earth was limited. You were rarely ill, you were as strong as an ox..... 

But sometimes in the quiet of an early morning, I would lie in bed, waiting, listening.

 This is how it would go: first the thud as you negotiated yourself out of the bed and on to the floor, seconds of silence as you bottom-shuffled your way across the carpet and then the crash-bang-wallop as you started on your toy box. Emptying it all , picking out your favourite, and giving it hell for leather. 

This until you got bored. Then you'd fumble your way round the bedroom door, bottom shuffle along the hallway to the kitchen, dragging along your best toy to the washing machine and bang it around inside.

But sometimes, this didn't happen. You would sleep in and I would lie there thinking...not today Thomas, not today. And it never was. Until it was. 

Do you know how many times that happened? More than I can say. Do you know how many times I played over in my head while sitting at my desk, scenarios of how it might be...and what if I were far away? 

Do all parents carry such dark morbid thoughts with them or was it my subconscious preparing me for something it knew would come? 

I took so many videos of you, as other parents will do...but I took them thinking, I need to make sure I always have you....just in case. 

So when I was asked to cover the funeral, that we had tickets to get into the Abbey, I think they were surprised. I surprised myself to be honest. But I never regretted it, sacrificing the chance of pomp and circumstance, to watch you putting a sock in it..

xxx

Day Between Days...

Driftwood.
Six pieces. Grains of sand and salt crusted in the smooth grooves and crevices.

Found in the slush and mush of a seaweed tideline on a sloped beach of grey pebbles and shining silver sand, where oystercatchers divebombed black backed gulls and the sun crackled on the surface of the water - and we couldn't help but turn to it and close our eyes.

We got there by mud-sucking path that was drenched and saturated after days of rain, past curious scraggy cows with long highland horns, clumps of muck clinging to their bellies, past gorse that smelled of coconut if you crushed it in your palms.

It was a day between days, a day of casting off clothes, of cares; for gazing in happy awe at rock pipits courting in the crevices of the cliff face, at the winter-starved pipistrelle venturing from his sleepy hollow to catch a snack in the sun, at the flash of  a redshank's legs.

Driftwood. Drift. Drifting..

One piece is long, round and smooth like a relay runner's baton, another is broad and rectangular, worked and worked by the sea until it is all but hollow. A third is long hard and spiralled, as if someone has taken each end and twisted and twisted.

They smell of wet sand and sea and seaside air and, fleetingly, of woodsmoke, and I collect them and add them to the pebbles, shells and stones in the rucksack.


Around the cottage we have eagles and otters, shiny, chunky rocks and water, water everywhere.

There is a stove with a creel hauled above it where we dry the tea-towels; there's a supply of too-damp logs, a torn, raggedy patchwork quilt on the lumpy bed, a bath with a spider in it and chairs that sag and tip you out.

Our home squats on a peninsula and we wander from window to window constantly - spotting birds, watching the snowline drift on the mountains - and at night we watch the flashes from distant lighthouses. By day we have it to ourselves and at night it is blacker than black outside and we hunker down.

Today the hills across the Sound of Mull are dripping with grey, heavy, slung-low cloud and on this side of the cottage - the sea side - the wind whips the water and every ripple is an otter's slick back or shiny snout or a porpoise fin. Light flinking and flashing, playing tricks on the eyes.

On the loch-side of the cottage, in the little harbour near the front door, the water is millpond calm and in each passing moment, the tide slides away exposing oily, pulpy seaweed.

It's sheltered from the wind here and the long grasses springing from the deep muddy prints left by Highland cows are russet brown and dipping gently, heavy with raindrops...although the rain stopped long ago.

I brought you here once.

 I don't know what you made of it. We sat together on the rocks on a beaming blue day and watched porpoise, scores and scores of them, rolling and rolling in the blue. The sea glittered.

Then we had a snack of yoghurt, bananas and juice on a rug at the foot of Ben More and we rode on the Mull Little Railway. You chuckled as it clattered on the tracks, as if you couldn't believe your luck.

It is one of my happiest memories. That special week, all of us together....

Time moves differently here, more slowly.

Or perhaps we just notice more, second by second.

On the little pier near the cottage, the sea sucks, gloops and slurps.

Black-headed gulls hunt one last time before flying to roost. They lift on a bank of air, hover, spot something beneath the surface - and dip, settling briefly, before they paddle, paddle, paddle, feet pattering on the water, and up again.

A curlew lifts and makes his lonely, rippling call and a grey heron stalks the shallows. And as day turns to dusk the wind finally finds us and brings with it icy rain.

Driftwood. Found on one of the days between days, between the day you died and the day you were born.

A week of anniversaries this. Lifted, lifted by the soar of golden eagles in Glen More, by the otters and their rings of bright water, by the mother and cub swirling and twirling together near the shoreline - the little one swimming for the beach and leaping and bounding as if for the simple joy of living.

By the white-tailed sea eagle languidly coasting low over grey waters; by the bright eyes of fallow deer; by sheep-infested seashores.

By oysters collected on a desolate, deserted beach; by a hen harrier dipping and looping, pausing and swooping over hillocks and heather-strewn wilderness.

By wild winds, driving snow, bitter cold and, on that one day, by a gift of spring.

A week of anniversaries, of  memories of birth and death, of days before and days before that . Of a whole life lived and then lost.

And here, on our island sanctuary, the wind strengthens, the rain is hard against the window. A log drops down in the fire and the sea is a constant gentle roar.

And it is so very peaceful.

xxx

Spinning Spheres

Dear Thomas,

The tree hasn't quite forgiven me, I think.
It sits there, glowering - if a tree can sit and glower - and I'm sure it sulks. Wishing, no doubt, it was in some brighter, grander place, surrounded by twinkly things and candlelight and merriment...and people who might actually love it a bit.

Poor thing. It didn't deserve this. Hauled home half-heartedly in a pull-along shopping trolley where it remained for days in the hall before I could muster the effort to bring it into daylight again.

There's nothing on it yet. The baubles need threading, and lights..we need to buy lights. At some point.

Worryingly I found myself talking to it. 'Hi tree,' I said. 'I'm sorry. I'm not much good at this. I used to be good at it, I used to be good at making the effort to be good at it. But this year...' and then I run out of things to say. A new level this! Talking to a Christmas tree, resenting it, because it doesn't know you, because it has nothing to do with you. As I say, poor thing.

I'm aware this is a tad bleak for Christmas, but it's how it is. I'll always tell you how it is. And how is it? Too quiet. The more noise the world makes preparing for Christmas the quieter it feels in here. Not lonely, just quiet.

The radiators creak and the woman in the flat upstairs has started playing music: 'As Time Goes By' from Casablanca. 'Now there's an irony,' I say to the tree, realising this must look a bit like Shirley Valentine talking to her wall (only my accent's a Yorkshire one). 'You must remember this....except you don't, do you? You don't remember any of it. How could you?'

Boxes spilling over with shiny sparkly things, cardboard tearing as we strain to cram them through the tiny door leading from the eaves, trying not to inhale dust and dead spiders or cut our fingers on bits of wood broken off from the door frame. Teetering down the stairs and bursting into the lounge, arms overflowing: 'Look Thomas! Christmas!'

You bang the boxes with the flat of your hands, shake the jingle bells and snatch at the tinsel we put on your head. You get glitter on the tip of your nose and it twinkles as you move. We play your special Christmas videos and sing 'the wind goes whoo in the middle of the night' or ' here we go round the Christmas tree allll daaaay long!' and give you your favourite toy while we begin the construction job on the tree, usually with a glass of fizzy stuff or make-it-from-a-sachet mulled wine.

The memory is a shimmering vision - blurred at the edges - noisy and bright, a shining ghost of Christmas past.

The smell of a real Christmas tree seems to fill the room. You can almost hear it greedily sucking water from our old gaudy crepe paper-covered pot that's somewhere in a storage unit in Derbyshire..along with all our other Christmas bits and pieces. Boxed up, put away.

This artificial one knows it is a poor second best.

Oh, despite the music upstairs it is still too quiet. Classic FM should do it, but the DJs are simpering and saccharine and listeners phone in requests, recounting scenes of jollity: 'ooh, we're so excited....all in the car travelling south to see our six grandchildren! Can you play Oh Come All Ye Faithful?!'. 'Oh sod off', I say to them, to the tree.

But I don't switch off. There's 'Oh Holy Night' and 'Away in a Manger', and as they play I sink where I stood for a moment, on to the hard parquet floor in this far away flat and I give in for a while, give into the music. 

And I know I'm not alone in this, in remembering a past life, an overwhelming moment when the loss is too great. There are so many like us. It's my comfort, that...not being alone. 


But let's not pretend our Christmases were ever everything we'd imagined they'd be Thomas. It was never easy. So many things defined your difference.

I would feed with envious eyes on the stories of 'normal' children. The letters to Santa, the hand-written cards, the imagination, the excitement, the advent calendar, the magic, the mystery, a filled pillowcase, frantic, excited: 'He's been! He's been!'...my own memories of it.

Christmas Day made you grumpy. Fancy...A child who doesn't like opening presents! But it's true. All the excitement, the noise, the flying paper, all those bright shiny new things to cope with all at once, picking up one thing, dropping it in a hurry to look at the next.

Too much for you.

 And sometimes one of us would have to take you away and read you a favourite book - The Gruffalo, Bold Little Tiger, Guess How Much I Love You (to the moon and back again, by the way, in case you were wondering) while everyone else got on with trying to make it all...normal.

We racked our brains over ways of making the days special to you. No point in talking about Santa; if he ever popped round - a school party, a 'Santa steam special' - he'd be surrounded by children with shining eyes, and then there would be you, my angel, giving him an unimpressed, cursory glance. Who knows what you thought, but there was no wonder in your eyes. You saw right through him.

We'd pretend it was different, of course. 'Look Thomas, look, it's SANTA!' and we'd hold out your hand for him to shake and you ignored him, found something more interesting to look at, turned your wandering gaze to the flashing lights of a little boy's hi-tech trainers instead. Santa feeling a wee bit awkward, we could tell, not quite sure what to do. Us having to explain. The toy always something hugely inapproprite for you.

And the concerts and the nativities?  The little ones, those who knew what they were doing, saying their lines; the towel-headed innkeeper, concentrating on his role, pointing angrily at Mary and Joseph: 'There is no oooom!'. The angels with wobbly coat-hanger halos; Mary, holding a Tiny Tears baby Jesus by the hair. And you, purple velour cape hanging off one shoulder, a teacher holding your hand to stop you huffily pulling off your crown (you never would keep a hat on), and holding on to your gold, frankincense, myrrh or whatever because you kept dropping it. You were a king, they said. But you didn't know it.

It broke my heart. There. I said it. Year after year after year...my little square peg in a Christmas-shaped hole............them, us, all of us, pretending.

The music upstairs has stopped. It's getting dark and the Christmas tree looks grumpier than ever. Outside, above the chimney pots and tiled rooftops, above the flat, grey concrete summits of office buildings, the eastern sky is a sharp, clear, piercing, bitter blue. There is one bright shining star.

It's barely gone four but the birds are roosting. Flocks of gulls and pigeons rise, fall, twist and about-turn. The white bellies of the gulls flying west are a dusky pink, reflecting the setting sun.

I hear shouts, look down, and on the street below a man and three children are lugging a huge net-swathed Christmas tree. The children, who must all be under 10 are plump, like little roly-polys in their puffer anoraks, bobble hats, wide scarves and too-big gloves. Their breath comes in sharp whispy blasts.

It's a large tree. Must be for a large room with a high ceiling, I think. Cornices, chandeliers, maybe a huge roaring fireplace swathed in holly where they'll be roasting chestnuts; there'll be halls decked and a piano in the corner around which they'll gather and sing carols. Maybe not. Dickens has a lot to answer for.

Had I forgotten how much you loved a Christmas tree? You would look and look at the lights. And you'd potter over..and plonk on to the floor, crossed legs, amid the already falling needles, right where the branches were thickest and longest.

 I hang the heaviest, biggest, brightest baubles there. And you catch them between thumb and fingers..and twist them one way and then flick them back and spin them and spin them..and watch as they spin first this way, then that way, catching the light. Faster, faster; the glittery ones sprinkling a dust of gold or silver around you..and then slower and slower until you spin them again.

And if you a bit get too exuberant, and we move you away, you sit on the settee. And you gaze at the tree, taking it all in. 

What are you thinking, Thomas? Those impenetrable nut-brown eyes with a glint of something that seem knowledgeable, wise, humouring. What do you know that we don't?

I must remember this Thomas - that your Christmas was special; filled with  music, twinkly lights....and spinning spheres. That it was candlelight, snuggling up with a book, a party hat that never stayed on, a seat at the head of the table, the first plate to be cleared and always room for more. That on the night before Christmas I crept into your room as you slept and I would sit, watching you, and I would think about how, just at that moment, you were like any other child and I like any other mum.

Classic FM plays 'In the Bleak Mid Winter'.....to the proper tune, on a trumpet. It would be easy to sit here as night falls, and do nothing....wait until the tree in the corner becomes a dark, unhappy smudge.

But I think of you. How your joy was in the smallest, simplest things; how you were amazed by the shining baubles turning, turning.... 

There's a small, bright, gold, twirly-patterned star in a brown paper bag next to me, bought several days ago from heaving, chaotic, bursting at the seams Maison Du Monde. As I lift it out it drops glitter into my lap.

In the twilight I hold the bare branches of the unloved tree and, as the music switches to the gentle piano melody that is the beginning of 'Walking in the Air', I perch it on top.

A star for a star.

We can do this, I say.

xxxxx

49 Minutes.....

Her name is Charlotte Grace.

Have you seen her Thomas?

An impatient little girl she is, always running, running, chasing rainbows, catching them! A clever girl, a mischievous girl, pirouetting through the refracted crystals, swooping and diving among the colours, singing, giggling, chattering.

A noisebox, just like you!
Can you hear her?

Sometimes you can catch a flash of her, the essence of her, in the rainbow's sweeping arch across the skies, in the sparkling dew of a summer morning, in the twinkle of the brightest stars.
But only if you pretend you're not looking.

You can hear her tinkling voice (such a chatterbox!) in the birds' evening chorus, in the babble of a sunlit brook, in the frittering of leaves on a silver birch...
But only if you pretend you're not listening.

She's a flighty one, she is! Swift of foot and as cheeky as a sprite, you'll never, ever, pin her down, never quite catch her - this busy, busy girl with moonbeams at her heels.

Little Charlotte, who wouldn't wait, who couldn't wait....

Forty nine minutes she stayed. No time at all - yet time enough for a girl to make her mark, to change everything.

A tiny child, of hope, of dreams, of love. A masterpiece. Perfection.

Peaceful, serene she remained, even as the world around her convulsed, contorted, spun, wheeled and turned in on itself.

And then... placed gently in her mother's arms.

And all was still......and in the quiet, in the calm, they took their little girl back to themselves again.

Dressed in pink cotton and wrapped in a blanket, and snuggled alongside her a yellow teddy bear - small, yet so big next to her tiny frame.
They loved her, wondered at her, stroked her feet, traced her button nose, her rosebud lips, caressed her miniature nails, her hair dark on snow-white skin.

They absorbed her, enveloped her, smelled her.  Their baby girl. And it was so right and it was so wrong and it was desolate and utterly cruel. Yet she was there, so it was truly beautiful.
They felt blessed and cheated and desolate but above all they felt love, such love Thomas.

And their love spun like a thread around her, the warps and the wefts, an invisible blanket cocooning her – and them – forever.

And sometimes when they think they can’t remember her, when her mother wonders whether she imagined those firm little kicks, she reveals herself. A gentle breeze blowing the crowns of the tallest trees: ‘it really happened’ she says. And she is there, playing peek-a-boo, a blink away, above, below, all around, swinging, swinging, throwing her legs into the air, back and forth, crooning made-up songs, higher and higher.

Oh she has taught them so much and they know her well. She is a girly girl, a daddy's girl too. The two of them, conspirators, mischief makers, secret keepers! They know this. She is a happy girl, a laughing girl, a skipping girl, light of foot with the cheekiness of a sprite. A mischievous girl, a poppet in pink pyjamas.

Little Charlotte Grace...you left such a big legacy for such a little girl. And what lessons you have taught! How to love with a fierceness that consumes all, how that love endures, how a heart really can be broken but how it can start to mend itself too, though never quite losing the hairline cracks that will forever remain.

How it is the very worst. But how willingly the pain is borne for the blessing of having had you at all, for being you, for being theirs now and always.

49 minutes...but forever.

xxxx

- Published for and with the permission of Claire and Steve in memory of their darling daughter Charlotte Grace to commemorate Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month. 

- http://www.uk-sands.org/

Sounds in Silence

Four minutes and 33 seconds of silence.
The conductor walks to the podium; the orchestra, all wind and brass, raises its instruments, the musicians look to him expectantly and he raises his arms in a flourish that means 'begin'.

And they do. They slowly lower their instruments. And the conductor lowers his arms, bows his head and stares at the second hand on his watch. And the musicians just sit. And we just sit.

Despite what the programme notes say (three movements of 'utter silence'), silence was never what John Cage intended. The void will be filled, albeit unintentionally. He knew that. And that is how it is.

Someone swallows, there is a rustle of paper, knee and ankle joints crack as someone uncrosses and re-crosses their legs, a seat creaks, a cough, outside a siren wails, there is the husshhhh of air conditioning, a deep thrum, a vibration - the underground?

The trumpet player is trying to look engaged but he has the whisper of a smile at his lips that suggest he thinks this is all ridiculous.
The conductor raises his arms to indicate the ending of the first movement and then lowers them again.

He breathes in sharply and exhales loudly, throws his palms aloft, agitated, as if to imply energy and fizz - a silence of some substance and vigour then.
Someone's stomach yaws and rumbles, the squeak of the leather of someone's shoe, distant footsteps, a door opening and closing, low voices, a stifled sneeze.

In the quiet that is not silence, senses become heightened so when someone parts their lips I hear that too. There's a rush of blood in my ears. I fight the sudden urge to snort, to laugh..

And I know we are all thinking how noisy the silence is. I think we can all hear the beating of our hearts.

Silence? Not while there is life and breath..

'Oh look at him, bless him'.
I hold on to those words. They mean 'look at him, sleeping, when it's past breakfast time'. They mean 'It's not like him to lie in'. They mean 'ha, a typical teenager, at last!'.

They mean nothing is wrong. They mean all is well.

But in the nano seconds after the words are uttered, as we stand in the doorway and gaze upon you there is something else. A thickening. An absence. A silence.

And I can't remember who moves first, I think it is me. And in the two short, quick, strides that take me to your side I know, because of the silence, that it is already too late.

Because the silence has filled the room, it chokes us, it is a form all of its own.
You are here but you are not here.

And in the ensuing cacophony, the dialling 999, the crying disbelief, the weeping, the sirens, the blue lights, the men and women, crowding in, their beeping machines, pulling us away, the jagged radio conversations, the whole mass of movement and noise... there are the sounds of silence. Of your silence.

You are there but you are not there, in your all-in-one green pyjamas with the zip up the back, and your cool, bare feet and your long, elegant fingers and your face, still sleeping, after all they have done to you, all they have tried to do, with their machines.

And when it is over, when my hands have been taken by a kneeling paramedic, even though I already know, I already know, and as people come and go, as statements are taken, forms are filled in, as cups of tea are made, as someone calls the undertaker, they snuggle you back into bed and when I see you for the last time, there is you and me and the silence.

And you are asleep and you are not asleep.

I sit next to you on the bed, and the door on the world on the noise of the world, is quietly closed behind us. A policeman has opened your window wide and cold air curls into the room. I pad down the duvet around you to keep you warm.

In the world outside, there are sparrows sparring, bickering, and a group of walkers stomp past the window in their heavy walking boots. They are singing. One leads with a loud, joyful 'Faldereeeeee! Falderaaaaaa!' And the rest of the group join in: 'Falderaha ha ha ha ha ha! Faldereeee.....'

They don't hear the silence and their noise doesn't break it and the irony of it all, of their being so full of life and living, makes me smile a little. If only they knew. And it is as if the world turns and turns again and we are separate, apart, cocooned in our silence.

Your forehead is downy and smooth, your cherub lips are closed, I lie down next to you, put my arms about you and whisper to you and sing to you but I can't remember any of what I say.

And then, because I have to, I take my leave. They have told me that is what I must do. I know they will look after you. I know you are not really here. They take me upstairs while they take you away.

And then you are gone. Really gone. And the silence goes with you. And the absence of your silence is deafening.

'There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot..' John Cage (Sep 5, 1912 - August 12, 1992)

* 4',33" was performed by the La Monnaie Wind Quintet and La Monnaie Brass Quintet at the Salle Fiocco Brussels, on Sep 5, 2012 as part of the city's celebrated KlaraFestival.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cage

The Visible Invisible Girl

She didn’t do sport...she painted hockey balls.
She would sit in a little office – the PE teacher’s, presumably – and they would give her a small, rusting pot of white paint, a brush and, on the floor there would be a basket of these balls, scuffed and mucky.

And as we put on our games kit, grabbed sticks and clattered and chatted up to the sports field; as we battled it out on the hockey pitch, all flying hair, dirty knees, ruddy cheeks, she would stay inside and paint them.

It was something we all had to do, every now and then. But it's all she ever did. You can’t entirely blame the school. I don’t think the teachers knew what to do with her. So they did what they tended to do in those days: kindly shut her out, shut her away.

Maybe she wasn’t bothered; maybe doing sport never occurred to her. Maybe the very idea of it was snuffed out by a pitying, patronising ‘can’t do’ society before any spark of desire could be kindled.

She was with us only for a half-term, a term at the most, and none of us made friends. I’m appalled when I think about it. She was a kind of distant celebrity of sorts - we’d never seen a girl our age in a wheelchair before.  So we stared at her when we thought she wasn’t looking, we whispered about her. 

Girls are cliquey at that early-to-mid-teen age. We were half-scared and no-one thought to encourage or explain. We even made jokes about being envious: we hated hockey - she didn't have to do it. And the barriers between us just grew and grew.

I don't know anything about her. I don't even recall her name. None of us, not even the teachers, I think, made any attempt to see beyond the contraption she sat in. She was ‘normal’ but she was different, she was strange, she was a visible, invisible girl, she was ‘handicapped’. 

That word. That awful word. I recall our primary school music teacher using it once before we got on a minibus to go on one of our sing-a-long excursions. We enjoyed these - it was a perk of being in the choir. We'd go round old people's homes, mainly, at Christmas time, and they would clap and sing along with us, and give us sweets.

This particular trip though was to a home where most of the elderly residents had severe disabilities. Again, there was no real explanation, no preparation. The teacher simply told us they were 'handicapped' and we were not to make jokes. We arrived nervous, we sang bug-eyed and left guiltily appalled, giggling and hot with embarrassment at what we'd seen. Forgive us, we knew no better.

And so, for us, 'handicapped' came to mean people to be scared of. It meant flailing limbs, it meant shouting, it meant sadness, it meant gawping, it meant looking away, it meant shame, it meant being ashamed, it meant pity, it meant people not fit to live among us, it meant people to be locked up.

That attitude still festers. My God, it does.

How do I know this? Because so many years later, I had you - my own disabled boy. And it became such an important thing to show you off, to make sure you were seen and heard, so that those people....especially the older generations - the ones who knew nothing...those who said to me 'isn't it a shame', and those ignorant others, those who pulled their children away from you, were made to see it wasn't a shame at all; that a different kind of life, a different kind of living could be just as happy, as fulfilling, as full of opportunity. 

I thought about the girl, in the office, painting, for the first time in an age recently, watching a BBC film about  Dr Ludwig Gutmann, founder of the Paralympic Games.

Gutmann. What a man. He fled Nazi Germany after putting his own life at risk to save others and, once in Britain, fought to change the attitude to paralysed servicemen returning from World War II – men who would have been heroes if they’d been killed in battle, but instead faced a half-life, hidden away in institutions until they did the decent thing and politely died.

They were inconvenient, they were an embarrassment, they were unemployable, they were better off in care homes, away from society, so as not to offend delicate eyes.

 There are such parallels here, between how the establishment regarded those soldiers and how, in many ways, we treated all our disabled - more shockingly, how we still continue to treat them.

We might deny it. We might protest it's not so. But it is so. It is so. From the easily-rectified issues of access to the unseen, unwitting, day-to-day prejudices that make life difficult and, in some cases unbearable for those who are subjected to them.

And equality of opportunity? Well, let's just say there's a long, long way still to go. 

Gutmann gave his brave soldiers the will to live, the strength to be bold, the optimism to see there was a future, after all. And it is thanks to him and to all the others, the pioneers and campaigners who refused to stay out of sight, out of mind, that we have come as far as we have. We no longer, I’m sure, keep young girls cooped up in offices painting hockey balls just because they happen to need a wheelchair to get about.

Gutmann described his soldiers as 'the best of men'. We should regard our Paralympic athletes in the same light. They have climbed mountains to get where they are. They are not victims to be pitied but examples to us all. They, above all others, can surely show that anything is possible...for anyone given the proper opportunities.

They are doing much more than battle for gold.

They are dashing to smithereens the perceptions of many who still, albeit unwittingly, see the disability rather than ability, who still think 'it's a shame'......
And they are inspiring those young people who might, in the past, have been told ‘you can’t’. 

* An abridged version of this article appeared in the Yorkshire Post on August 29.

A group of school children - they must be after-school clubbing - is playing playground games.
They wear high visibility jackets and kick up clouds of dust as they run, in rings, holding hands, round and round.
They tug and pull each other and then two form a pair, link hands aloft, forming an arch and the others  form a chain running underneath. Isn't that 'oranges and lemon's?
They have hoops, they have batons and they have beanbags. Of course they do. They look like Tumble Tots. How many ways can you carry a beanbag Thomas?
Always something.
But this is how it is.


group of tourists trudge after an umbrella, almost two by-two. Cameras around their necks, bags of mementos.
Their chocolate will be melting.
The sparrows are bold as brass.
They hop about, just inches away, squabbling, pecking, and having dust baths, pock-marking the sandy path with their little bodies, rubbing, scratching.
Brussels its on its lunch break and the park is full, tourists mix with families mixing with workers escaping air conditioned offices. Again we bake, and the plash of spumy water in the fountains only serves to intensify the arid, hot air.
People don't know how to dress for this - it's unexpected, to locals and tourists. There are shorts, jeans, sweaty, crumpled suits, loosened collars. There are silly, floppy hats on plump ladies, there are old men in baseball caps. There are tights and bare legs, there is pasty, there is tanned, there is burnt, there is roasted. There are miniskirts, sandals, wedges, flipflops.  There is gorgeous, ridiculous and everything in between.
They crowd on shady benches eating sandwiches. A few brave the full sun, but
The water in the fountain is green, but it runs clear...as water dribbles at the edges, in the nooks of the walls, the sparrows flock to take tiny sips.

A man sits next to me with his sandwich and takes a bite. The sparrows notice and hop closer. He notices too and throws them crumbs which they fight, bricker over. The victor hops away with his spoils.
Ludicrously there is a big screen showing the Mannekin Pis playing electric guitar.
This city.

Paris....

Mona Lisa, what have they done?
I bet you and your beguiling smile never saw this coming.

Do you enjoy it? It is, after all a hero worship of sorts, a kind of mad pilgrimage..
There's nothing in your eyes to suggest it's bothering you, no sign of tiredness, of world-weariness at your predicament; nothing in your demeanour that betrays a desire for it all to stop, for them all to go away.

Indeed, perhaps you revel in it. Perhaps you hear the incandescent cries of great artists turning, writhing in their tombs as their works go un-noticed, unappreciated by the hordes who blindly stampede past in your direction?  Perhaps you enjoy their outrage. 

Oh, I came to worship too, of course - but found I preferred to step back, seek a space, a wall to lean on, and watch the watchers watching you instead for a while.

Single-minded, unswerving, blinkered, they thundered for your presence chamber...all the nations of the world, it seems; their target set, their aim true, heading your way...countless languages, countless tongues, melded and stirred into a meaningless, senseless noisy thrum.

They move in a speedy current, carried along by each other - and I see why Giotto, why Botticelli, why even the blessed Fr Angelico - who have the unhappy circumstance of being on the route to your domain - might grumble. How it must wound to be so ignored! For them, THEM, to be relegated to 'D-list', dulled by your red carpet A-List celebrity....

I see you, first, from quite some way away. It is a disappointing anticlimax of an introduction - you over there, me over here and in between us the mass moves, convulses, clamours. The air smells of sweat.

There are many, many smaller versions of you in the viewfinders of cameras and smartphones, held high by their owners. Each device identifies a face, your face, boxing it in red, zooming in, beeping, pinging, buzzing as the auto focus finds its subject.

There are even flashes where none are permitted - but I see little evidence of your modesty being protected. There are security guards present, though none runs to your aid.

I move closer, join the throng. We bump, push, pull, nudge; there are exchanges, exclamations. It is like the Tube: there is no consideration for personal space, there is no eye contact for that would then require an acknowledgement, politeness. It would demand an 'after you', or a 'please, go first'.

There is a sense of urgency, of neediness, impatience. Each wants a piece of you all to themselves at the speed of a shutter. But do they think you will run away if they are not fast enough!

You seem to bear it well, in your bulletproof case, aloft, aloof. But this melee cheapens you, for all your reputed allure.

Too many want to see you, the hordes must be satisfied - and quickly - and it's clear your custodians have decided there is no time for contemplation, for consideration, for dignity, for respect.

They need to keep the queues down - so you have become the 'wham, bang, thankyou ma'am' of the Louvre.

Doesn't this horrify you? It should. Your name makes superlatives drip from the tongue, you are myth, you are legend, you are wife, temptress, secret-keeper, enigma, there are a million facts, a million figures, a million stories. You are Mona Lisa....

But you have become a cheap thrill, La Gioconda, for a quick-hit, list-ticking mob who - and you must believe this - seem to care not a jot for the genius of your creation. You think they love you? That they are lost in you? They do not. They are not. Why would they behave so if that were the case.

I've watched them. Point. Snap. Done. Next....

And those who do care...do pity them.  Those who have come to see and wonder, who arrive, throw up their palms in helpless futility at the snapping hordes and turn on their heels, preferring not to meet you at all rather than to meet you like this.

You don't believe me? Your eyes tell me you know better. Well wear your smile then Mona Lisa. Enjoy the mob.

Pretend it is not the case that you are betrayed...