085 - Chapter 85

(Illustration: The dusky thrush, a rare bird which breeds eastwards from central Siberia to Kamchatka wintering to Japan, South China and Myanmar)

As I began to recover from my meltdown over the next few months, I began to lead a much easier life and I began to smile again.

Katie, our nine year old granddaughter, during a family meal, was in discussion with Bob about England having won the World Cup in 1966, and she asked him, “Granda, do you think you’ll see England win the World Cup again before you . . . .”

 Only then did she realise what she had been going to say, and she went red with embarrassment. It was pretty obvious what the missing word was, but Bob just laughed. I think she was relieved he took it so well. He was having a lot of trouble with his hip then, and walking badly. He was hoping for a new hip; the only problem was he had a heart complication, a leaky valve, and needed to be examined by the consultant first before any operation was possible, but he never once complained about the pain. He was 70 then, and even though his hip bothered him, we were still able to enjoy a family holiday away at Centre Parcs in Sherwood Forest, all fourteen of us.

Jennie, the friend I’ve already mentioned in connection with my Brexit episode, visited our house when our grandson Jack was with us that day. She came with some sad news, telling us that a former colleague from Benfield Comprehensive School, where she and Bob had both taught, had been diagnosed with breast cancer, and she was so upset. 

Whether it was because she had tears in her eyes or what, I don’t know, but Jack, who was almost two years old then, picked up her singn of distress and went over to comfort her, without anyone telling him to! He gave her a lovely kiss and a cuddle, and put his head on her shoulder! Which of course brought about even more tears. It was a beautiful moment, one she still remembers.

Towards the end of the year, I was picking up again and doing some minor activities which weren’t too demanding, having emptied the bucket of busyness so to speak. My radio programme time had been reduced back to half and hour, and had started up again, and I’m so grateful to Dave, the chairman of Radio Tyneside, for his patience and for keeping my space on radio open. I was beginning to plan more interviews with local people involved in interesting projects, and I was getting excited about outreach work again.

Bob and I made a decision to stop travelling to St John’s Church in Kingston Park, which had been a spiritual base to us for ten years while I worked in evangelism projects, and we came home to the church which was nearest our home; the church I’d served at as curate i.e. Church of the Good Shepherd, and what a lovely welcome we were given! The priest there by then was, and still is,  Revd Julie Mooney, and when we asked her if it was OK to return, she opened her arms wide to us. 

I still had ‘PTO’ which means ‘Permission to Officiate’ as a priest, but no pressure at all was put upon me at church to serve in any way, and I appreciated the space given to me, where I could fully recover, and feel confident again. How good it was to be back in our home church. We simply slotted back into place like the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle. It felt good to be back among friends.

The year 2016 ended for us with a beautiful winter holiday with Joan and Alan, and of course my mam, in the Peak District; there’s nothing quite like a Christmas there, especially when visiting Haddon Hall, a house built in the middle ages, with its fragrant Christmas garlands, its decorations of greenery, cinnamon and dried orange, and of course its blazing fires. Mam loved it, as did we. The cottage we stayed in, on the other hand, was thoroughly modern and spacious inside, and it had a heated floor! What a luxury!

One morning at breakfast, when I opened the curtains, having just woken up, I was shocked to see what looked like thirty or more paparazzi all focussing their binoculars directly at us, and our holiday cottage! It felt like a scene from the film Notting Hill, when the door opens to a seething mass of reporters and photographers from the press, only we weren’t hiding Julia Roberts!

“What on earth is going on?” we asked ourselves.

I went out to ask one of them later that morning, the reason for their 'invasion'. They weren’t paparazzi or reporters, they were ‘twitchers’; in other words, birdwatchers who usually descend on places whenever there is a rare bird sighting. Now  they'd come to village where we were on holiday, after receiving news of an unusual winter visitor! More and more were added to their number as the day wore on, for a ‘dusky thrush’ from Siberia had come to visit Derbyshire; it was in our garden that morning and we saw it for ourselves.

It was to me a little symbol of 'hope' colour, and promise amidst the cold and frosty white world of ice and snow all around our little cottage, reminding me now of ‘Aesop’s’ version of the story of Pandora. According to him, ‘Hope’ is saved, and not imprisoned forever in the bottom of the treasure chest, after all the evil has been set free by Pandora into the world, through her disobedience and curiosity.

So often the focus is upon the evil that is unleashed upon our world, whereas in fact 'hope' embodies all we have left when things go wrong. So often we forget there are those whose kindness, love and generosity warms our hearts, time after time, such as that of our two year old grandson!

The Christian ‘hope’ of eternal life too is not merely wishful thinking, the word for hope at the time of Jesus, was and still is, a sure and certain hope!

Mind you, I felt another sense of foreboding before that year was through, which brought about an earnest prayer from my lips, and I would guess not only mine! Donald Trump was to become president of the USA on the 9th November 2016!

“Good Lord preserve us!”