What if my guardian angel was called Bob? I don’t know why: I just didn’t want a Bob. That was the name of someone you go to the pub with, not someone you want flapping their wings around you of an evening when you’re trying to eat your curry and watch Law and Order: SVU.
Category: That’s Life
On Christmas morning, we all used to go to the neighbours for pre-dinner drinks. The turkey would have been prepared and stuffed early in the morning – the giblets pulled out for stock, the inside of “the bird” dried out with a tea-towel, accompanied by Mum shouting at Dad “You know I hate it being called the bird!” What was it with her and birds, I wonder?
The smallness of the list was heartbreaking. Already, the record of my father’s last weeks had filled several small, black notebooks: his last Christmas, his final trip into ward 18 at Frenchay Hospital, the last time I saw him when, with an attempt at a normal smile, he told me that he loved me.
If you read nothing else, ever, read this.
I never dreamed that the first (and only) occasion (to date) that I would pull an emergency cord would be on the Paris Metro. Nor did I imagine that I would bring the whole underground system to a crashing halt with a security alert that sent half the Paris police force running down into the confines of the Rue du Bac station, guns at the ready.
I have no idea whether throwing yourself to the ground is the best thing to do in these circumstances, but it is what I do. And I suddenly hear myself screaming to everyone else to get down too, and words coming out of my mouth that I think might have been along the lines of: “Stay down, everyone! Give him what he wants!” In a language that may be French. Or Norwegian. Who knows. It is a gurgle of syllables: a sound of trapped terror.
Mum always said that the best present Dad ever gave her was an Elizabeth Arden vanity case, packed with goodies. It was probably the only present he ever got right. The Christmas he bought her the amethyst necklace and earrings that would have been fine for someone of 90, not 40, stands out; but that was a veritable festive dream compared to the year he gave her a china bird.
Was God angry because I had shown so much pleasure in the acquisition of a material object? Quite frankly, he could have cut me some slack. I’ve been banging on long enough about His great sunrises and sunsets and how much joy we should take in nature; was it really too much to ask that He spare me an oven glove for my troubles?
Hi, my name is Jaci and I am a Coronaholic (all together, in the group now, please: “Hi, Jaci”). Having consulted AA’s 12 step programme, I feel I might well be on to the way to recovery and share my thoughts here, for anyone else fearful of their sanity being taken over by this insidious virus.
As if grief had not already distorted time enough, along comes Coronavirus, the Tardis of infections that has thrown minutes, weeks and hours into a universe none of us could have imagined.