Thursday 2 May 2024

......Another Day !




He has always liked the rain, but this is too much.

 

The walk through the forest is sweet, spring is beginning to show and the meadow is green. 


From the shelter of the trees he watches the rain fall in soft misty shadows, and then he walks on, through freshly fallen puddles to the village shop. 


Inside, he buys a coffee, bread, and cakes and looks at the headlines of the paper, but he sees nothing that induces him to but it. 


“No news is good news,” his mother tells him, though she is not here.


And then he steps outside and start to retrace his steps.


The sky unleashes a sudden fury, a deluge of water and then hail. He tries to shelter, instead he is soaked. He likes the rain. 

 

When he is 10, he sits outside under the porch watching it as it falls, his body tingles with expectation and excitement.


When he is 17, his first real girlfriend calls him the rain-man.


When he is 23, he stands on a wooden balcony, also covered, and watches a muddy street in Guatemala become a lake. It is night time but the majestic lightning illuminates everything in stark whiteness. Even though colour has been invented, it is for the day-time only in these mountains.

 

But today, it is too much.


Wednesday 1 May 2024

Bit of a Flap.




Apparently, thirty years have passed.


Which means I was in my thirties, my daughter about to be born and my son already.


It’s difficult for me to remember a time without them being a part of my every day.


And yet I remember this day, thirty years ago.


It was a Sunday.


I think I was driving when it happened, ironic in a way as the accident happened in a car.


My wife’s grandmother, my son’s great grandmother, looked ashen when we walked in.


“He crashed,“ she said.


“I was surprised that she was interested in motor racing, I associated her more with baking and knitting. 


It just goes to show who wrong you can be.


Even though I myself am not overtly interested in motor racing, I was aware that he was something special.


A complex, uncompromising genius is how the newspaper describes him today.


My son stood for the first time in Elena’s front room where she had been sitting watching the race.


So she saw both things happen.


The one full of joy and future expectation.


The other empty, yet full of loss.


Life and death, the two extremes of our existence.


Uncompromising can be a quality.


We are all complex, to a degree.


Few of us touch genius.