Life: It Doesn't Always Wait Until You Are Ready, It Just Happens.

By Frances Wright

A story about the effects of a close-knit group of family and friends in the face of a personal tragedy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9781326991210

Frances Wright

Frances McMillian Wright was born in West Florida during the end of the 1940s. There, she spent her childhood growing up until her late teens. As she grew up in this rural Southern setting, she acquired a rich and enduring heritage of Southern hospitality. She currently makes her home in Syracuse, New York, with her husband of forty-eight years. She is indeed a wife and a mother. She is married to Herbert Wright. She and her husband have been blessed with four beautiful children: two beautiful daughters (Octavis and Larissa) and two handsome sons (Donald and Wayne). They are now grown and have given them a host of darling grandchildren. Frances is an avid reader, having read widely on many subjects. She also enjoys writing as well. Currently, she has three published books listed with all the online book retailers. In her spare time, she also enjoys traveling as well. During her many trips, she has toured many popular and exciting places. Frances is also a committed Christian who loves the Lord with her whole heart. Indeed, she is strong in the faith and spends an enormous amount of time in prayer and evangelistic activities.

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Life: It Doesn't Always Wait Until You Are Ready, It Just Happens.

Life

This book is dedicated to my parents

Sarah and Stephen Howell.

Who taught me to believe that I could do whatever I set out to do, but will never get to know that I finally did embark seriously on this particular journey with the intention of making them proud.

Thank you dad, for passing along to me your love of literature and storytelling, and thank you mum, for a tiny bit of your talent and instinct for the words with which to tell them.

Copyright Frances Wright 2017

Chapter One

October, and the Norfolk summer has blown out like a candle. Almost five o’clock on a Sunday evening and the world is closing down for the night. I am standing in a bit of a daze, watching the wind bend the grass of the field behind the house, wishing that my disposable income was high enough to employ someone else to chop firewood and wondering whether my father – a gothic revivalist architect (retired) would actually kill me if I bought one of those mock-coal electric jobs and installed it in the sitting room, when I feel a pair of arms come round my waist from behind, and my girlfriend Cathy’s voice says in my ear,

Mark, I said I’d had a thought. Most of Cathy’s day to day thoughts have to do with donkeys, or pottery, so I am not unduly concerned; she likes rescuing donkeys – she has four now, Dave, Bracken, Sparky and Pearl, all of whom live a complicated life in the field behind our house.

Oh yes?

We ought to have Christmas here this year. We could ask your folks, and your sister and her family – we owe everyone the most tremendous amount for all the help they’ve given us over the last year, and it might be fun. I latch immediately onto the word ‘might’.

Do you really want to organise a whole Christmas? We could just have them over for a weekend each. Cathy bends down and picks up a couple of split logs.

I thought it might be a good way to say thank you. And it would be a sort of delayed house warming. I’ll have to ask my parent’s as well, but they’ve said no for the last six Christmas’s, so there isn’t any danger of them saying yes this time. I look at her. The blistering wind is playing with her long blond hair, and her eyes are the same grey-blue as the sky over the marshes. Cathy looks beyond me at the donkeys, Oh hell, the water trough is full of leaves again, here; hold these I’ll be back in a minute.

And she is gone – trotting down the garden path, through the gate to the field leaving me holding some lumps of wet wood. I look down, and watch a woodlouse doing a complicated sort of jig across the bark. I flick it off into the grass and watch as it mooches off. Must be nice to be a woodlouse I think to myself, they don’t have to invite hordes of their loved ones round for over-complicated festivities.

When I was single, Christmas was easy. I was either working – I’m a nurse, and it is a fact of the job that people do unfortunately develop ailments, and have accidents during public holidays. The closer to Christmas, the more idiotic and booze-fuelled the accidents tend to be, it’s true, but they also still get pneumonia, urinary tract infections and have strokes even as Santa is parking the reindeer and getting ready to shimmy down the chimney, and if people are going to be ill, then people like me need to be there with anti-biotics, plastic gloves and in extremis, cups of tea. A lot of British nursing has to do with tea. There is also the practice of ‘Granny dumping’ to contend with. This is where you rock up to your local A&E department with you demented grandmother, explain that she is way more confused than normal, get her admitted, then piss off on holiday. People think we don’t notice, but we do, and we are not impressed.  Don’t tell us how caring you are, and then leave it to the Health Service to feed your elderly relation pureed turkey – we are experienced, cynical, and can spot your hotel reservation a mile off.

If I wasn’t working, I went home to my parents’ house, and let the catering happen to me. Last year, our house had been full of building materials, rolls of insulation, pots of paint, boxes of our possessions and an almost biblical amount of dust. Half the floor boards were leaning against the walls as well, where the plumber had left them before promising faithfully to be back in the morning at eight sharp and had then disappeared for two weeks, and we had opted for my parents’ more to get away from it all than anything to be honest, and it had been the usual routine. It had been fun, entertaining, more than a little drunken, but not romantic. There had been the usual enforced games of charades, and the influx of family children as there always is these days, and to be honest, small kids can be a bit, well, insistent, as can parents when you are on their turf. Yes, that’s the word I want, insistent. However, Cathy and I have been together for a year and a half now, and I suppose that part of finally being in a fully functioning, adult relationship, is organising this kind of mass-family event.

It feels selfish, but I’d really like to have a Christmas alone with Cathy. Just once. Family and friends are wonderful, and I love them all, but I have been treasuring a vision of a calm, adult-only day, with a late breakfast, some thoughtful gifts and sex instead of lunch. Even I know that you can’t invite your entire family over, give everyone a sherry and then piss off upstairs to make love. Well you can, but I don’t imagine you get any Brownie points for it. I hope you don’t think badly of me, but I am rather hoping that Cathy’s plans don’t amount to anything.

I am in the sitting room when Cathy reappears. She kisses me, holding the sides of my face with her icy-cold, wet hands.

I’m going to move the water trough tomorrow – it was stupid putting it under that tree. I fancy a glass of wine, do you want one?

Lovely. I carry on laying the fire, listening to her footsteps down the hall to the kitchen and with wind rattling the windows.

Cathy and I have lived in Norfolk for a year – doing up a house that we originally discovered when we rented it for a week in the country with our friends. It was a complete tip when we first stayed there, but we have slaved over it, spent all our money on it (and quite a lot more), and it is now, thanks to the architectural and builder-bullying skills of my father, two houses. He is particularly proud of the hi-tech German hot water and heating system he’d had put in, and the completely unnecessary quatrefoil window above our front door, but it’s his signature, and as we weren’t paying him we let him indulge himself.

If you look at the house from the front, Cathy and I have the right hand end – three bedrooms, bathroom, a sitting room, new wooden conservatory (I didn’t dare go for UPVC – my parents would have strung me up before I could say ‘wipe clean’), a big kitchen etcetera, and it is still so newly decorated that you can smell emulsion paint if you breathe deeply. The other half, which has four bedrooms, is sort of furnished (beds, sofa and coffee table and a kettle), and we will be renting it out in the new year, which, if we charge the maximum rental for it, should pay us back for what we’ve spent in about four hundred and thirty seven years. Ambitious, but we needed to find a place that was ours, not just her home with my stuff scattered about in it.

Our sitting room is fairly simply furnished; a couple of sofas, an antique table with photographs and the telephone on it, two armchairs, some pictures, a coffee table and a grandfather clock. The piece of furniture I am proudest of however is my desk. It came with the house; an old roll-top desk that was left behind. It had had some love letters in it from some people called Ronald and Alice, who had lived there long before us. He had died in the battle of the Somme, she had remarried after the war and all they had left behind were their ghosts. I’d taken the cracked, stained and grotty desk to my friend Emma’s partner Patrick, a furniture restorer, and he’d done the most amazing job on it. It is now back to being the beautiful piece of furniture it was meant to be, and I sit at it sometimes, just imagining the people who had owned it before me and hope they are pleased with how I’ve cared for it.

We’ve got one of Ronald’s love letters to Alice framed on the wall in our bedroom. It’s all about flowers and dancing and how much he loves her, and I don’t think he’d mind too much – it’s a celebration of two people who were truly happy at Goose Halt, and not a bad memorial.

It is a good while before Cathy comes in to join me with the wine. I’ve got a decent blaze going, some music on, and I am lounging on the hearth rug with my cats Nibble and Weasel. My cats are prime examples of the two main feline personality types. Nibble is a stout tabby and white creature of a nervous disposition and a fear of the great outdoors. He likes expensive cat food, milk from a saucer on the sideboard, has his favourite cushion, purrs in a rather self-conscious manner and always tries not to get in the way, which means that he is usually under your feet.

Weasel is a big, over-muscled, black and white thug. He made the transition from house-cat to mass murderer with barely a blink, and he has three principle dislikes; late meals, most humans but especially my best friend Matty for whom he harbours psychopathic hatred after we had been instrumental in stuffing him into a box, and Nibble, who he views with complete contempt. He can identify someone with a cat allergy at fifty paces, and immediately sits on them, and only purrs when he’s succeeded in bending the world around him to his will.

If he was white, he’d be a great cat for a James Bond villain, although he wouldn’t need the actual villain, he’d be launching schemes for world domination all on his own, and he wouldn’t bother with explaining his ideas to the captured Mr Bond either, he’d be straight in there with the lasers and Mr Bond would be a charred heap before he had the chance to do anything unlikely with a pocket watch, two feet of knicker elastic and an Aston Martin. I like Nibble. I respect Weasel, and keep a sharp eye out for claws. Weasel thinks I’m an idiot, but he absolutely adores Cathy, and when she returns, sits down beside me and hands me my wine, he surges onto her lap; it’s like watching a pillow going rock climbing.

I’ve just spoken to your mum.

Oh?

Yeah, she’s absolutely up for the Christmas thing. She’s going to make the Christmas pudding. Nibble looks a bit suspicious about this idea, so I give his head an idle tickle.

Okay, so that’s her and dad – we could do that.

She’s going to talk to Ellie this evening because they had planned to go to your folks’ again this year, so she’s going to let us know if they want to come too.

Okay, that’s six adults and three children. Cathy looks at me, and grins.

I sent a text to Polly about her, Matty and the kids coming over as well.

And . . .

She’s really keen as well. Eight adults – that’s going to be great. I can see her enthusiasm, to welcome all the people we love to our home.

And five kids. Okay my love; what do you want me to do?

Erm, lay the table, and have fun?

I think I can do that. I kiss her. It is an easy, every day sort of kiss.

Just don’t get too pissed with Matty and forget to tell me everything is going well? This is going to be really complicated. Why did I start this? Help me won’t you?

I can do that as well. She gives me a nervous smile that says ‘homemade or shop-bought mince pies’?

Women do this. They have ambitious, spontaneous ideas, get them to the point where they feel they can’t back out and then start worrying about them; so much for the two of us, some expensive champagne and a very early night. We are going to have competitive cake making, midnight mass and staying sober. For Cathy, I can do that too.

Chapter Two

I am on an early shift the next morning. I walk away from our home and pause at the gate as I always do, to look back at our house through the trees. I can’t see Cathy, she is down in the field getting the donkeys their breakfasts and anyway, she kissed me goodbye as I drank my coffee, but I wave anyway, to my sanctuary.

I drive a Mitsubishi Shogun these days – have done since I moved in with Cathy in fact, so that I could be helpful, and pull trailers about should the need arise, and the longer I own it the less satisfactory I find it. There is nothing obviously awful about it otherwise I wouldn’t have bought it in the first place; rather it has about a million little niggles. I don’t like the driving position, or the fact that I am so visible in it (if I am making a hash of something in a car, I like to be able to remain incognito), and I dislike the noise the indicators make, the inescapable fact that it does naught to sixty in about twenty minutes, is really thirsty and that, for some reason known only to itself, it automatically resets the radio every time I start the engine to a station I dislike immeasurably. Finally, I don’t like the steering, which Matty once likened to trying to change lanes in a tent. Still, you can get about a year’s worth of shopping in it, and no one has ever tried to steal it.

One day, I will change it, but I bought it off my old school friend Emma who is a mechanic, garage proprietor and seller of second hand cars in Surbiton, and I feel that I need to drive it for long enough to be believed when I tell her I just want a change. The car I used to have was a brown Volvo 850, and I still miss her. This feeling was intensified when Emma pointed out that if I was buying a car to pull things, I could just as easily have had a tow bar fitted to the Volvo. I’d pretended I’d always known this, but actually, it was a truly irritating revelation.

As I navigate my way to work, Cathy, who is a potter, will be settling down to work, and I have a fairly shrewd idea of how her day is going to shape up. She makes mugs, bowls of various sizes and platters all with patterns based on nature. This is more complicated than I’d thought; she doesn’t just make a bowl or two, slap on a picture of a leaf and call it a day. She collects photographs, makes drawings of everything from the silhouettes of trees to the patterns of sunlight on water. She designs her pots or whatever, and then she has to make batches of them – the same size and shape, as identical to one another as possible. There is the first firing and then the decoration which makes each one unique and unites them in sets, then the second firing and at any point the whole lot can go wrong.

Sometimes, to fill a kiln, she will work until three or four in the morning, creeping into bed, exhausted and smelling of clay. Just before she opens the kiln, she has a little ‘good luck’ ceremony involving a short but earnestly muttered prayer to St Spyridon, the patron saint of potters (an odd sort of bloke according to Matty – used to be a shepherd in Corfu and is apparently principally remembered for something called the ‘Miracle of the Potshed’ about which I have no details to hand). Until that door opens, Cathy doesn’t know if she’s got things she can sell, or a whole load of rubble. The whole clay thing is more fraught with peril than I’d imagined. Then, when she has enough, she spends days away at craft fairs and things.I used to go with her sometimes to these events, but we agreed fairly early on that while I was quite helpful when it came to carrying things, I make a useless salesman and if I’m bored or cold, or both, I make fairly rotten company. There are two types of people who stop and look at Cathy’s wares; the hippy, arty variety, with their floppy clothes and unreasonable facial hair who imagine that if they quiver poetically the price is going to magically reduce itself (not on my watch it doesn’t), and then there are the readers of magazines such as ‘Country Homes and Interiors’ who I can spot a mile off. They want truly artisan stuff that will go through the dishwasher and one day be valuable, they call their children things like ‘Caleb’ and ‘Poppy’, absolutely always have either a Labradoodle or a German Pointer on a lead and they use the word ‘wonderful’, a lot. I have no patience with either type, where Cathy is endlessly polite and chatty, and with the right encouragement will reduce prices where I feel she doesn’t need to.

The only time I have ever been known to allow a discount was when a small girl who was transfixed by a mug with three flying birds on it, came back four times only to be dragged away each time by her mum. She had two pounds and eighty seven pence on her, and the mug was four pounds fifty. In the end I let her have the mug, and she bore it away with such an expression of awe on her face that I was truly touched. I’d made up the difference and tried to ignore the mental image I had of her dropping it in her parent’s BMW on the way home and breaking it into fifty pieces. As far as I am concerned, these street markets go on far too long, and I am always ready for home by eleven, and ready for death by four.

If that wasn’t enough, Cathy then needs to work on advertising and promotions, and then has the account books to do and tax to sort out. What she makes is becoming popular and demand has now started to outstrip availability. I cannot begin to explain how proud of her I am.

We have lots of her ‘seconds’ at home. All our coffee mugs are designs that didn’t quite work, or went wrong somehow, and I think they are really lovely. I may be biased about this, but I can live with that. There is also a bowl I made. It looked so easy that I’d had a go, and approached the thing with far too much confidence. It isn’t easy. The clay wriggles about under your hands, and it’s cold, and it makes your fingers tired but I’d made my pot in the end. It’s blue, six inches high and ten inches wide. It wobbles because its base isn’t level, and there is a big thumb impression in the edge, and as is to be expected Cathy was very, very kind about it. I am unreasonably smug about it, decided it should live on the hall table and we keep loose change in it.

Ten passed six on a bright, cold morning and the only real traffic about in the lanes are monsters driven by farmers. I wave to our neighbour, a scruffy but entertaining dairy farmer called Josh Bishop who doesn’t see me. He is driving a tractor, with a trailer and sending a text message. Farmers seem to do this a lot; trundle about the hedge-lined thoroughfares, towing horrifying looking bits of agricultural machinery about, either talking on mobiles, sending texts or looking out of the side windows at the view. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a farmer actually looking where he was going. Makes driving in the backwaters a bit of a nerve-wracking experience to say the least.

I work in A&E. After a long stint doing ITU nursing, it’s very different; one I have had in the past and enjoyed enormously, but I was a lot younger then and I’m sure my feet didn’t hurt so much in those days. I was going to take the easy route and get myself another ITU post, but when I applied, they were after a Sister or Charge Nurse, and I have never had the ambition to remove myself from the clinical area and get mixed up in any way with doing off duty, sorting out budgets or handing out bollockings. The rise in pay goes nowhere near compensating for the sharp increase in stress levels, and as the hospital was recruiting for A&E, I’d gone to an interview and persuaded them that what they needed was an unambitious male nurse who was staring his fortieth birthday down.

Today, I am working from seven in the morning until four. The other shifts I work are ‘lates’, which are two until ten, or ‘nights’, nine-thirty until seven thirty, and each has its own perils. ‘Earlies’ tend to bring us problems that would have been much easier to deal with if the patient had gone to their GP three days ago. There are also collapses over breakfast, crashed cars driven by people who were still much further over the legal drink-drive limit from the night before than they’d imagined and accidents with machinery caused by not having had enough coffee.

‘Lates’ tend to bring us discoveries made by community nurses, fights in betting shops and pubs, the aftermath of weddings and accidents caused by having a liquid lunch. ‘Nights’ bring anything and everything; often resulting from recreational excesses; either too much of something has gone in, too much of a body fluid is coming out or too many tempers have flared. Occasionally, we get the results of accidents with machinery caused by someone doing something complicated and industrial when they should have been asleep. Whatever, it’s all reasonably old news to me.

Before I lived and worked in Norfolk however, I hadn’t had much to do with farmers, or with the accidents farmers tend to have and believe me; some of them are eye-opening. Stick something fleshy into a machine designed for baling hay for example, and the machine won’t even pause – the fleshy bit just gets inexorably and efficiently mangled. I’d read in the papers when I lived in London, about a farmer who’d cut his own arm off with a pen knife to avoid getting pulled further into some monstrous machine, and I’d scoffed at the time, but after a year up here, I’ve reassessed my scepticism; faced with death by slow but inescapable mincing and I’d happily cut someone else’s arm off with a sharpened carrot. For myself, I just don’t go anywhere near them.

One night not long ago we received a farmer who had had a cow fall on him. When I first assessed him I thought that the cow must have fallen from a plane to do that much damage, but apparently not – she had slipped while he had had his arm up her nether regions, and that had been enough. I’d waited with him while the porters came to take him up to theatre, and he’s pulled the oxygen mask off his face suddenly and said,

She’s had a beautiful heifer-calf mind. I’d looked at his blood-smeared face,

Is that good?

Yes, she’ll take over from her dam.

That’s nice.

Yeah, ‘cos I’m going to eat her lazy, piss-footed bitch of a mother when I get home.

Oh, okay. He had closed his eyes against a haze of pain and diamorphine.

In a fucking bap. That’s farmers for you.

Line any group of nurses up against a wall, and I can point out the different types at a glance. There are the lazy ones, who will eventually miss something and get caught out. There are the gossips, the flirts and the embittered ‘that sister’s post was mine’ ones. There are hugely ambitious ones, for whom this job is a means to an end, and the ‘I’ve been doing this for thirty years and we used to do everything better twenty years ago’ types. It’s the same in every job, in every office, school, wherever. We all have our own reasons for what we do and why we do it, and if the reasons were purely related to health care when we set out, family life, experiences and our own personal agenda have all coloured why we are still there.

This department, like every other one I’ve ever worked in has all these personalities and more, but there is one person that I try and steer well clear of. Angela Byatt is one of the Sisters. She has risen up through the ranks having started out as a Health Care Assistant, which is fine, and a testament to her hard work, but she has carried along with her a massive chip on her shoulder, and she doesn’t like me for two reasons. First, I did a degree in nursing before it was mandatory, which means I’m a privileged snob, and second I am a man and therefore a failed doctor. She is someone who goes out of her way to make my life trickier than it might be.

I take a sneaky look at the off duty and find that my least-favourite person is on a day off, and relax accordingly. Some of my friends are on, and that means that whatever the day throws at us it’s going to include a bit of giggling in the sluice and some good companions in the coffee room, if we get the chance to get in there.  It is with a certain spring in my step that I arrive at the desk for hand over.

Hand over is done at the start of every single shift, on every ward and acute department in a hospital, and it is where the staff who are just finishing their shift, tell those of us who are coming on the story of the previous eight hours and what to expect from the next. Tina, the Sister who has been in charge overnight gives us her slightly sarcastic take on things.

Cubical one. Eighty seven year old woman with a urinary tract infection and dementia, mad as a mongoose and she bites. She’ll be going up to the ward when they can’t think of another reason not to have her. Cubical two, female, fifty four, broken ankle – dancing on a table at a club to show the youngsters how to do it. X-ray done, plaster cast on, waiting for take-home meds including something for the hangover, and crutches. Cubical three, nineteen year old asthmatic, she’s had a nebuliser, waiting for a chest x-ray and doing a very credible impression of a dying duck in a thunderstorm. Cubical four, a frequent flyer; fifty seven year old man in an interesting shade of orange. Long term alcohol abuse; found by someone stuck to a sofa with a very efficient adhesive made from his own excrement and the ambulance drivers said that the carpet was a lake of urine so he’s going to be a tricky discharge ‘cos his landlord has already said he won’t have him back, but he is likely to abscond. Can be violent and will drink the alcohol hand sanitiser if he gets the chance . . . It goes on for some time. Conner, one of my colleagues, whispers to me,

Same old, same old. He’s right; it is the same old things.

I get bitten by our barmy pensioner. Her relatives have scuttled off and left her with us, and as she knows none of us, she is convinced that we are all about to ‘take her virtue’. Given that she has about eight children, I can’t help but think that we are a bit late on that front. I have one of those endlessly confusing, circular conversations with her where she agrees with me that she is in hospital, that I am a nurse, that I need to take her blood pressure etcetera, and then, when I try and stick the thermometer in her ear, she grabs me, calls me a ‘Fucking Nazi’, and sinks her filthy teeth into my wrist. For a woman of eighty seven, she has a lot more get up and go than I do. Indeed, when I get caught up with another patient for half an hour and then return to her cubical, she has got up and gone. We find her, eventually, drenched in urine and smeared with excrement in the men’s toilet unravelling the toilet roll and swearing at the hand-dryer because it won’t sell her a cinema ticket.

We indicate that she needs to be cleaned up a bit. She tells us to ‘fuck off’. We suggest she would like to come with us. She doesn’t think much of this idea. We submit that she needs to go to bed. She vehemently disagrees with this as well. We start to laugh, and she throws the toilet brush at us. It is with huge relief that we manage to put her back on her trolley just as the porters turn up to take her to the ward. I wash down the cubical, and return to my nineteen year old asthmatic and her peek flow readings. Same old, same old. The job never changes, and people never change at all.

All the time I am at work I miss being with Cathy. This job has become merely a way of earning the money I need to enjoy my life with her, and every hour I spend doing it translates into donkey food, groceries and the odd evening out. I mostly run on automatic pilot; turning the identification of symptoms into pre-ordained actions, actions into paper work and conversations into suggestions that the next thing that patient over there needs is a mental health review.

I am late off and drive home in darkness; headlights illuminating hedges, isolated houses and the bright reflections from the eyes of wild animals in the fields. The closer I get to home, the happier I am, the more I anticipate the contentment of seeing our house through the trees and the warm and wonderful embrace of the woman I share my life with.

Chapter Three

This evening we have company. My best friend Matt and his wife Polly are coming to dinner. We don’t see them very often even though we only live some forty minutes apart. His life is taken up with his family, his children, and his job as a history teacher and it can be quite difficult to drag him away from them, while Polly runs the ballet school and dance studio she started when their youngest daughter first put her bum on a floor mat at play group. This evening has been a long time coming and I have been looking forward to it as a beacon of irreverent light. Luckily, one of Polly’s employees has turned out to be a baby sitter of world-beating standards.

Darren, who has two passions in life – tap dancing, and the intellectual company of   small children absolutely loves looking after his boss’s girls. Cloe, Eleanor and Darren will be spending the early evening watching some hideously twee movie, or making little plastic-bead bracelets or whatever, and having important conversations about the kind of things that interest those under seven. Darren has several other gifts that aid him as a baby sitter; he can identify any Disney Princess at fifty paces, knows all there is to know about children’s TV and according to Matty, will leave the kitchen a whole lot tidier than normal. Darren may have a hopelessly chaotic love life – he has a massive and wholly unrequited passion for a man called Martin, but he is absolutely brilliant with kids, entirely trustworthy and responsible, and both girls apparently always looks tremendously disappointed when he leaves.

Cathy however, who is doing the cooking, is getting stressed about it. I am silently concerned that this is going to translate into a really traumatic Christmas if her plans come to fruition, but I change out of my uniform and try to help. I am given the job of peeling the potatoes; well within my remit. This leads to a session of cabbage slicing, and then we spend some time pouring over Delia Smith’s recipe for Yorkshire puddings. Cathy and I usually eat her home-cooked Chinese-style food, which she is brilliant at, and completely relaxed about cooking, so I don’t really understand why she hasn’t just gone with that instead of getting tense and doing roast beef. I also don’t see that feeding Polly and Matt is something she needs to worry about.

Polly is hugely laid back about her occasional culinary disasters – I recall one meal Polly made which she admitted was meant to be a pot roast, and which she had cheerfully rechristened ‘gravy with bits’ when it went a bit pear-shaped. It was extremely edible; it just didn’t look anything like the illustration in the book.  I tend to err on the side of chilli, but make the occasional sortie into the world of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall if I’m feeling especially daring. Matty only ever makes one of two things when he’s doing food for friends – he does fish pie, or he does spaghetti bolognaise and if you don’t like it, tough, there’s always toast.

I lay the table in the kitchen. I put out some knives and forks, some spoons for pudding, a paper napkin each and a wine glass. We have a dining room but that’s not for relaxed meals with a couple of mates, that’s for people we want to impress and since we don’t invite anyone we need to impress over for dinner, it tends to get used for storing things in. At the moment, it is full of some wood that I am supposed to be turning into shelving. I’m not very good at DIY, so I am being a bit slow at getting round to it. 

I go and try to divert Cathy from her preparations by wandering up behind her and putting my arms round her waist.

Mark! Watch out, the gravy stuff is going everywhere.

I don’t care.

Well I do. Get off you idiot!

Not until you’ve kissed me. She squirms round, kisses me very rapidly on the nose,

Go and light the fire or something.

Kiss me properly and I’ll hoover the living room. She makes a face.

I did that earlier. Now get off. Since she is threatening me with a wooden spoon covered in flour, I beat a speedy retreat.

I light the fire. I’ve got quite good at this now – I don’t mean I can do the whole rubbing two sticks together and setting light to a pine forest thing, and I don’t get all alpha male about it want to start wearing combat trousers, but I’ve got my firelighter requirement down to two per blaze. Alright, sometimes three.

Matt and Polly are late. They usually are, but then getting away from small children can apparently be a bit of an undertaking. The house is filled suddenly with their voices and our laughter. Polly scatters kisses about, Matt hands me some bottles of wine and then envelops Cathy in a bear hug which makes her squeak. Matt, Cathy and I have known each other since school, but Polly effortlessly slotted in with our little group when she arrived, and it feels like we have always known her.

Polly is younger than we are, thirty three or thirty four I think (it’s not really polite to ask), and she’s about five foot three, with long brown hair that she normally tries to control by putting it into a bun. Apparently her hair has other ideas, and she is endlessly trying to pin it down with hairgrips and things. She is very pretty with big brown eyes that seem to contain both an air of complete tranquillity, and the sparks of an epic and wicked sense of humour, she needs both. Two children have left few marks on her figure, apparently, Cathy says she is between a size eight and a size six, and I’ve only got the sketchiest idea of what this means, but apparently, if you’re a woman, this is important.

Polly is almost completely unflappable. I’ve often thought that she’d be absolutely your first choice of companion if you happen to be trapped somewhere ridiculously perilous - adrift on a melting iceberg surrounded by rabid polar bears for example. You just have to look at her to know that even an insane polar bear would be gently persuaded to look elsewhere, and she would accomplish everything without even breaking a sweat. In any of the ‘Die Hard’ movies, you wouldn’t want Bruce Willis on your side, you’d want Polly Buckingham; with her on hand, everyone would have lived, become firm friends and not even one window would have been broken. Mind you, she’s a dancer, so it takes quite a lot to get any perspiration out of her anyway. She has that effortlessly graceful way of moving that ballerinas’ have and, I am assured by her husband, she can even maintain her poise while tripping over a box of children’s toys.

When Polly and Matt got together, we three all but shared a flat in Green Lanes in London for eight months so I got to know her very well, and what impressed me was the way she could seem to just adapt herself to things. Matt and I had our routines, our habits and our set ways of doing things, and Polly could have nagged us about the pile of pizza boxes in the corner of the kitchen, or the state of our tooth mug, or any number of other things we’d done without thinking and put our backs up about it, but she didn’t, she’d just admired the boxes, cleaned the tooth mug and taken on the ironing every Sunday evening so that we both had enough shirts and uniforms for the week ahead and this had, I’d realised in retrospect, made us feel just guilty enough to get our acts together and save her the trouble of having to ask us if she could do anything else. She had then thanked us. I have never made the mistake of thinking that Polly isn’t anything other than really smart.

After we’ve done the mass greeting, Cathy takes Polly off to the kitchen to help her make the gravy, and Matt and I sit down in the sitting room and keep out of the way.

So what’s this Christmas thing then? It’s almost the first thing he says to me.

Cathy wants us to have Christmas here, get you lot, my folks, Ellie, everyone, and say thank you to everyone for their help by getting really stressed about cooking a turkey.

Oh? Sounds like the kind of occasion where you and I need to keep our heads down. Polly’s quite keen to give her a hand with it all mind, but my mum, and Polly’s parents were coming to us this year. I wonder if my wife has forgotten that.

Erm, they weren’t mentioned.

She’s forgotten then. She’s really tired, and massively stressed at the moment so I’m not surprised. The only reason I’ve remembered is that I wasn’t keen on the idea. I have a feeling that when both grannies get together they spend most of their time criticising me. Perfectly legitimate of course, but a bit waring.

What’s Polly stressed about? I didn’t think she did stressed.

She’s trying to run a family and a new business at the same time. I’m doing my best to help her, but the dance school she started has become busier that she was expecting and it takes all the time she has. She’ll be fine, but this year has been a bit manic. He grins. I’ll remind her about the parents in law but I need to pick my moment.

Okay. Back to them then, what do they criticise you for?

Generally, or specifically? Just being me mostly. I’m not privy to their intimate conversations, but I can’t help getting the sense that every time my mother in law looks at our children, she knows precisely what I had to do to her daughter to get them, and I don’t think she likes the idea much. He grins at me.

I haven’t met Cathy’s parents since I was about nineteen. I’ve seen them at mum’s parties, but I’ve avoided talking to them for about twenty years.

One day, when we have the time, I will explain to you exactly how lucky you are. I look from my friend, to the photograph of us all on the wall behind him. In some ways, he hasn’t changed at all.

That picture was taken in Petersham Meadows which is between Richmond in Surrey and the village of Ham where we all grew up. There are six of us in it, and we are all eighteen, but as always, Matty is the one you notice. In those days he’d had ridiculously long dark hair, which is now much shorter and going grey.

Remembering the fuss he made about finally getting his hair cut has remained with me, and will do I’m sure, until I’m dead. We all still lived in London then, and he had made his decision, after an impressive amount of dithering about, and then asked that my mum did the deed. The appointment booked, we had travelled along to my parents’ house one evening, clutching several bottles of wine, and Cloe, who was then about fifteen months old.

How much do you want me to cut off it? Mum had asked him as he sat looking deeply miserable and extremely nervous in the kitchen.

Just go for it. Cut it the way you cut Mark’s hair. That should do it. Mum had looked at him, her hand on his shoulder.

Are you absolutely sure about this? Matty had taken a very deep breath.

Yes. Go for it. Mum had raised an eyebrow.

I don’t want you telling me afterwards that it wasn’t really what you wanted. Are you absolutely certain? I can’t stick it back on again afterwards.

Yes. Mum had looked, not at him, but at his hair. It was thick, black and reached down to just above the waistband of his trousers. She had picked up the scissors, and asked again.

Are you sure?

Mrs Wilson, please just get on with it!

He had sat for the whole performance with his eyes shut. He’d flinched a little as he felt the cold blades across his forehead and we’d watched as lengths of hair landed on the kitchen floor around his feet. Mum had given him the haircut she always gave me; ear lobe length, side parting, slightly floppy fringe. It had taken a quadruple whiskey just to get him to open his eyes.

Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, oh . . . that’s not too bad I suppose. What do you reckon Polly? Polly had spent the entire time looking out of the kitchen window. She turned slowly, her eyes half closed with tension.

Oh, actually I think it looks great. Matty had grinned at her.

Cloe however, was absolutely horrified; she didn’t recognise him and screamed for her father to come back. She knew his voice, but it was a stranger who tried to cuddle her and she wouldn’t let him. My dad had wandered in at this point, gazed at my friend for a moment or two and then announced,

Good heavens, have you come to do my tax return? This didn’t help at all; I don’t for one moment imagine that dad thought it would. He had left the room again, laughing. My mother had shouted after him,

George, don’t be unpleasant! She turned to Matt who was staring at himself in the mirror as if he’d spotted something supernatural emerging from behind him. It was a combination of dad’s comment, and the fact that for the first time since he was about thirteen he could see his own ears without going searching for them. Matty, take absolutely no notice of the old fool, you do not look like an accountant. And Cloe will be fine. Just give her a little while to get used to it. I think you look very handsome. My mum had picked up the distraught little girl and hugged her. Doesn’t daddy look nice? Cloe had not been able to find any words, but she had taken courage from my mother’s smile. Give daddy a cuddle darling; he really needs one just now. 

Polly, who for all her practicality and good sense is a complete romantic at heart, had picked a long lock of Matt’s hair up off the floor, curled it up gently and put it secretively in her purse. She still has it, kept in a little mother-of-pearl memento box on her dressing table, with one of the rosebuds, carefully pressed, that she had in her wedding bouquet, Cloe’s first lost tooth and the clamps off both her children’s umbilical cords. I’m not very romantic myself, so I can’t really see the point in keeping a dead flower, a rotting incisor, two disposable plastic clamps and a bit of her husband’s hair, but what do I know?

As for the rest of him, some things have stayed the same over the years, while others have evolved. He still has blue eyes, and he is still skinny, he has remained entirely obsessed with history, can’t go passed a second hand book shop without going inside and spending about three days perusing the shelves and he has a dislike that borders on an allergy for reality-TV shows. His clothes however, have calmed down a lot – the shirts tend to be merely stripy rather than zigzag and the waistcoats are monotone rather than alarming, but he still wears a trilby, and he still spends most of his time smiling.

Some things have changed though. When my best mate was thirty one, he’d had a massive car accident and done an enormous amount of damage to himself, (save your sympathy, it was almost entirely his fault) and although he’s several lots of surgery, and in the end had a knee replacement since then, he is still, for want of a better word for it, a bit manky – he’d be your first choice for a trip to the pub, but a long way from your first choice for someone to scale Everest with. He doesn’t have to use crutches anymore, and he’s given his disabled drivers badge back and his car has been converted back from an automatic with its peddles shifted over, to a manual, but he does still use a walking stick, and try as I might I can’t really get used to it. I don’t know if he has because he won’t talk about it seriously, so we make jokes about it, I make unspoken adjustments, and then just try and do what he wants and ignore it.

His eldest daughter Cloe is massively protective of him and she is the only person who is allowed to be; the rest of us can keep our instincts to ourselves. He’s carried on with his job with the same enthusiasm and energy that he’s always had, he’s doing his share of bringing up their two children, and he is the same entertaining, irreverent and instinctively kind person he always was, but it is hard not to make allowances sometimes. Making allowances is a kind of pity which he won’t accept that from anyone, and believe me, with someone as astute and sharp as he is; there is a real art in not getting caught.

He is the one person in the world who knows all my secrets. We’ve been friends since we met at four years old – our first day at infant school. I was the planned product of a well-off, settled, nuclear family, I was wanted and secure. He was the child of a desperately poor single mother, conceived outside a toilet at a party when she was fifteen; a hideously unintentional accident. From different biospheres, we had collided, and latched on to one another against a world of kids we didn’t like and didn’t want to know. We had dragged our parents together, and my folks and Eileen had melded together into a mutually-supportive, triangular friendship.  We’d been bought up by all three of them, and loved by all three. The six of us, my parents, my sister and me from our Georgian house on Ham Common, and Eileen and Matty in their maisonette in the midst of the muddle of Ham Estate had been an extraordinary extended family unit, and for thirty six years he has been just about the most important person in my life.

My parents and Matty’ mum Eileen have a unique relationship. Eileen was nineteen when my parents met her, almost lost in her struggle to survive, where my parents had been twenty eight and twenty six, well off and successful. My folks had taken this young woman, who they knew nothing about, under their wings, supported her and her son, been her rock, her friends and her surrogate parents as hers had abandoned her, they had looked after Eileen and Matty, and in return they have been awarded the loyalty and love of one of the most determined, strongest and most extraordinary women I have ever met. Matty and I are natural feminists; we can’t help it, we’ve been surrounded by female roll-models all our lives; they’ve got bigger balls than we have for a start.

Are you two around next weekend? Matty asks me,

Yeah, I think so, why? He grins at me.

I have permission to cause an explosion and I wondered if you wanted in on it. This sounds exciting, but first I need the answer to a serious quandary. I’ve been catching sight of about a million coloured bands around his wrists.

Hang on, are you wearing about fifteen ‘friendship bracelets’? He shoots his cuffs and reveals the collection.

I am indeed. The girls made them for me.

Okay. When did that happen?

Oh, about two weeks ago. They check I’ve still got them on when I get home from work.

You wear them at work? He looks serious for a moment.

Of course. If they wanted me to wear a dress to work I’d do it, so I’m not going to have any problem with a couple of strands of cotton and some beads am I?

Alright. Carry on with this bomb thing then. If I’d needed more proof that he loves his children, this would have been enough.

Bomb. Good reason. Permission. Involvement – yours?

Sure, what reason?

I need to remove a tree stump from our garden, and I can either pay about a hundred quid to get someone else to have fun with it or I can do it myself, so Polly’s said that if I can get it organised, I can have a go. I thought a really big pipe bomb underneath it should do the trick, and as Guy Folks night is looming over the horizon, we should be able to pack the bomb with firework filling.

I am absolutely on for that. Have you chopped the tree down?

Oh yes, I borrowed a chain saw from a neighbour. If you don’t live long enough to do anything else mate, chain sawing a tree down is definitely something you should try – fantastic fun.

I do my best to imagine Matty wielding a chain saw, and it’s not an easy vision to conjure up. It’s a bit too macho, and with the best will in the world, that’s not a description that can be applied to either of us. It’s like trying to imagine him carrying a couple of machine guns and leaping through a doorway at a bunch of terrorists – if he was carrying enough ammunition to be effective, he’d topple over sideways.

Not that I would get any prizes for machismo. As part of my new life as an inhabitant of the English country side, I’d had a go at shooting pigeons off a barn roof with our dairy farming neighbour Josh. The first time I’d taken a shot, I’d had my face too close to the site and I’d given myself a massive black eye, which caused much merriment. After about the fifty third crap shot I had actually killed a pigeon, and then felt hopelessly guilty about it for days. Josh had killed about twenty of them and took them all home to make a pie. I took my little, forlorn, feathery corpse home and gave it a Christian burial. I was also compelled by remorse to become a vegetarian for about a fortnight.

Cathy and Polly call us through for dinner. I pour the wine, and we sit down and make a start on the roast. It’s great, in parts. The meat is really good – not over done or still mooing, and the gravy (thanks to ‘Bisto’) is great, but the cabbage is well over-cooked and Delia Smith’s Yorkshire puddings have somehow come out like soggy cardboard, but we all tell Cathy it’s brilliant anyway. She knows it isn’t, but takes comfort in the white lies for the moment.

Mark’s going to help me blow up the tree stump. Matt tells Polly enthusiastically.

Thanks lovely, Polly says to me, smiling nervously, I think we need someone involved with more sense and less enthusiasm. I’m actually terrified he’s going to blow himself and the house up.

It’ll be fine. I tell her, We’ve blown up loads of things. Matty and I begin to reminisce, while Polly and Cathy look increasingly worried.

"Have you two ever noticed the recurring theme