Further on up the Road: Volume 4: A Journey through Corona: Tunnels and Light

By Graham Macey

Now in this volume four of Further on up the Road: A Journey Through Corona, Graham J Macey reflects on the new normal of Corona, especially how the family can finally gather to place the ashes of their mother in the small country churchyard. "Use this opportunity to seek and to find that freedom which is true and everlasting – the freedom that remains untouched and untainted by all the ways of our mortal existence.

Originally, this book was simply that it be a journal of the author’s travels through Spain and Italy in the anticipation that it would be a time of just letting the dust settle from all the ups and downs of the previous seven years – a time of healing and peace and a time of moving on from the past. But, within four volumes, the author has so much more to convey to us. Read to grasp how being safely cocooned from Corona has provided the author the opportunity to help us also see and understand our own lives as the Corona days seem become normal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chaim Mazo
• Release date: Apr 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9780463514412

Book preview

Part One

From Captivity

1.

Inscriptions and Invitations

‘Death is not extinguishing the light,

it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come’

Rabindranath Tagore

July 2020

I am walking slowly around the small country churchyard of Holy Trinity Church in Lyne – myself and my two brothers are wandering alone, each with his own thoughts – partly to find shade from the 35 degree mid-summer heat – partly to pay respect to all the many feelings and emotions that have been stirred by the day’s events… but mostly to while away the time until the ground has been prepared and the Vicar arrives to conduct the short but intimate service.

After nine months, the current restrictions have eased sufficiently to allow us to intern our mother’s ashes within our father’s grave, and in doing so, to allow our father and mother to be united once more beneath a much needed new granite headstone.

We were tempted to include, on this shared memorial to their love, a plaintive remark on behalf of our father as he ponders with alarm the sharing of his small trench of ‘holy ground’ with his ‘beloved wife’…

‘I was resting in peace’

… but reluctantly, we defer to something more appropriate and respectful.

The time passes and I soon lose sight of my brothers as my own wanderings take me past a roughly hued headstone of such towering proportions that it would not look out of place amongst the ‘pillars’ of Stonehenge. I am impressed and inspired and immediately send a photo to my daughters to allow them sufficient time to organise just such a monolith for their own dear father… order early to avoid disappointment kind of thing.

It turns out that our minister has been called out of her retirement just for this occasion – our mother would have been touched and impressed… I can almost hear her as she humbly reminds us that she ‘really doesn’t want to make a fuss’… which is ironic, for our mother never ever missed an opportunity for a really good fuss.

All proceeds with predictably uniform formality until our very warm and personable cleric asks us to say a few things about our mother. As is my inclination at times of gravity and seriousness to take my solace in the ways of flippancy and mirth – I blurt out the first thing that comes into my mind which, in this case, is my mother’s abiding passion for Foyle’s War and in particular, her gushing adoration for Michael Kitchen.

It becomes instantly obvious that I have touched a very pleasant nerve within our lovely ecclesiastical representative for, in an instant, she is pouring out her heart in unbridled devotion for Mr. Kitchen, as well as for all the exquisitely woven plots that Detective Chief Superintendent Foyle is seen regularly and patiently unravelling with all the dependable mastery of his quietly authoritative demeanour.

Before this ‘seam of gold’, our simple service suddenly opens out into a relaxed coming together of old friends, within whose gracious circle my mother is now held in an affectionate and grateful embrace.

But all too soon, the heat of the midday sun re-affirms its sway over our simple meditations and, as the moment passes, it becomes gently and lovingly placed alongside countless other fond and tender memories – deep within the hallowed and oft-frequented hallways of our hearts.

After warm and thankful farewells, it becomes embarrassingly obvious that an undeniable urgency has imposed itself upon the day’s otherwise leisurely agenda… for religiously inclined remembrances are all very well – but if you truly want to do justice to a mother’s memory, what is really needed is a jolly good lunch washed down by a jolly good beer.

We drive through lanes thick with nostalgia to the nearby Barley Mow Public House – an old student ‘watering hole’ of ours that, in the late sixties, would often play host to the quiet unassuming figure of Keith Moon and his long-suffering pink Rolls Royce.

The said lunch proceeds faultlessly along its route of amicably fulfilled anticipation – full of the flowers of renewed brotherly fellowship and the precarious good cheer of exposed and vulnerable hearts – walking with care along the perilous unmarked borderlines between laughter and tears….

~~~~~

… and now the day has passed and I have become a house sitter with the weighty responsibilities of looking after a friendly little black cat called Audrey, a shiny new Nespresso coffee machine, a micro-wave oven and a Netflix account – while Ted the Irish terrier takes my brother and sister in law on a short but well deserved holiday in Dorset.

The hours pass slowly and peacefully as I watch