Is ‘someone up there’ really looking down on me….?

It is a while since I have written a blog and that’s partly due to being busy with our new home, meeting new people, partly a lack of ‘inspiration’. Prompted by a note from Dr Michael Ward of Swansea University, who setup the CoronaDiaries Project of which mine is part, I did think about doing one more blog about the pandemic. The two-year anniversary of my first blog seemed a good time to revisit the topic. However, events of the 5th of March 2022 prevented me from writing that blog and are the inspiration for this one.

The simplest way to start is to reproduce the ‘incident report’ sent by Mark, one of the Run Directors (RD) of Delamere Parkrun, which I ran on that never-to-be-forgotten Saturday morning….

Ian Skaife collapsed around 1.2 miles into today’s run at around 9:15. He was immediately attended to by the following: June who was just in front of Ian and heard him fall, June’s partner Matthew, Nikki who was a little behind but did not see him fall. Nikki is a medical nurse (an unknown passing runner, not in Parkrun, who was also a doctor was in attendance and stayed until the paramedics arrived).

Around this time an unknown person called an ambulance.

Nikki reported there was no pulse and Ian was not breathing. Between herself and June and advice from the unknown doctor, they opened his airway and administered CPR for perhaps the next 15 minutes or so. Ian occasionally restarted breathing for a short while, but Nikki did not detect a pulse at any time she checked for one.

Shortly after the incident, perhaps at 9.20 the tail-walker (Liz) arrived who called the RD Andy. I was standing next to Andy when he received the call. At 9:22 I made a call to the Forestry Commission(FC) office. They collect the AED (Automatic External Defibrillator) and drove to the incident – the main FC contact on the day was Liam at Forestry England. I left on foot to the incident and was joined by marshal Katherine who is a medical doctor.

The FC team arrived at the incident at around 9:30 and on arrival immediately deployed the AED once. This was successful in initiating a pulse. Very shortly afterwards the paramedics arrived by which time Ian was conscious and had achieved some sort of satisfactory stability.

I arrived at the scene around 9:37 and called Ian’s ICE (In Case of Emergency number) from his wristband at 9:39. The ICE is his wife Alyson Skaife who informed me Ian was with his son, Mike Skaife (now at the finish), who Alyson then called. Mike appeared at the incident perhaps within 10 minutes.

By 9:50 Ian was on a stretcher, breathing himself and able to talk and knew where he was. The paramedics had been joined by air ambulance paramedics, though the helicopter had to land around a mile away (as we are in a forest).

At around 10:10 Ian left the immediate area in an ambulance to be taken to the helicopter which left with Ian around 10:25 for Stoke Trauma Unit.

Even now as I read the report it almost brings me to tears. I have no memory of the day other than arriving at Delamere and parking the car. I made it to the start where I met up with my son Michael. I can remember talking to a Crusader, a lady with a Superman top wearing a blue tutu and a couple of nuns! Alyson had to tell the nurse in A&E that I wasn’t hallucinating as the run was fancy dress to celebrate the 9th anniversary of Delamere Parkrun’s first event.

Mike had helped the paramedics get me into the air ambulance – apparently an older lady was nearly blown over after not getting out of the way as the helicopter took off from the crossroads where the traffic had been stopped. Alyson had been working at a pharmacy in Gobowen when she got the call from Mark and left immediately and drove to Mike’s in Northwich where they drove together to Stoke. It was the second time in almost 10 years that Alyson & Mike had sat in the family area of the hospital waiting to see if I made it. For those who don’t know what happened in 2012 you can read my blog from 2019.

https://skatchat.wordpress.com/2019/10/06/the-long-story/

I am relying on what Alyson & Mike have told me happened after leaving in the air ambulance as my next memory is waking up on Sunday morning in the Cardiac Care Unit (CCU). The junior doctor had written me a note telling me that I was in Stoke and they diagnosed that my heart stopped due to blocked artery and they had started me on some more medication. Alyson had written on the end of the note ‘Middlesbrough won 2-0’!
Back to A&E ‘Resus’ where I kept saying ‘Did I come in a helicopter? and Mike answered yes and I said ‘What a shame I missed that’. Over and over again! They decided to scan my brain for a head injury, but the image hadn’t changed since my last one in 2013. Alyson was pleased that I hadn’t been running in Oswestry as a) the defibrillator is not as close (note 9 April 2022 – having volunteered there yesterday I know this is not true as there is a portable one at the start), b) the ambulance service in rural Shropshire is not as responsive and c) they might have taken me to Shrewsbury Hospital which, although I wouldn’t have been in the recently sanctioned maternity unit, doesn’t have a good reputation. If they didn’t have my scan from 2012-13 goodness what they would have made of my slightly mushed brain!

Stoke is also where I had been diagnosed with angina in early 2021 so they were aware of that. I had been signed off after a ‘stress test’ in July when I went on the treadmill wired to an Electrocardiogram (ECG). Although I was due to have another test this coming July, as one of the A&E doctors remarked I had done my own stress test and failed spectacularly.
Alyson & Mike stayed with me until early evening and weren’t offered any drinks or food and didn’t want to leave me in case another doctor came with information. Eventually I was admitted to CCU and they sat with me there a while.

CCU Royal Stoke

CCU is a ward of bays in a circle around a central nurses station. It is not a quiet place as we were all wired to heart monitors with electrodes attached to several sticky pads over our chests reporting to a central screen. Alarms were going off each time a lead came loose, and I was confused as I thought it was mine that was setting them off, so would try not to move. Also on my chest were two large sticky pads from the defibrillator used in the forest. The device made sleeping difficult but I was grateful just to be there. Alyson visited me later in the day and I started to learn more about what had happened.

Alyson and Michael had gone back for my car on Sunday morning as it was still parked at Delamere. Alyson parked outside the administration offices and saw Liam who had taken the AED and he was pleased to hear how well I was doing. He admitted than when he first got there and saw the medics working on me he didn’t think the ending would be good. Alyson thanked him on behalf of all of us, and only this week I emailed him to tell him how well I am doing. Often people who help others never find out what the outcome is, and that is a shame.

Alyson visited me later that day and brought my phone in so I was able to message friends and work colleagues to tell them what had happened to me. Mike was frustrated that only Alyson was allowed to visit me due to Covid-19 restrictions, and our other son David – who had been rowing with his club in Bath and left ready to come up when Alyson called him on the Saturday morning – had to make do with a Zoom update on the Sunday evening. Since the pandemic started we had been having a weekly call often with a short family quiz. I may have been able to join on my phone that evening, but was very tired and sore.

The soreness was something that, when the nurses asked me how I was feeling, I told them I was grateful for. It showed that Nikki, June and Matt and the unknown doctor had done a good job. A few weeks previously Alyson had attended a CPR and defibrillator use course, and told me that it was physically hard, and not something one person could do for more than a few minutes. Alyson had also text June & Nikki to thank them for what they had done. I sent an email to the ‘Core Team’ of volunteers at Delamere who I know well having volunteered there many times over the years. These ‘Hi-Viz Heroes’ as we call them in the Parkrun family are the reason events are free every week. I told them in the message that I was well and thanked them for what they had done.

On Monday Alyson came over in the afternoon but didn’t get to see me for long as I was taken down to what is called ‘The Lab’ to have a stent fitted. This was something that I had been due to have last July, but they decided my blood vessels were ‘perfect’. This time the situation had changed, so it was a case of putting one in to be sure. As it turned out my temperature was too high, so I was back on the ward after Alyson had left.

The next morning my temperature was fine and my bloods were ok, so I was back in the lab and this time the stent fitting was successful. As Dr Gunning my consultant said ‘that’s the plumbing sorted, all we need to do now is find a good electrician to sort you out…’. Alyson visited me later in the afternoon after tutoring pharmacy students at nearby Keele University. After getting up at 5am to travel there she said the work kept her busy, and took her mind off what was happening to me. She had also been very busy, as people often are when someone is in hospital, having to phone family and friends and taking calls from people asking how I was doing.

The ‘electrician’ turned out to be Dr Baynham who came to see me when Alyson visited on Wednesday, by which time I had been moved to a nicer room on a nearby ward. The room had been a ‘day room’ before the pandemic where patients could sit and watch TV and had panoramic views overlooking the helicopter landing site. It was converted to a 3-bed bay and was light and comfortable.

Dr Baynham said the plan was to give me an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) which would deliver a shock should my heart fail again. There were possible side effects such as infection, and it giving me a ‘shock’ when it wasn’t needed, but overall it seemed a good solution to my issue. I needed an app on my phone to send data from the ICD back to Stoke – Alyson was disappointed that it wouldn’t allow her to turn me off and on.

The procedure was planned for Friday afternoon confirmed at the ward round Friday morning. The device was fitted at about 3pm under a local anaesthetic. Due to the blood thinners I was on the surgeons struggled to get it under my collar bone in a ‘pocket’ they cut into my chest muscle, but eventually they managed. An X-Ray about two hours later confirmed it was in place with wires to my heart, and by 8pm my discharge letter and medicines were ready. Alyson came to pick me up and drove me home for 10pm. I slept in my own bed.

For the first few days home I was very sore and couldn’t sleep well on either side. This was both from the bruising to my chest and ribs from the CPR and the scar and the device under my left shoulder. I was also very weary from the whole thing, and this added to my ‘usual’ fatigue from the brain injury. I often have a short 40-minute nap during the day, but now needed one morning and afternoon. But it felt great to be home with Alyson.

The NHS had done an amazing job in the 5 days since I was admitted. I underwent two procedures, and the surgeon told me the ICD cost £30,000 (not sure if that is the cost of the device only or for the surgeons, operating theatre and nursing care). The care of all the nurses, doctors, pharmacists, physios, catering and cleaning teams was fantastic.

I sent WhatsApps to June and Nikki from Parkrun telling them that I was home and what had been done to me. I also said I was very grateful for the pain I had in my chest which showed that they did a great job! I said that without them I am certain that Alyson, Michael & David would be planning my funeral. Both sent gracious replies and June said although it was her slowest time for a Parkrun as they all took an hour and 14 minutes by the time they got back to the finish, ‘it would always be a personal best (PB) for a different reason..’ It had only been her 3rd run, and she nearly didn’t go, as it is her partner Matt who was the runner. I said that I hope that what happened wouldn’t put her off doing another!

The following weekend we had planned a trip to some cottages outside Scarborough in the north east where we have been many times. I felt strong enough to make the journey but as I can’t drive for 6 months Alyson had to do it all in our new all-electric car (the story of ‘range anxiety’ is for another blog!). We had planned to do the Parkrun at Whitby (Alyson is also a member of the ‘Parkrun Family, having done 35 since she took it up a couple of weeks before her 59th birthday). So at 9am on a Saturday two weeks after my incident the RD gave the usual pre-race briefing and when she mentioned that they had a defibrillator people start to laugh. Alyson shouted ‘It’s not funny! My husband needed one two weeks ago at a Parkrun!’ It went quiet and someone asked ‘Is he ok?‘ to which she replied ‘Yes, he’s over there watching the start..’.
Alyson enjoyed the run which was down a disused railway but reflected afterwards that the surface was hard paving, much less forgiving than the forest track at Delamere.

Last weekend we were also away at a large house with 18 of Alyson’s family and on Saturday morning a group of six went to Ross on Wye Parkrun. Five to run and me to watch. Alyson and Mike both ran in this one. However, this time no one laughed when the RD mentioned that they had one portable defibrillator at the start, and another was in the nearby sports centre. I was chatting to some other ‘tourists’ at the start, and one older guy from Leeds who, when he asked if I was running and I told him my story, announced ‘Oh I had one fitted 12 years ago and have run lots of times since including a few marathons.’
I have been told that I should be able to resume ‘normal exercise’ eventually, but am not sure I will ever do a marathon given the furthest I have ever run is several half-marathons and the last of those was the 2006 Great North Run! However, it gave me some hope.

I am not sure Alyson feels the same, but I have promised that I won’t go out on my own – as I had thought of doing the week before my incident when I fancied a quick jog up to the woods in our local area…

The final ‘twist’ to the story is that this weekend we celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary. We had booked a trip back to Paris to stay in the same hotel in the Place de La Sorbonne down from Notre Dame, where we went for our honeymoon and revisited on our 25th. There is a Parkrun close by and we had planned to do that one…it doesn’t bear thinking about what it would have been like if I suffered my cardiac arrest there – not with two failed O-Levels in French between us!

Something that Nikki replied after I shared the blog about my brain injury has stuck with me. She wrote ‘What an amazing story! I think someone up there is looking down on you!’ Another friend wrote ‘You know my thoughts on God, but you are a special case so I will pray for you’. A university friend who I will call Speed wrote ‘God clearly still has work for you to do! Thank God for all the prompt medical help you got.’

Even Alyson and her sister, neither of whom attend any church, in talking together when we were away in Ross on Wye concluded that God really didn’t want me joining him just now as that is twice I have tried and twice he has sent me back!

Since we moved from Crewe, a year ago this week, where I had been deeply involved at my local Methodist church and held various roles at circuit, district and attended the annual Methodist Conference, I have not found my ‘place’ in Oswestry. This is partly a deliberate choice as I wanted to take some ‘time out’ to discover the area and people. In September I met our local minister Rev Julia in her manse garden for a long chat. She was wonderful and encouraged me to work out what I wanted to do. This despite being very busy with pastoral care of 23 churches and knowing that, as in all places Methodist, there is a shortage of willing and experienced people for all the roles. The local churches have been very welcoming, despite numbers being down and attendance less during Covid. I have certainly not been to many services or joined local house/prayer groups, and even my attendance at the online Methodist Central Hall Westminster (MCHW) setup during ‘lockdown’ has been patchy.

Perhaps I am being given a ‘message’ through what has happened, and I definitely have more time to think things over, as I can’t just take myself out in my car without Alyson coming with me. I attended our annual ‘Covenant Service’ in January at which Methodists say a prayer which has these lines in it.

Your will, not mine be done in all things, wherever you may place me, in all that i do and in all that I may endure.
When there is work for me, and when there is none: When I am troubled and when I am at peace. Your will be done.
When I am disregarded: when I find fulfilment and when it is lacking;

The Methodist Worship Book P.288 (Modern Form)

The more traditional version is even more ‘stark’ with the lines ‘…Put me to doing, put me to suffering; let me be employed for you or laid aside for you..’

With all the cards. messages, calls and support I have had, I certainly don’t feel disregarded – quite the opposite. But in this season of Lent as we look towards the suffering of our Saviour Jesus on the cross, even though I am not doing a formal lent study, maybe I need to take some time to consider my place in the local area, my family and church, and commit to doing something positive.

I am definitely going to sign up for a CPR course and use myself as a living example of what can be done. I will commit to raising some funds or donating to any Parkruns who need to get a defibrillator. But beyond that I will try to find something in the coming months or years to take the place of the work I have done in the past for my local church and community.

I will continue to volunteer at Parkrun events and be a ‘Tail Walker’ who follows the slowest person so that no one ever finishes last. To be fair to the core Team at Delamere it might be some time before I turn up in my new branded orange Parkrun shirt – my old one having been sliced down the middle by the paramedics! And I will definitely update my ICE barcode wristband which currently says ‘ no medical conditions’!

Coronavirus week 14 – Not ‘the new normal’ but ‘a reorientation…’

‘So what’s the story?’….time for change

This week’s blog will be a shorter one (who shouted hurrah!) as I am busy this weekend taking part in a ‘virtual Methodist Conference’ along with 300+ other people from all over the country and the world.  The Conference met for the first time with founder John Wesley in the chair in 1744, and has convened annually in the 275 years until 2019 when I attended for the first time in Birmingham. It would be easy to characterise our church as ‘old fashioned’ and living in the past, but the first thing we did was spend half an hour voting electronically via ‘raised hands’ and Zoom polls to put aside our ancient rules designed for a physical gathering. This had taken a great deal of work by our Law & Polity team in conjunction with the Charity Commission. It could have been a very short conference if we hadn’t voted unanimously to do so. Who says our church is stuck in its ways?!

A casual glance at our new President Rev Richard Teal, dressed in black robes with a white collar, the 60+ year old white male that he is, might have reinforced the old-fashioned tag. But his message that this time of lockdown must lead to a time of ‘reorientation’ – to see people and do things differently in the future, shows we are rooted in the present not the past. He used the word ‘oriented’ to describe the way we felt just a few months ago, comfortable in our situation, and the example of his feelings seeing his new grandchild for the first time to emphasise the emotions that existed at the time. Next he talked about feeling ‘disoriented’ during the last three months, unsure of what it means, and without many of the things which make our lives stable, including family and being part of a local church with all its traditions and routines. What we need to do next is ‘reorientation’ as a church, with the things we have learned. We are finding more people than ever wanting to be part of on-line services and gatherings, we have reached out to those who live in our area most in need – particularly those who are lonely and isolated. We need to value those who do vital work and have been underappreciated in the past.

Richard follows a President in Rev Barbara Glasson who exemplified the diverse talents we have in our ordained ministers. Barbara has spent her ministry working with people ‘on the margins’ or outside our church. In Liverpool city centre she started a group of people including those with learning disabilities, from the LGBTQ community, the homeless, and young people, who came together every week to make two loaves of bread, then gave them away to whoever wanted it. Never the same group two weeks running, the ‘Bread Church’ is still going strong. She currently directs the Touchstone Project in another city centre, Bradford, that works from a terraced house in a Muslim-Pakistani heritage area on interfaith relations. They are about to move into a refurbished pub. Barbara is a blessing in our church. With 2019 Vice President Clive we were encouraged and challenged to tell our story of faith – hence many of my blogs using their phrase ‘So what’s the story..?’.

Our new Vice President Carolyn, in her 50’s, described herself as an introvert, activist, impatient, easily bored and liable to make flippant remarks – an honest assessment of her humanity. She confessed to being uncertain about taking on such an important role, but the testimony she gave on how she got here was powerful. She described the church as part ‘mad’ – some of our members can get very worked up if people use the wrong cups, wear the wrong clothes, put papers on, or take them off, the noticeboard.  There is a whole potential for trouble around anything to do with setting out, stacking or moving chairs!  It is also part ugly – this ranges from telling visitors off when they sit in ‘someone else’s seat’, we can say the cruelest things to each other, have inappropriate comments and touching, bullying and controlling behaviour. Ministers from our overseas churches can be subjected to racist comments from our members, and homophobia is not uncommon.  This ugliness extends to some extremely serious cases of abuse, which we need to continually guard against.

Carolyn’s hope is that the best of the work we do is really good and awesome; helping the weakest in society, and through our overseas relief and development charity, All We Can, those in poorer countries. She wants to use the year meeting with local churches and encouraging us to use our gifts to the utmost.

It is a very different conference this year, but our group of 8 local Chester & Stoke District representatives are keeping in touch, and helping each other during debates via a WhatsApp group.  We won’t be able to hold the deep and passionate debates where speakers come forward to give different views, but we will be reviewing some important reports and committing millions of pounds of funding to important mission and outreach projects. We will also do the ‘mundane and routine’ business such as approving accounts, membership of committees and working parties. There is a sadness that the vital debates we held last year, and the provisional legislation needed, to make us a more inclusive church that recognises a wide-variety of relationships as valid, will not be completed as it was felt the format would not allow the ‘deep personal conferring needed’. Those in single sex relationships are already welcomed, and can hold any position in Methodism, but will have to wait until the conference of 2021 to find out if they can marry in our churches.

Our ministers in training are usually ‘ordained’ on Conference Sunday, but this year they had to make their promises on Saturday via Zoom as the first part, but will have to wait until we can get back into churches to have the physical ‘laying on of hands’ in the special service with friends and family. After one of the candidates made her promise from home our chair Helen sent a message on WhatsApp saying ‘we need to get Natalie into our district’, prompted by a framed message on the wall in Natalie’s house that read ‘Gin is my saviour’!

In the conference last year we learned that language is so important, not only in what is said but how it is said. Hence my wish not to use the term ‘new normal’ for our post-Covid society but the hope that, using Richard’s word we will ‘re-orientate’ ourselves. This week with the ‘White Lives Matter’ banner flown over a premier league match we learned again this lesson of use of language.

With cases not falling as fast and the death rate levelling off to about 150 per day, there is concern that the ‘welcomed’ easing of lockdown has sent the message that ‘it’s all over, we can have a party’. Scenes at ‘block parties’ in London, the celebrations in Liverpool after their team won the Premier League title after a 30-year wait, and overcrowding on the beach at Bournemouth during a very warm spell, raised fears of a second spike of infections. And all that before the pubs open on 4th July. Add alcohol to the mix and arguments over what constitutes ‘one metre plus’ in crowded pubs will lead, as one punter said, ‘to even more fights on a Friday night’! 

I understand some of the reasons, but in my opinion it says a lot about our country that we work hard to get the pubs open, but not the gyms and swimming pools. Judging by the photo on the front page of one newspaper this morning, Boris Johnson clearly thinks an office floor is all that is need to become ‘as fit as a butcher’s dog’. Although I am not sure wearing a suit and tie is recommended gym wear?

We really are at a ‘turning point’ or maybe looking over a precipice with the virus. Infections are reducing, deaths at least leveling out, and there are signs of hope. Yet scientists keep telling us that there is no sign of the virus just dying out and it will be with us at some level for ‘years to come’. The next three months and how we as individuals react will be critical to the future path of the virus, even more than the past 14 weeks of lockdown.

We need to re-orientate our country if there is not to be a pandemic of unemployment. In my less optimistic times I worry about a complete breakdown of society as those in work continue to regain wealth, but those in lower paid jobs or no jobs get poorer and poorer – or am I kidding myself, as that has been the case for decades?

Other news this week

• The daily briefings came to an end on Tuesday with the announcement of the next stage of easing, adding to the ‘its all over’ feeling. Those who are shielding were told that they could leave the house at the same time. There is uncertainty and real fear among some. It may be that the presence of the virus is such that on average you need to meet 1,700 people before you interact with someone who carries the virus, but the effect if you are the unlucky winner of that particular lottery is no less devastating if you are vulnerable.
• With the briefings ending, you have to work hard to find the daily new cases and death figures. The four days figures Tuesday to Friday were 154, 149, 186, 100  and the total is 43,550 and the average new daily cases is about 900 which is at least moving in the right direction. Globally we passed 10 million confirmed cases and  500,000 deaths.
  
• At the weekend it was announced that from the 6th July we will be able to go to some European countries via so-called ‘air corridors’, meaning that on return there will be no requirement to go into two weeks’ quarantine.
• Infections in the US are continuing to rise at a dramatic pace and President Trump is still in denial, with his senior team appearing increasingly uncomfortable trying to defend the indefensible. It is such a large country and a major part of the world economy, even beyond the personal impact the loss of over 125,700 of its citizens.
• World number one tennis player Nova Djokovic arranged a short tour of his native Serbia, and Croatia in which there was little attention paid the social distancing or ‘covid security measures’. Djokovic himself got the disease as did his wife and several of the organising team. He is a self-declared ‘anti-vaxxer’, an area I plan to explore in a later article as the ‘conspiracy’ theorists and those who ignore science facts are dangerous for the rest of us.
  

How was week 14 for us?

It didn’t start well as on Monday Alyson was seriously ill with sickness and stomach upset. At first I did wonder if she had caught Covid-19 from working in the pharmacy on the Saturday. It turned out to be a reaction to a new type of antibiotic she was taking.  It was the first time in 93 days that she hadn’t been on our exercise bike and her Wii Fit.  We had to cancel our trip to meet friends from Shrewsbury the next day for a walk around a lake at a park halfway between us. It was a gloriously sunny day and such a shame.

The weather stayed hot and sunny and by Thursday when Alyson finally got to meet three former work colleagues in our garden, we needed to put up the gazebo we had bought specially, not for the rain, but so that they could sit in the shade. It was the hottest day of the year at 30 degrees.  

The opening of self-catering accommodation on 4th July means that our holiday at a National Trust cottage in a remote area of Norfolk is back on. It will be good to get away even if we can’t visit some of the places we planned to. It will be a change of scenery and walks along coastal paths. I admit to glancing at the availability of villas in Spain, Crete and Croatia when the air corridors were announced, but Alyson is a bit more cautious and is waiting for the ‘second spike’ and what happens when the ‘winter flu’ season starts again.

I continued to do my local parkruns twice a week and am feeling the benefits both in some weight loss, and clearing my mind of confusion.

We had a meeting of our head injury charity trustees via phone and the figures I had prepared as treasurer showed that our reserves have increased.  There really has been great support for small charities like ours who can’t hold fundraising events. We have been fortunate with the grants we have applied for – and received. Apart from the National Lottery the money we have received is from local trusts and benefactors wanting to support Cheshire-based charities.  We have not furloughed our two employees, as the work they do supporting members who were socially isolated even before the restrictions caused by the virus, is vital. We too will continue with ‘reorientation’ of our services, taking some of the ‘virtual coffee mornings’ and chat rooms forwards to reach those who haven’t wanted to attend physical meetings even in normal times.

Alyson’s hairdresser called to ask if she wanted an appointment in the first few days of opening. I am getting used to her long hair and she doesn’t want it taken back to where it was, just the fringe tidied up. I love the haircuts Alyson gives me with my trimmers and not sure I will ever go back to paying for one!

Although there was no formal Conference Service this year, our new President and Vice President joined the service at Westminster Central Hall via Zoom. Richard’s sermon was about John Wesley’s drive for Methodists to strive for ‘personal holiness’, but to live out the gospel we proclaim via what he called ‘social holiness’. This is a radical, active care for those in society who need it. Richard talked about the last letter Wesley ever wrote being to William Wilberforce supporting the abolition of slavery. He worked in the desperate slums of London where he saw people in extreme poverty continue to work and help others. Richard used a modern-day example of this social holiness by telling of a member in his circuit in rural Yorkshire, inspired by her faith to help the local food bank and deliver to the housebound and isolated in her community. 

Vice President Carolyn led us in prayers for those who are broken-hearted, worried about the virus, struggling with loneliness and living in conditions where social distancing is impossible. For countries where health systems are overwhelmed and asked that we use our social holiness to do what we can.

We finished with video messages from our sister churches around the world from, Bolivia, Rwanda, Australia, The Caribbean, and Italy. As Methodists we adapt one of  Wesley’s famously sayings ‘the world is our parish’.

Keep safe and let’s see what the next week brings us.

Coronavirus week 13 – The best and worst of the NHS – the old normal is back…

C₂₂H₂₉FO_{5 – the wonder drug}

As it is nearly 40 years since I was awarded a BA(Hons) in Chemistry, I think I can be forgiven for not being able to give the modern name for dexamethasone. This is the drug announced this week used to treat patients with Covid-19 resulting in reduced deaths for those receiving oxygen or on mechanical ventilators.

Nomenclature has changed since I taught chemistry for five years in the mid-80s. Looking back at the literature of the time it was called 9α-fluoro-16α-methylprednisolone or 6α-methyl-9α-fluoroprednisolone, but either way even having done a biochemistry module I am not sure I would have known it was a steroid derivative of the well-known drug hydrocortisone. One of the main topics I enjoyed was organic chemistry, that of carbon compounds. Looking through the 1,280 pages of Hendrickson, Cram and Hammond’s textbook from 1977 there is no mention of it, despite being used in a clinical way since 1961. To complete the confusion that people often express when I tell them I used to teach chemistry, it is always good to have a chemical structure to describe the compound. Here are two for this drug.

The slightly more modern version on the right shows the different elements hydrogen, oxygen and fluorine as different colours and the methyl (CH3-) structures as a dark triangle. My pharmacy consultant (and wife) Alyson tells me that I was on dexamethasone for a short time in 2012. I was in hospital for 12 weeks (the time we have been locked down now) with a brain abscess, and was given it to reduce the resultant swelling of my brain.

The research on dexamethasone done in British hospitals, with volunteer patients involved in the clinical trials, has been hailed as ground-breaking. The drug has potential to save tens of thousands of lives worldwide. It must be devastating for those who have lost loved ones who may have benefited from it. This and the amazing dedication of the care staff, cleaners, physios, pharmacists, therapists, doctors, nurses, and administrators demonstrate the best of our NHS. As a country and tax payers we need to fund them to the level required. We will have a thorough review and ‘learn the lessons’, but I fear that once ‘real life’ takes over and self-interest resumes its ‘normal life’, we will forget those weeks early on when as one voice we said ‘this can’t be allowed to happen again’.

The whole system needs a thorough rethink. There have been many reviews and reorganisations over the years, and it would be natural for those who work in it to think ‘oh no not again’.  The NHS needs rebuilding from the ground up, and possibly renaming. Before Covid-19 I think most people thought of the NHS mainly as the hospitals and local surgeries. In latter years, and certainly during the crisis, there have been concerns that care homes, mental health services, and some social care is linked to the NHS. Many people comment on ‘private business’ not getting involved in our health system as a bad thing. Well I have news for them, much of what we think of are ‘private businesses’. Community pharmacies which I worked in for over 20 years and Alyson has worked in for 40 now, are private limited companies owned mostly by pharmacists but some by medical wholesalers. The same is true of almost every doctor’s surgery who are businesses of doctors setup as a partnership of lead GPs who employ other GPs to help them. These private businesses operate as ‘contractors’ and are paid by Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC), itself only renamed in January 2018.  They are paid a rate for their services, whether that’s seeing patients, running clinics or dispensing prescription or carrying out medicine use reviews that is negotiated by their professional bodies with DHSC. It should not be a surprise that negotiating with what is in effect a ‘monopoly’ supplier is not one that leads to mass riches. What does surprise those doctors who visit pharmacies or chat to owners is unlike their partnerships, DHSC pays nothing towards premises or staffing costs of pharmacy businesses, or pay for the holding of large amounts of drug stocks. And don’t even get me on the subject of Dispensing Doctor practices – people who can write a prescription if they have too much stock of a particular drug, or choose the one that’s best for their business rather than the patient.

‘Business’ and the idea of accountability and competition has been part of the health service for many years, and now we have ‘Trusts’ who are independent organisations running services at a local or regional level. They contract to suppliers and surgeries, pharmacies and ‘buy in’ other services from blood and organ donation services, laboratory services and a host of other clinical ones. There are companies who contract for IT projects, finance, property building and maintenance, catering, cleaning etc. This started when I was still in pharmacy 20 years ago and even then I could see the problems of having local GPs on trusts. As with teachers and risk assessments I wrote about in an earlier blog, most GPs are not businesspeople and they can’t be blamed for conflicts of interest between their business and that of patients and other contractors.

Many governments have presided over reforms but the last major one by the coalition government in 2010 and overseen by Andrew Lansley has proven to be disastrous. Even before starting it drew criticism from a lot of areas. The idea of giving even more power to GPs and frontline staff and increased ‘competition’ on one level might seem like a good one, but in reality it led to a mix of systems and lack of any central accountability. The devolving of the social care and public health issues to local government foundered as the secretary of state for health, Jeremy Hunt, cut the budgets under the guise of ‘austerity measures’. The well-publicised ‘scandals’ with Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust and others in care homes can be laid at the lack of oversight on patient safety.  The organisation Public Health England (PHE) was formed as a result of abolishing Strategic Health Authorities (SHAs), and at the time several directors warned that this would compromise our ability to ‘fight any future pandemic’. SHA’s would have been able to lead on organising the local response and would have people on the ground able to conduct a ‘track and trace’ system. Andrew Lansley stepped down from government in 2015 and was rewarded for his efforts with a seat in the House of Lords.

Jeremy Hunt was the secretary of health who ignored the results of ‘Operation Cygnus’ in  October 2016 used to check the resilience of the NHS to respond to a pandemic (albeit one of influenza). As widely reported at the start of this pandemic, this led to a failure to replenish our stockpiles of PPE, antiviral drugs and ventilators. It is shocking to see him in recent weeks, as the now chair of the parliamentary health and social care select committee, taking the government to task over their failure on issues he was responsible for. When he was elected by MPs to this role in January there was a feeling that this conflict of interest might stop him questioning too much. It’s extraordinary to see the exact opposite happening, but his ability to wipe clean his own responsibility is equally unbelievable.

Andrew Lansley promised a ‘bottom up’ review but ended up with more ‘top down’ structures in place and setting up a whole series of ‘independent bodies’ to monitor things.

Several people have expressed surprise that hospices receive so little funding from DHSC and other government bodies that they have to rely on local fundraising and charitable status to continue. This was put in the spotlight early in the current crisis when fundraising stopped and no provision was forthcoming to help with PPE. If a national health service is supposed to cater for us from ‘cradle to grave’, what has gone so wrong that patients and their families who are facing the real end of the health system are left to donations and sales from charity shops for the provision of care to their loved ones. Another part of the health service that I have experience of, and which has been neglected are rehabilitation units. It seems Covid-19 is an illness that takes a terrible toll on survivors, with months of aftercare needed to even walk again. Many weeks on a ventilator in a medically-induced coma leads to mental health issues as well as physical weakness.

NHS IT provision, which I had some experience of when trying to implement the Electronic Prescription Service (EPS) in our pharmacy branches in 2005/6 was one riven with problems. With the help of our wholesalers and investment in NHS broadband we got all 50 branches setup just as we were sold to the Co-op. Alyson continued working in branch and even now, 14 years on, the system is not fully implemented and looks unlikely to be any time soon. Only recently can pharmacists see a very small amount of information held nationally on any patient who comes into their branchwhen they are away from the place they live. I know from personal experience that my local hospital, 15 miles from the one in another county and a separate trust where I was treated for my brain injury, can’t access any of my scans or records. This is why I have a lever arch folder with all my records and several CDs of my scans/x-rays that I can take in should it happen again.

As predicted by my sons in a blog six weeks ago NHS IT, or NHSX as it is now called, was criticised this week for the failure to deliver the NHS Test & Trace app, and are considering reverting to the Google/Apple model. As my chair of district tweeted;

In all the ‘clap for carers’ and accolades given to those in the health and care systems, we shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking everyone is working for the common good. In an organisation of about 1.5 million people there will be some ‘bad apples’ and strong management and administration supported by decent pay and training is needed.

Our National Health service should be as much about prevention and encouragement to live a healthy lifestyle as it is about treating us when we fall ill. The effects of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and respiratory conditions on the death rate from coronavirus demonstrates this need. The savings made from prevention should outweigh the costs of later treatment.  Education, as in many things, is vital for health outcomes as is reducing poverty.

Let’s hope the next review takes all of the factors into account and, as I wrote last week, as a country we can fund the necessary changes. Our National Health Service has become a ‘Reactive Illness Programme’ (RIP), and needs to change, and quickly.

Other news this week

• The ‘old normal’ resurfaced in our area this week when 6,000 people attended raves in two separate areas of Manchester on Monday. Several people were stabbed, one girl allegedly raped and local people had to clear up the mess after everyone had left.
• Crime seems to be on the increase (or at least being more reported) and terror is back on our streets with the stabbings in Reading this weekend.
• There is more talk of reducing the social distancing requirements to one metre to get hospitality and self-catering holiday accommodation open.
• Dame Vera Lynn died this week at the age of 103. She was called the ‘forces sweetheart’ during World War Two and had shared her thoughts during the current crisis and her song was echoed in the address to the nation by our Queen when she said ‘we will meet again’.
• The Labour Party review on the reasons for disastrous results in December’s general election was published. It didn’t make comfortable reading for members of the party like me. We must work for Labour to produce policies which chime with the need to do things differently in relation to funding the new health and social care system, tackling poverty, improving education and closing the gap between the wealthy and poorer in society.
• The daily death announced totals continue to fall with the Monday-Friday total this week being 853 down from 1,065 last week (a fall of 20%). The total of deaths at the end of the week was 42,632.
• With numbers seemingly under control in European countries despite some local outbreaks in Germany, I looked again at the statistics on Johns Hopkins site and there are some awful looking graphs in other areas of the world. Here are the graphs for cases in Europe;
  
  
  These show that we are over the (first?) peak of infections. The story in two countries with presidents who think it is nothing to worry about, and are trying to get their country’s open again is not so hopeful…
  
  and note that the scales on these are tens of thousands rather than the thousands in Europe.
  The middle and far east countries are also showing curves which are concerning, with a ‘double peak’ for Iran. The cases are in hundreds but show no signs of decreasing.
  
  
• We need to start looking overseas again now that we are getting the UK cases down. There is concern from aid charities that helping less well-off countries will be harder now that the department for international development (DFID) and the UKAid agency has been subsumed into the Foreign Office. A move criticised by three recent former prime ministers from both Conservative and Labour.
• The debate and protests around racism and the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement continued across the world.
• I was going to write that the demonstrations and actions of climate protestors, similar to the ones for Black Lives Matters with marches and ‘direct action’ had not resurfaced, when yesterday I saw an interview with Greta Thunberg saying that she was looking forward to going back to school in Sweden, and vowing to carry on campaigning.
• Greta’s target for criticism president Donald J Trump was back on the campaign trail with a ‘huge rally’ in Tulsa, Oklahoma where only 6,000 of a possible 19,000 seats were occupied despite over a million applications for tickets. For those who did attend there was little sign of masks or social distancing, and six of the organisers caught the virus. At the time of writing there are reports that Mr Trumps rally had been ‘turned over’ by teens and young people responding to campaigns on the Tik-Tok and K-Pop social media platforms applying for tickets then not turning up. Mr Trump said earlier in the week that a million supporters would come.

How has week 13 been for us?

Unfortunately we have another example of the ‘worst of the NHS’ in our household. Five weeks after Alyson applied to help out NHS 111 with taking phone calls from people who need to speak to a pharmacist, and after three polite chasing emails and responses from the HR team doing the ‘on-boarding’ stating that she will hear ‘in a few days’, there is still no sign of her contract or training plans. She has played her part by taking two more calls on the SOS NHS volunteering app.

We haven’t ventured to ‘non-essential shops’ yet and the crush at the Nike store in London and the lady interviewed in the Primark queue in Manchester who stated that she ‘felt like I’ve won the lottery’ didn’t pursuade us. We did go for another walk in Delamere Forest and had a picnic which was pleasant. The weather meant another postponement of meeting with friends in our garden, but we have a walk planned in a park further afield this week.

I have watched a couple of the Premier League football matches now live on ‘free tv’ and have been surprised how realistic the ‘virtual crowd noise’ is to make them seem more ‘normal’ despite empty stadiums. The  online radio commentary I heard for my team Middlesbrough was a sign of the ‘new normal’ being much like the old – we lost 3-0 and are looking at relegation again.

I had my first international Zoom with a call to our subcontractors’ office in India with the person who helps on the IT project I am doing. We have had training sessions with the team from our district who are attending the Methodist Conference in a week’s time. With over 300 representatives, Zoom will be in the form of a webinar where we can only see the person presenting and another speaker who wants to add to the debate. Voting will by the raising of a virtual hand or completing a poll on the screen, so the feedback on numbers should be much quicker than the usual manual count of raised hands in the conference hall.  I will write more about this next week. The conference service on Sunday will be at my now ‘virtual home church’ of Methodist Central Hall, Westminster in London.

Keep safe and let’s hope there is a safe further easing of lockdown in the coming week.

 

 

Coronavirus week 12 – what I have (not) done…

Looking to a more just society…

Even though lockdown has been eased and we are allowed to do more things than before, my week has been dominated by planned activities that I have not done.

Alyson gave me a lovely thoughtful present to surprise me on my birthday in April. It was something that she knows I had looked at, but dismissed as probably too expensive and not fitting in with our plans at the time. This weekend should have been the ‘London Series’ of Major League Baseball (MLB) where teams from the US play a two-game series at the ex-Olympic Stadium, now the London Stadium and home to Premier League team West Ham United. The two teams due to play were the St Louis Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs, who play in the Central Division of the National League(NL) so it would be one game in a long-standing rivalry.

The 2019 series, the first one to showcase MLB overseas by playing in the UK, was another rivalry between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox of the American League (AL) East Division. Some readers may know that I have been a supporter of another AL East team the Toronto Blue Jays since I first saw them in the early 80’s and have been to matches each time we have been to Toronto since, including last September. So, it would have been great to see a live game in London, but the virus put a stop to that.

I am sure more people would have been looking forward to the next thing I have (not) done this week – the Euro 2020 football championships. Friday would have been the first match in Rome where Turkey would have taken on Italy at 10pm UK time. Saturday would have seen Wales play and today England would have played Croatia at Wembley. I had put all the matches into the calendar on my computer which I do months before each major tournament in case people try to arrange church or charity meetings. Not that I wouldn’t go if they did, I just want to be able to inform them, and to have the chance not to do so!

The third activity I have (not) done this week like the 11 weeks before is my regular Saturday morning Parkrun at 9am in Delamere Forest. I have written about Parkrun before if you look back at posts, starting in April 2016 when I did my first run and first post, to February 2018 when I did my 50th, and last October when I did a sponsored 10k the week after completing my 100th. I really miss the run, the team of volunteers and other runners. During lockdown I have done a 5k run on Wednesday and a longer 6.1k on Saturday morning. The great thing is that I have come first every time, and today was my second fastest time of the 12 weeks.

However, the one thing I have (not) done and want to write about the most is an event I chose not to go to on Tuesday, despite being successful in my application to attend. We met up with Alyson’s sister and husband in Cannock Chase Forest park for a lovely walk and a ‘socially distanced picnic’ sitting either end of a felled tree. There were a lot of people around, but it was easy to keep a safe distance on the miles of paths. There was a takeout service from the cafe and there were plenty of Portaloo facilities which were clean and had plenty of hand sanitiser.

The event I chose not to go to was a Zoom conference with the Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Jonathan Reynolds and other MPs and Labour Party members. It was to discuss policies that feed into the National Policy Forum consultation taking place this summer. The agenda looked an extensive one;

This policy discussion is on the subject of the future of social security after coronavirus and we would like to hear your thoughts and ideas on the questions below: 

1. What has the crisis taught us about the role of social security in protecting the most vulnerable in society and the gaps in the current system?
2. To what extent has the crisis changed public perceptions of social security? How can we build on any changes to ensure wider public support for the system?
3. To what extent should social security be a universal entitlement available to all?
4. How can social security support self-employed workers?
5. What role can social security play in addressing inequalities and poverty in society?

Many of these were topics I wanted to write about when I started this blog and if you look back to the first one on the 5th April there is a section on Economics where I ask

• How we use our wealth to best effect for what both main political parties agree should be ‘for the many not the few’.
• How corporations, public bodies, small and medium businesses, wealthy individuals, and every individual supports each other.
• Do we need a fundamental rethink and ‘reordering’ of past conventions?

So it would have been extremely interesting to have been in the session and one of the ‘breakout room’ where we would have had the opportunity to discuss in smaller groups with other MPs acting as leaders and Johnathan popping in to listen and answer questions.

The brief paper that we needed to read before attending the forum set out the problems with the current system, many of which were there before the crisis, but have been highlighted in recent weeks. It acknowledged the steps the present government has taken in the furlough, business rates, business loan and help for the self-employed, which have been unprecedented in recent times. The paper also pointed out the issues that need a fundamental rethink.

I admit to having no formal economic training and acknowledge that the taxation and benefits system for any ‘developed’ country is complex. A balance between ‘fairness’, ‘equality’, ‘incentive’, ‘reward’, ‘ethics’, ‘environment’, the fast-moving needs of the ‘labour market’ and dealing with factors arising from being an interconnected world and ‘globalisation’. But you don’t need to be any sort of expert to know that the present system is failing. It fails not just those in real poverty and need, but large numbers of working people who are claiming benefits and slipping into poverty as housing  and other costs rise at a time when wages are rising slowly.

To pick up on the current mood, the effects of the virus and ‘Black Lives Matter’, the present system already discriminates against the BAME community, those who we now call ‘heroes’ in low-paid but vital jobs, many of who are women, the disabled, young people coming out of education trying to get employment and into a home of their own. After the virus, these impacts will only increase.

In mid-February I ordered the book below, prompted by a discussion we were having in one of our church study groups with Richard who worked at the local Credit Union. I had been reading the second one for the last year. Both have something to add to the conversation we would have had at the forum and for a policy fit for the 21st century.

 

Richard’s statement about what we could do to help those who he sees at the Credit Union was simple. ‘As one of the richest countries in the world, it’s time we paid everybody in the country a basic income’. The other book explains how our current taxation system is exploited by global corporations and wealthy individuals, using tax-havens and false reporting of money flows to avoid paying a fair share to support society. This can be to the point of criminality by those who setup the money markets to manipulate it in ways that even governments don’t understand, and for which there is little transparency. Radical change is needed considering the ideas in both books to reform the economy.

A Basic Citizen’s Income

There is not enough room to explain all the ideas around this and I suspect most people’s reaction would be ‘well it is a nice idea, but it will never work’.   The details need to be worked out after a full debate and explanation. The amount needs to be considered but the ‘simplicity’ of it, in my opinion, is unarguable.

Every citizen who reaches working age will receive a basic income for them to use as they wish.  It is unconditional and nonwithdrawable (with higher amounts for older people and smaller amounts for children). It will be paid by the government directly into people’s bank account on a regular basis with no means testing at all. This immediately cuts out whole swathes of bureaucracy or ‘red tape’ so disliked by many politicians, it allows citizens who live in the present world characterised as a ‘precariat’ of uncertain income and changing jobs frequently, quickly slipping into needing help. There would be no need for Universal Benefit as everyone would have some income and could build a ‘reserve’ to see them through short periods of unemployment or sickness (or lack of income caused by a situation like the present virus). It could, over time, replace the need to pay a state pension. It will give the ability to those who want to pursue higher education the means to subsidise that, those who want to setup a small business to do so, and those in work to help others less fortunate or to pool ‘unneeded income’ to give a hand up to other family members. All such income would be taxable.

It needs bringing in with another pillar of a fair society – education. I can already hear people suggesting that it is a recipe for ‘scroungers and wasters’. Children and families will be taught basic money management and the way the economy works. Banks would have to change their model to help people manage their money well, and stop them from getting into debt through bad choices.

There is not enough room in this blog to explain it all, but I hope the chapter titles in Malcolm Torry’s book will prompt you to think about it more;

1. Imagine….
2. How did we get to where we are now?
3. The economy. work and employment
4. Individuals and their families
5. Administrative efficiency
6. Reducing poverty and inequality
7. Is it feasible?
8. Options for implementation
9. Pilot projects and experiments
10. Objections
11. Alternatives to a Citizen’s Basic Income

Tax and the Campaign for a Just Society

This is the subtitle of the second book I read a review in The Methodist Recorder and asked for it as a Christmas present. I have not read it all but the parts I have made me realise that the reason a universal basic income might not happen, is the people who setup our complex financial structures are also those who control and exploit it.  Although not formally setup until March 2003 the Tax Justice Network (TJN) has its roots in the almost total lack of research as to what lead to extreme poverty in Africa, South-East Asia and Latin America as money flowed out from these countries under the guise of ‘aid’ to the financial centres in Geneva, New York and London via a complex network of offshore companies and trusts located in secrecy jurisdictions. They exploited the fact that many of the countries they were ‘helping’ had poor governance and taxation systems and officials willing to be corrupted by the promise of wealth such people could only dream of.  One of the writers of the book has worked ‘on the inside’ and struggled with what he saw in terms of ‘transfer pricing’, tax havens and ‘illicit financial flows’ as part of a team working for accountants Deloitte Touche and as Economic Advisor to the States of Jersey and alongside the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). He witnesses what he calls the ‘dark arts of tax havenry’ and relations with Hong Kong, Jersey, London, and Singapore. Every time he questioned something with senior people, lecturers for his degree or powerful people in government, it was side-stepped and he realised he had wandered into an ‘economic blind spot’. TJN is now an established organisation working with partners in the charity sector and other likeminded organisation to campaign for transparency and information and changes to the global economic system. Not easy when you have the full weight of large financial institutions funding lobbyists and vested interests.

Again, there is not enough space here to write in full, but the book is in the form of individual articles/papers written by a variety of authors. I urge you to read some of them and here is a selection;

• What is necessary is possible
• Pinstripe Outlaws
• The Africa Question: Where Do All the Profits Go?
• Tax Justice and the Oil Industry
• Tax Competition: A case of Winner Takes All?
• Revealed: How Multinational Companies Avoid the Taxman
• Making the Link:  Tax, Governance and Civil Society
• The City of London: A State Within a State
• Harnessing Land Value as a Green Tax
• How Much Should the Rich Pay in Taxes
• Didn’t they notice?
• Human Rights and Just Taxation
• Public Duty, Private Gain: Professional Ethics and Tax

The one highlighted in red I found the most shocking as it exposes the City of London as the largest enablers of tax havens in the world. In four short pages written 11 years ago it explains why it is unlikely that any UK Government will agree to such a radical policy as transparency in tax avoidance, and how the narrative against a citizens income could be stopped in its tracks by ‘those who have the real power’.

Other news this week

• The Black Lives Matters protests continued and after the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue last week and the graffiti daubed on Winston Churchill’s in Parliament Square, a debate started on which others should be removed. This, like most topics I have written about, is why education is so important. The historical context of our ‘famous’ people and the benefit to society needs to be explained and the flaws of whatever size or nature drawn out. In some cases this could lead to public statues being placed into museums and others to have information that gives both sides of the stories. None of this should take focus away from what we need to do now and in the future to change society for the better.
  There is no doubt that the violence on Saturday by so called ‘protectors of the statues’ was nothing more than extremist thuggery and anarchists and aggression towards the police. Many of the young men involved are clearly missing the chance to fight other football hooligans in the (not) Euro 2020 Championships.
• 
  I admit to being taken aback when one of my ‘local heroes’ Captain James Cook’s statue in Whitby as well as those in Australia. In the several books I have read of Cook’s life story it is clear that he is an example of someone from Middlesbrough born to a labourer who worked his way up from farmhand, to shop assistant, to junior sailor in the merchant navy, and became a senior captain in the Admiralty and who led surveys of large parts of the then ‘undiscovered continents’ and routes between them. These were ‘different times’ but Cook was known to treat his crews ‘relatively well’ and never lost one from the diseases of the time.  He is honoured in his hometown with schools and the major hospital named after him. The other parkrun I sometimes do when I am in the north east starts just outside the Captain Cook Birthplace Museum in a park in Marton next to the place where he was born in what was at the time little more than a shack and is no longer there. The cottage the family is supposed to have lived in when they moved to Great Ayton was moved to Melbourne in Australia in 1934.
  I completely understand the objection by indigenous first nation Australians that James Cook ‘discovered Australia’ and the suggestion by them that 26th January the ‘Australia Day’ national holiday should be renamed ‘Invasion Day’/ ‘National Day of Mourning’ / ‘Survival Day’ and the colonial nature of the planting of the flag on Australian soil by Co0k’s fleet that day should be set in historical context.
  
  But as far as being involved in the slave trade, there is nothing of that in Cook’s story that I have read, but it is true that he killed Maori warriors on arrival in New Zealand and proceeded to subdue the then self-governing people, misunderstanding their initial ‘welcome’ as one of a threat to his ship and crew. Similarly an incident of kidnapping a king on Hawaii that lead ultimately to Cook’s death was a tragic episode.
• The protests in the US continued and another unarmed black man was shot  by a white policeman. Another name added to the ever growing list.
• Education has been to the fore again this week. A government that put a lot of energy into the building of new hospitals and getting retired medical staff to return, appears unwilling to do a similar thing for our schools. There is no sign of building temporary classrooms or taking over unused public buildings or exhibition centres to setup places to help the generation that is missing out on six months of formal education, particularly those with no facilities at home. A straw poll of retired teachers I know shows that some might be willing to go back and help in the short term with classes to make up for lost time. As someone who left teaching 34 years ago I am not sure my ‘skills’ are up to the job or my subject knowledge of Chemistry and Mathematics!
• The official number of total deaths announced at the daily briefings continued to fall gradually as measured by the 7-day average. The figures for Wednesday to Saturday were 151, 202, 181, 36 and on Sunday the total stood at 41,698.
• The 14-day quarantine for people arriving at airports was introduced but other than airlines complaining there was little news on the effectiveness and no numbers on how many people had been followed up or fined.
• In the coming week ‘non-essential’ shops who have put social distancing measures and are self-declared ‘Covid Secure’ can re-open.
• As I write Boris Johnson, pushed by some Conservative MPs are looking to reduce the social distancing from two metres. It seems ironic that many who were in favour of ‘taking back control’ from the EU are now quoting many countries from who are using shorter distances than we are. It would be interesting to know if their views would be the same if a declaration by the EU that all member states should adopt a distance of one metre had been given when we were still part of the bloc and operating a ‘different standard? I am not sure how those retailers who have already spent millions of pounds (much of it grants from local government) on reorganising layouts and putting signage in, will feel when the advice changes again in three weeks as hospitality starts opening.
• Today is also the third anniversary of the Grenfell Tower disaster. We saw the tower covered in screening as we drove through London last August. It was a larger example of the covered statues this weekend. At the time there was much talk about how the lower paid and largely ethnic minority key workers who live there had been forgotten by the wealthy borough next door. Three years on this seems to have been dropped from the agenda. Sound familiar? This and the violence in the centre of London makes me less optimistic that we will ‘learn the lessons’ and start being kinder to each other. 
• 

So how has week 12 been for us?

Apart from our walk in Cannock Chase Forest, Alyson has continued daily walks and I joined her for one on Friday which was also the anniversary of her mum’s death 12 months ago. We walked on a footpath through fields of corn and stopped between the showers to listen to the sounds of birds singing. The sadness of the anniversary was tempered by feelings of gratitude that this time last year we didn’t have to cope with a pandemic, and the associated issues of visiting care homes, organising the funeral, and sorting the sale of the family house in the north east.

Alyson took another trip to the garden centre to buy a yellow rose to plant as a reminder of her mum who loved roses and the colour yellow. The garden is starting to look a blaze of colours as other plants flower and grow.

The birdlife in our garden continues to become more varied and this week as Alyson was exercising on the bike in our conservatory she saw a buzzard land briefly, and today a green woodpecker visited. The buzzard probably explained the headless body and scattered feathers from a blackbird we found on Monday.

With the announcement of ‘household bubbles’ where single person households can pair with others without social distancing and even stay overnight, we asked our son David if he wanted to travel from Bath to see us. He declared himself ‘happy in his own bubble’! He has managed to go for an open water swim and some more rowing.

Zoom coffees have continued and I attended my weekly streamed service from Methodist Central Hall, thankfully not affected by the violence just outside in Parliament Square. I am not sure that any statues of our founder John Wesley are on the ‘hitlist’ of those for removal, but like all of us his life was not without flaws. There is a statue in what was a British Colony of Georgia in the southern states of America. In 1736 John and his brother Charles travelled to the newly formed parish Savannah, as Anglican High churchmen with the primary aim of evangelising to the Native Americans. This was not successful and an incident with a young lady who he had a failed relationship with, and then banned from taking communion did not go down well.

Nevertheless, John Wesley went on to found a movement that, as as I written before, was a reforming one with social principles and members who were key in the Trade Unions and Labour Party. I try to live by his rules on wealth which sparked my interest in the two books in this blog. Those rules were;

Gain all you can. Save all you can. Give all you can.

Stay safe and let’s see what the next seven days brings. Two things are certain;

• we will (not) be rushing to join the queues in the shops that are opening.
• Alyson will definitely (not) be watching the restart of live sport in the form of Premier League and Championship football!

 

Coronavirus week 11 – ‘I can’t breathe…’ not because of Covid-19

How many pandemics can we have at once?

When I started to draft this week’s blog the other day, the first lines were about other news breaking in, and that for the first time in weeks it wasn’t part of the first headline. I suggested that even the Daily Briefings are getting ‘bored with themselves’, with just slides and questions rather than new announcements. By Friday Matt Hancock was on his own with no scientists. I thought that by next weekend they will be finished or once a week.  It turns out that they are going to be only on weekdays, so none this weekend. The statistics were still produced by the Department of Health and Social Care and they showed that on Saturday 204 deaths were announced and on Sunday 77 bringing the total to 40,542.

As the number of official deaths passed 40,000 it felt like a grim milestone, and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures of all deaths mentioning Covid-19 is over 60,000. This week worldwide deaths passed 400,000.

The news that pushed Coronavirus off the front pages of newspapers and further down the television bulletins were protests in the US and other countries about the death of George Floyd.  George was a black American killed by a white policeman by kneeling on his neck for 8 minutes 46 seconds, while George repeatedly said ‘I can’t breathe’. At first the Minneapolis Police Department denied there was anything untoward, but after mobile phone footage of the incident was broadcast, that was shown not to be true.  This triggered several days of protests in many of the larger cities across the US, several of which were used as cover for looting of shops and burning of public buildings.

I was particularly shocked by footage from a security camera of tens of people stripping a small family-run pharmacy in the Bronx area of New York of all of its stock including prescriptions made up waiting for patients to collect them.

The irony of many of them wearing masks to protect them from coronavirus was lost among interviews with the devastated owners, as it had taken them 14 years to build the business up in a relatively poor neighbourhood. The Rodriguez family are themselves members of a minority community.

As the protests spread out to Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia under the banner of ‘Black Lives Matter’ the long-standing issue of racism that has been part of American society back to the Civil War and the Civil Rights cases in the 1960’s, was high up the political agenda once more. Protesters and some policemen went down on one knee in a reminder of the act of the policeman in Milwaukee, and an echo of the protests by black players from the National Football League (NFL) a couple of years ago. President Trump had called for them to be sacked at the time. Now he sent the National Guard to clear protestors in Washington who had gathered outside a church, and then he posed in front of the church with Bible in hand, much to the indignation of the local ministers.

The Floyd family have the services of Ben Crump an attorney who takes on high profile cases for those who need representation in the areas of unlawful death and civil rights. At the memorial service in Minneapolis he said

..it was not the coronavirus pandemic that killed George Floyd. It was that other pandemic, the pandemic of racism and discrimination.

Rev Al Sharpton, a veteran of civil rights cases alongside Rev Jesse Jackson in his eulogy said it was time to stand up and say “get your knee off our necks”.

In the social media furore around the riots an interview with a former  police chief of Milwaukee appeared to show him ranting about the fact that people know the names of the last three people killed because they are black, but not the names of the last 300 killed by criminals using guns. He said there are a lot of bad policemen, but there are also a lot of unlicensed guns and he was on his way to reports of a five-year-old girl accidentally shot through the head.  The video was from 2014. The President’s son Donald Trump Jr used it to divert attention away from the race issue. The fact that the police chief was speaking after attending a meeting about the shooting of another black man Dontre Hamilton, was not mentioned.  The white officer involved was fired as he had stopped and frisked the man for no apparent reason.

Given that a record 2 million extra handguns were sold in March, many to first time gun owners, it could be that the number of Americans dying in the future from the ‘pandemic of gun ownership’, will be a high figure.

Despite the home secretary Priti Patel and Australian prime minister Scott Morrison appealing for demonstrations not to happen due to the virus this weekend, large numbers turned out in London and Sydney. Masks and gloves were handed out, but as numbers grew social distancing became an issue. This type of protests needs to be done ‘in the moment’, but it could affect the spread of the virus. So I understand those who criticise. We shouldn’t forget that in the UK we have had our own problems with ‘stop and search’ tactics of policing, and claims of ‘institutional racism’. And these things are not only apparent in police and government, but in business and housing. The scenes of disturbances around Downing Street and violence directed towards the police were shocking. During the demonstrations earlier in the week some people had defaced memorials around the Cenotaph on Whitehall.  The next morning a group of young people were filmed cleaning the graffiti off and being berated by a protestor who said ‘could you not leave it for just one day’. It turns out the ‘young people’ were cadet trainees at the Household Cavalry from barracks nearby. On Sunday in Bristol a statue of the ‘slave master’ Edward Colston was pulled down and one of the demonstrators knelt on his neck. The city is built on the wealth of the slave trade and even though Colston gave much of his wealth to charitable causes, setup schools and hospitals, there are some who think the record of their former MP was ‘sanitised’ and rewritten before the statue was erected.

On the news pictures I saw, however, most of the demonstrations were peaceful and did their best to maintain social distancing (if not the regulations about more than six people meeting). Overhead shots of demonstrations in Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington in the US and Manchester in our area of the UK showed a great deal of good distancing and masks.

Australia, like America has had problems with police brutality and race and this was the focus of the protests. in 2016 David Dungay Jr an indigenous Australian man was killed whilst being restrained by police in a hospital saying those same words ‘I can’t breathe’. We saw the pictures of people talking about their frustration that yet again something happens and again nothing happens.

The last word goes to an academic on a video my cousin Janet’s husband Chris posted on Facebook. I don’t know the name of the person or anything of their background, and it was from an organisation called ‘Atheist Republic’ and appeared to be cut together from a longer one. None of that matters as it struck a chord with its simple message . The question was put ‘why do we hate’?

We hate because we are taught to hate. We hate because we are ignorant….We have been taught that there are four or five different races…there are not…there is only one race on this earth which we are all part of, and that’s the human race. But we have separated ourselves into different races so that some of us can see ourselves as superior to others….It hasn’t worked, and it is bad for everyone. It’s time to get over this business. There is no gene for racism, no gene for bigotry, you’re not born a bigot, you need to learn to be a bigot. Anything you learn you can unlearn, it’s time to unlearn bigotry. It’s time to get over this thing…and pretty soon. I am an educator…and it’s my business to lead people out of ignorance, the ignorance that you are better or worse than someone because of the amount of a pigment you have in your skin. Pigmentation of your skin has nothing to do with intelligence or your worth as a human being. It’s time to get over that.

We are struggling to find a vaccine for the coronavirus pandemic and are worried that it may take a year rather than a few months. It seems that we have been unable to find a vaccine for the pandemics of racism and gun control, or the other pandemics of hunger, poverty, and inequality which have been with us for centuries. After the coronavirus pandemic is over there could be a pandemic of unemployment, a pandemic of economic uncertainty and a pandemic of growing debt. Can we do things to ‘unlearn’ the behaviours that make them happen.

As a representative to the Methodist Conference at the end of the month (see note later on about our week), I have been asked to complete some training on ‘unconscious’ bias as part of the church’s Equality Diversity Inclusion (EDI) policies. I commit to doing so as a small step to understanding my own behaviours and to check if I need to ‘unlearn’ some attitudes.

Other news this week

• The news that pushed coronavirus down to third place on the television bulletins was that of the German police identifying a suspect for the abduction of Madeleine McCann in 2007 and declared it a murder inquiry.  It is a story that was horrible the first time around and doesn’t get any easier each time it crops up again. I hope that the family get some certainty soon.
• We live in an area, the north west, where the number of infections is not decreasing, and the R-number is on the unsafe value of almost 1.  The north west as defined by the government is a large area stretching from where we live in Crewe to Kendal 110 miles away on the edge of the Lake District. However, the detailed statistical tables show that in our local hospital there was only one death on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday this week, compared to deaths every day and a total of 15 the week before.
• Crewe is a town which is dependent on the ‘health’ of one of its largest employers Bentley Motors.  Admittedly, not as dependent as it was when we moved here 40 years ago and along with the Railway Works, Rolls Royce Bentley as it was then were the main employers in the town. The announcement on Friday that nearly 25% of the 4,200 workforce were under the threat of redundancy is a blow to the local economy. This wasn’t due entirely to coronavirus but adjustments for social distancing has cut production by half in recent weeks.
• With the government declaring two weeks quarantine on travellers coming in through airports, there was talk of  ‘air bridges’ that would allow those from some countries with lower infections not to have to do so. The airline owners are against the quarantines and some countries will not allow UK citizens to have an ‘air bridge’ with them as we are a country with a high infection rate.
• Track, test, and trace continued to be a point of contention with Boris Johnson challenged at Prime Ministers Questions about the lack of statistics and details around this topic.
• MPs returned to parliament and there was much discontent about having to vote by forming a queue which was over a kilometre long to walk past the Speaker to say which way they were voting. The irony was that the motion was about the type of voting that could be used if they remain away from the House of Commons due to the virus. One said it was like ‘doing the Mogg conga queuing for a ride at Alton Towers that turned out to be a little bit sh*t.’

How was week 11 for us?

Alyson took advantage of the new ‘freedoms’ to go to a garden centre 8 miles away but came back disappointed by the choice of plants and the lack of atmosphere as the main centre and shops were not open.

Alyson was delighted, however, that as we watched another week of BBC’s Springwatch we had a version going on in our garden. Visitors to the feeders included, bullfinch, greenfinch, goldfinch, long-tailed tits, and a mother blue tit feeding three tiny fledglings as they lined up on one of the supports.

I was elected as one of seven representatives from our District to go to the Methodist Conference in Telford at the end of June, but that has been cancelled in its usual form. We usually meet as a group to discuss the topics and format of the 5 days, and we did so this year but via Zoom, as we will with 300+ others this year. The Conference will not have the debate and resolution of the report we discussed last year on our understanding of relationships. This could have paved the way to same sex marriage taking place in our churches, but it has been held over to next year. It was felt that if we couldn’t give the time needed, meet in smaller groups face to face, and share on the fringes of the Conference, it could be challenged. This won’t stop us looking at more reports and ‘business’ to move our witness and evangelism forward.

Wednesday was Global Running Day, but I wasn’t aware of that as I set out in the rain for my early morning 5k run. It was only when I got back and Alyson told me that she heard it on the radio and I found out that I had joined with over a million people in 170 countries to celebrate a simple sport that those like me with little natural ability can participate in.

During my weekly virtual coffee later that morning with David, a friend from church, we reflected on the ways we need to change personally and as a church in how things are done, and lessons learned during the pandemic. My evening Bible study with 10 others via Zoom is one such example that we will continue with. There really is little point splitting us into two groups and travelling to each other’s houses, especially on cold wet winter evenings.

The cold and damp weather that started on Wednesday led to Alyson cancelling the get together with three former work colleagues in our garden on Thursday morning. The beauty of a ‘virtual coffee morning’ like the one I hosted for our head injury charity, is that the weather will not stop it taking place. There were 11 of us and I used a feature in Zoom that allowed all of us to be put in two separate ‘rooms’. One for the group that would normally meet in Crewe and the other at Ellesmere Port. It worked well and the smaller numbers meant that those who didn’t want to speak in the larger gathering chatted to members that they were used to meeting.

HIP Charity – Cheshire-wide coffee group members

We had ‘virtual Friday night drinks’ with Alyson’s brother and sister and then on Saturday night we had a Zoom quiz with my cousins and family. Alyson and I came second out of ten teams after 100 questions using an app on my phone called ‘Kahoot’.

Sunday brought my now weekly trip via YouTube to the service at Methodist Central Hall in London. We restated our belief in the sanctity of all human life, knelt in solidarity with those who are victims of discrimination, and prayed for the family of George Floyd. It brought to mind one of the modern songs we sing that challenges us to act for the wider good. These are three of the verses. They seem appropriate given the news this week.

Will you use your voice; will you not sit down
when the multitudes are silent?
Will you make a choice to stand your ground
when the crowds are turning violent?

In your city streets will you be God’s heart?
Will you listen to the voiceless?
Will you stop and eat, and when friendships start,
will you share your faith with the faithless?

Will you watch the news with the eyes of faith
and believe it could be different?
Will you share your views using words of grace?
Will you leave a thoughtful imprint?

Stay safe and I hope to post another instalment next week.

 

 

Life & Death – Coronavirus week 10 – taking things one day at a time

Week  10 in daily format.

I usually start these blogs at the end of the week but decided today that I will try doing a ‘daily’ note. This will allow me to capture my thoughts in real time and my mood in relation to events around the crisis. I will review and correct some grammar and shorten sections prior to publishing, but the essence of the days won’t change.

Monday 25th May – ‘I have never been so angry..’

Having made a determined effort in last week’s blog not to write much about Dominic Cummings, the story of his 260 mile trip to Durham, and Boris Johnson’s ‘defence’ of his actions at Sunday’s daily briefing, I woke up this morning quite angry. Not about the actions of the senior advisor, but more that I was so distracted by the whole thing that I missed a huge section of the blog which I had planned to cover.

Sunday 24th May was, for Methodists like me a special day. It is called  ‘Aldersgate Sunday’ formerly ‘Wesley Day’. As the web site for the Methodist Church in Great Britain explains;

In May 1738, John unwillingly attended worship at a Moravian ‘Religious Society’ meeting on Aldersgate Street in London. It was during this service that he felt his “heart strangely warmed”, as he experienced God’s love in a most personal and life-giving way. Until then he had known God in his mind, but not in his heart. Now he understood the value of a personal experience of God that would bring assurance of salvation to the believer.

This year the 24th fell on a Sunday so that made it even more relevant. Not so reluctantly as John Wesley, I attended a streamed service from Methodist Central Hall in London, just over two miles from Aldersgate Street in the City of London.  It was a wonderful service with over 1,500 watching. It was also the last service of their minister Rev Dr Martyn Atkins, former President of the Conference who was ‘retiring’ or as we call it ‘sitting down’ after over 40 years of service to his church. He was what we call ‘one of Mr Wesley’s preachers’, who had been ‘stationed’ in various places across the country as ministers in our denomination are called to be ‘itinerant’, usually staying in one place for around 10 years and then moving to another ‘appointment’ .

The penultimate service I attended in church before they were closed for lockdown was at Methodist Central Hall on 1st February. We were down in London for a visit and, never having been there, I decided to go for the Sunday service. It is an impressive place, built from the donations of one million Methodists, including members of my mum and dad’s families. Martyn was preaching and gave a challenging message about putting on the ‘armour of God’. I received a blessing and was anointed with oil by one of the Deacons at the end of the service. I  managed a few words with Martyn as we had briefly met a couple of years previously. It was in a small room at one of our closed churches, repurposed as a second-hand bookshop raising funds for the museum of Methodism at Englesea Brook Chapel, which is in our circuit between Crewe & Alsager. I was dropping some books off and Martyn was chatting to our Superintendent minister who worked there on his days off. Martyn had written an article for the ‘Methodist Recorder’ that came out that day and which was a challenge to modernise, and I told him it was thoughtful and a great piece. Martyn didn’t remember the conversation but knows the bookshop as he is a great collector of books, and said he would be going there a lot in the future as he and his wife are moving back to Derbyshire, less than an hour away from Alsager.

So, my anger was about not mentioning all that in last week’s blog.

However, the anger referred to in the heading of this section is my wife Alyson’s. Having never been ‘political’ before, she found the email address of our local MP this morning and wrote to him to express her anger at the situation over Dominic Cummings and her disappointment at the way Boris Johnson has handled it. I don’t think Alyson will mind me saying that her natural inclination is not to vote Labour. As a pharmacist and frontline worker who has seen the effects of coronavirus on her patients she wanted her MP to know. He is Dr Kieran Mullan who worked in the accident & emergency department prior to becoming our local MP for the conservatives and has gone back to work some shifts. It will be interesting to see if she gets a reply.

Neither of our moods was improved after the two press conferences that evening. The extraordinary lengthy one with the special advisor in which he showed no regrets but tried to explain why he could make special arrangements for his family. Followed an hour later by one with Boris Johnson. No one, particularly the journalists, was listening to details of how lockdown was to be eased by opening of shops and secondary schools in mid-June. Everyone wanted to keep talking about Mr Cummings. As the day ended the special advisor was still in place, left to be judged in the court of public opinion.

I sat and wrote my own email to Dr Mullan MP.

Tuesday 26th May – hey ho, hey ho, it’s back to work we go..

When the prime minister told the country two weeks ago to get back to work, I didn’t think it applied to me. I was enjoying my semi-retirement, time with Alyson, the warm weather and helping my church and the charities I am involved with. However, at 9.30am I found myself attending a Zoom ‘Monday Morning Meeting’ (moved due to yesterday’s Bank Holiday) with 18 of my new colleagues at an accountancy practice in Manchester.

My friend Steve had asked me back to do another systems project for his new company. If Alyson and I had been managing to take all the holidays that we had planned, there was no way I could have said yes. Truth be known I had some doubts about my ability but after a couple of meetings and 1-2-1’s my interest, and not a little ‘excitement’, was back. It took most of my day, and I had foregone the usual early morning exercise.

Meanwhile Dominic Cummings was still in his job, despite one ministerial resignation and a ‘revolt’ of 30 MPs and literally thousands of similar emails like mine to local MPs. It was left once again to the BBC ‘s Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis in her opening ‘monologue’ to sum up as follows

Dominic Cummings broke the rules. The country can see that and it’s shocked that the government can’t. The longer ministers and the prime minister tell us he worked within them, the more angry the response to this scandal is likely to be.  He was the man remember who got the public mood, who tagged the lazy label ‘elite’ on those who disagreed. He should understand that public mood now; one of fury, contempt and anguish. He made those who struggled to keep the rules feel like fools and has allowed many more to feel they can flout them. The prime minister knows all this, but despite the resignation of one minister, growing unease from his backbenchers, a dramatic early warning from the polls, deep national disquiet, Boris Johnson has chosen to ignore it. Tonight we consider what this blind loyalty means about the workings of ‘Number Ten’. We do not expect to be joined by a government minister but that won’t stop us asking the questions.

Wednesday 27th May

Today was a warm one and started with my weekly 5k ‘local Parkrun’ which I have been doing as the usual Saturday morning one, I have done since 2016, has been suspended as part of the lockdown measures. We ate all three meals outside on our patio table and were delighted to see a pair of young goldfinches on our feeders.

The numbers of Conservative MPs asking for Dominic Cummings to  be sacked was over 40, and the prime minister was before a committee of senior members of parliament from all political parties. Their questions were supposed to be on his performance in the new parliament which started in December. However, they too concentrated a lot on his special advisor and what effect it might have in getting the message over for the rest of the pandemic.

Health secretary Matt Hancock tried to distract from the Cummings story by changing the sign on the podium at the daily press conference announcing the NHS test and trace strategy to help ease the lockdown. He was ambushed by the video question from a member of the public asking if everyone who had been fined for travelling to arrange childcare would have the money refunded. Perhaps taken aback by the questioner being,  as he so tweely described him, ‘a man of the cloth’, he desperately searched for an answer and promised to take it back and ask the treasury. The next day the answer came back – ‘no’.

At 9pm I logged onto the American businessman Elon Musk’s SpaceX website to watch a live stream of his Falcon 9 reusable rocket taking men into space in a Dragon spaceship that sits on top and carries astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley. It will dock with the International Space Station (ISS) and then return to earth. This was the first time since 2011, and it was cancelled with 17 minutes to go due to storm clouds. I looked forward to the second try on Saturday.

The virus touched this event when a photo of people watching the launch from a road bridge nearby caused a social media storm around social distancing and accusations that the picture in USA Today was an old one. I read an account on the paper’s blog that showed the picture from 2011 and you can see not quite so many  people, and some in the today’s one wearing masks.

We have watched the launch of a small rocket from a beach nearby the Kennedy Space Centre during a visit in 1994, so can understand the interest of locals in such a massive event.

Just before turning off my laptop to go to bed I made a sign parodying the one on  the daily briefing podium. Having done so, I almost deleted it immediately, worrying if such a thing was ok. I posted it on Facebook and Tweeted it to Rev Helen Kirk, our own Chair of District or ‘woman of the cloth’!

Thursday 28th May

The tactics seemed to work as the prime minister’s special advisor was not the top headline on news bulletins. My ‘funny’ podium sign was retweeted by Helen and liked on Facebook, so guess it was ok. This was the exchange between Helen and me.

When we had a coffee via Skype with friends David & Janis it was something they were annoyed about. Janis knows the road to Barnard Castle where the now infamous ‘test drive’ was taken and thought it unsuitable as a check for the type of journey back to London.

It was another very warm day and we had meals outside and did more work on the garden.

The evening briefing, after the cabinet had done their legally required 3-weekly review, brought news of another ‘easing’ of the lockdown measures. From next Monday we will be able to meet in groups of six in a garden or outside space, some non-essential shops, outdoor markets and car show rooms can open from the 8th of June.  Premier League matches would start from 17th June behind closed doors. Boris Johnson stated that he wanted to ‘draw a line’ under the Cummings affair and move on ‘as the country wanted’. Journalists had other ideas and asked more questions about the ‘illegal trip’, even trying to involve the Chief Scientist and Chief Medical Officer in the questions. There were questions about how people might hold ‘socially distancing barbecues’ in their gardens, and what if someone wanted to use a toilet in the house. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland announced different measures from England, just to add to the confusion.

The evening brought the tenth and final clap for carers. It was well supported and loud on our street, but it felt like the right time to end it.

Friday 29th May

We had planned to get up very early, have breakfast, drive to Delamere Forest, and see if we could manage a walk without getting too close to other people. We arrived at 8.45am and walked to a small isolated lake surrounded by some beautiful yellow orchids. It was not too busy with people, but there was a lot of litter from visitors over recent days. We resolved to take bags and collect it if we came again. We saw a lot of birds, went on a rope swing under a tree, and walked the parkrun course.  We arrived home by mid-morning and sat in our warm garden for lunch.

Alyson commented during the walk that it seemed odd to be in such a peaceful place surrounded by life when there were thousands of people in hospital fighting for their lives. I said that most days were like that, but it had been heightened in the last three months.

Rishi Sunak, Chancellor of the exchequer announced an extension of the furlough scheme and support for the self-employed until October.  It was at a slightly lower rate and employers were going to contribute towards the costs. Employees can go back part-time under the scheme.

We watched the last of the daily  BBC Two ‘Springwatch’ reports. It has been a joy to see all the birds nesting and trying to survive. Insights into nature, and a new section of ‘mindfulness’ where they show 90 seconds of pictures with no commentary. We have had river valleys, woodlands, seaside, and tonight’s was lakes and mountains. Wonderful.

This was followed by the satirical program Have I Got News For You, and we were back to Dominic Cummings again. The fun (laced with real anger) they had with the story reached new levels of satire. Apparently there is a Durham slang of ‘that’s a load Barney Castle’ meaning a pathetic excuse. It originates from medieval saying based on a siege in the castle. As one famous columnist is fond of saying ‘You couldn’t make it up!’.

Saturday 30th May

Another bright and sunny day. I got a new PB for my new regular ‘local parkrun’ and like every other week I finished in first place! Alyson was back on the frontline working a morning shift in a community pharmacy. It was again one where she felt safe with one patient at a time.

Two members of the Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (SAGE) broke ranks to voice concern about easing lockdown restrictions too early, risking a second wave and peak of infections. There was a worry that having announced on Thursday that people could meet up in larger groups for a barbecue in gardens, some would start early with the forecast sunny weekend. Our neighbours had two families together in their garden with little evidence of social distancing, and on Alyson’s afternoon walk she saw a group of youths playing a football game.

I watched the SpaceX mission finally take off to the ISS at 8.22pm. It was a spectacular event.

Sunday 31st May

Harold Wilson, labour prime minister in the 1960’s is quoted telling lobbyists before a general election, when it wasn’t looking good, ‘a week is a long time in politics’. He won the election with an increased majority. Well, it is a week since the papers and television were full of stories and accusations about a trip to Durham. It felt at the time like Mr Cummings would be sacked, especially after another day trip to Barnard Castle came out. Boris Johnson decided to try to ride out the storm, pushback on any questions, and focus on getting the next steps of easing restrictions out. It appears to have worked. The news today was of opening schools and some shops tomorrow, and the overnight announcement that those who have been ‘shielding’, and locked in their own homes for the last ten weeks are to be allowed out for walks in the local area but still not to go to shops. They can meet up with one person from another household in the open air but must maintain social distancing. As the virus is around less than it was the chances of infection have gone from 1 in 40 at the start of their self-isolation to 1 in 1,000 now.

This Sunday in the church year is Pentecost (what used to be called Whitsun), the anniversary of the formation of the early church and the day the first ‘sermon’ was preached by Simon Peter after the coming of the Holy Spirit. Watching the service streamed from Methodist Central Hall, preacher Rev Howard Mellor reminded us that the disciples had been effectively in ‘lockdown’ for coming up to 50 days waiting for the next stage in their work.  The image with tongues of fire raining down reminded me both of the fires burning in the US from the protests over the killings of the unarmed black man George Floyd by a white policemen in Minneapolis, and the power of the burning of kerosene and liquid oxygen that took the two NASA astronauts towards the ISS. The US riots had spread to many more cities overnight with more fires and looting. There was little social distancing going on there or at the protests in central London.

I watched the live stream of the docking manoeuvre on SpaceX’s web site as the Dragon-2 spacecraft gently attached to ISS. Despite the seemingly ‘slow and careful’ way the two vehicles came together; we were reminded by the commentator on the video that the two vehicles were travelling at 7.66km per second or over 17,000 miles per hour. As I watched the spaceship close in ‘slowly’ for the last 20 metres between the two vehicles which took just over a minute, they travelled over 300 miles or the distance from Crewe to Land’s End! All at 260 miles above the earth. Over 1.3 million people were watching live on-line.   Docking happened at 3:16pm and the alarm on my phone went off. It is set to remind me of the famous Bible verse John 3:16. My mind went back to the time last November when I stood on steps on top of the Hulda Gate up to the temple at the centre of the ancient city of Jerusalem. Our guide told us that when astronaut Neil Armstrong stood on them he said

I am more excited stepping on these stones than I was stepping on the moon.”

It was seeing earth from the Apollo spacecraft and from the moon that reinforced Armstrong’s belief in something larger than humanity. He had been brought up in a Methodist family and on return from the moon he gave a speech in front of the U.S. Congress in which he thanked them for giving him the opportunity to see some of the grandest views of the Creator.

The final daily briefing of the week gave the figures for deaths on Saturday as 113 compared to 215 on Friday and 324 on Thursday. The total of deaths at the end of week 10 was 38,489.

We shared a weekly family Zoom with the boys. David was happy to be back on the river Avon after his second session of solo rowing from his club in Bath. He had also managed a short swim as he capsized his single-seater boat!  Michael had been walking in Delamere again.

Alyson has arranged for a friend from her ‘knit & natter’ group to come around tomorrow and sit in our garden to share a coffee. We are planning to meet up with her sister and husband for a walk somewhere between our home and theirs in Coventry.

Next week I am planning to look at a single issue related to the pandemic, perhaps the future of the health and social care services, or the costs of repaying the huge financial debts the government support has built up.

Keep safe.

---

 

So Whats the Story?….We did it!

During the weekend that Eliud Kipchoge ran a marathon in under two hours, I managed to slowly jog 10k around Tatton Park in 1 hour 12 minutes and 23 seconds. Eliud could have done it in 28 minutes 32 seconds!

The real story, however, is not my running but that together we raised a lot of money for four charities. I decided to include Parkrun Forever, the charity which, along with corporate sponsors, allows Parkrun to be free for everyone to take part in.

The total sponsorship for the charities are:

Cheshire South Methodist Circuit
£1,230.00

HIP in Cheshire
£2,860.50

UHNM Charity (Royal Stoke Hospital)
£1,312.50

Parkrun Forever
£145.00

That’s a total of £5,548

Thanks to more than 65 of my family, friends, church fellowship and HIP members who donated. Your generosity is overwhelming!

I know the charities will be grateful for the funds and it will allow them to support the people they work with, or who are helped by what they do.

The on-line donation pages have now been closed and the funds passed to the charities.

Every blessing

Ian Skaife
November 2019

 

 

So Whats the Story?….. The Long Story

This is the longer story of the reason I am doing a sponsored 10k for three charities that you can read about in my last post So Whats the Story…? A 3-2-1 offer on a sponsored 10k.

During the Olympic summer of 2012 I was training for my first short triathlon, having been a ‘slow plodder’ for about 30 years of doing 10K’s and around 15 Half Marathons including five Great North Runs. I was never competitive and my motto was ‘when the going gets tough…..it’s time to slow down or even walk if needed’.

I woke up one Wednesday morning with a splitting headache and some numbness in my right foot. Putting it down to ‘man flu’ and an old back injury I worked that day but took the next one off. On Friday I woke up and could barely move my right side and the headache was excruciating. By the time we got to A&E I could barely stand unaided. A stroke was diagnosed, and I was put in a ward and pumped full of aspirin. On Sunday after a CT scan I was told that it could be a cancerous brain tumour and I was being sent to a specialist hospital 18 miles away. They confirmed that it wasn’t a tumour but a large amount of infection. They were not able to operate, as I had so much aspirin in my blood there was a danger that I would suffer a bleed in the brain. By Thursday my condition deteriorated, and they did an emergency biopsy. This didn’t go well and early the next morning I went for a second operation to drain the infection. Alyson was told that I might not make it, and when our two sons arrived from their homes in the south, they had what we now refer to as ‘the organ donation conversation’.

Memories of the next 24 hours are sketchy but when I arrived back on the ward from intensive care, I still couldn’t move my right side and although I understood what people were saying I couldn’t answer at all. The only words I managed were a tentative ‘yes’ (when I meant no) and no (meaning yes). Later I managed to speak a little but then it was mainly swear words which, as people who know me will confirm, I rarely use.

So began treatment involving two antibiotics intravenously five times a day every day. I was also put on anti-epileptic medication to prevent fitting, and antidepressants for my low mood. The days were endless, the restless nights even longer. I was struggling with tiredness and extreme confusion. Coming to a dead stop after my life as a busy IT Project Manager was hard. I wanted to be back at work but had to learn that in the brain business, days turn to weeks and weeks to months.

I tried to read newspapers and magazines but by the end of a paragraph I had forgotten what the headline was about. I had asked for my Bible to be brought in and that was even harder to read. I couldn’t even remember The Lord’s Prayer. My Bible was still a source of some comfort, although starting on Psalms was probably not my best idea. I do have a vivid memory of Carmen, a Columbian nurse singing quietly a hymn while she gently washed my back. I shared stories with other overseas nurses who, on seeing my Bible, talked about life ‘back home’ and what their faith meant to them.

I started intense physio and speech therapy. Being left-handed was a bonus as at least I could do some basic tasks. It took three people to get me out of bed using a hoist and either onto the toilet or eventually to prop me up in a chair.  What I couldn’t do was muster the words to ask to be put back, so often sat there frustrated for hours as people came in and out of my room.

Alyson visited me twice a day every day for the next 12 weeks. I owe her a debt that will never be paid. Church friends and close family helped relate my story each day to our wider circle. My brother and cousins drove mum and dad from their home 3 hours away. I barred any visitors other than close family at first, as I looked awful and couldn’t concentrate enough. When I relented our friends were faced with Ian who didn’t have any personality. The lights were on, but no-one was at home.

Then started daily visits from close friends, our sons, Alyson’s sister and brother, cousins. I couldn’t remember who had been from one day to the next – but I know that they all made me feel better – even if it didn’t always show on my face. Chocolates, grapes, biscuits and particularly ready-made custard were very welcome!

Work colleagues from the IT & Business Consultancy business I worked in visited and I was grateful for their support covering the projects I was supposed to be managing. Alyson’s employers Co-op Pharmacy were very understanding and allowed her all the time off with compassionate leave. The stress and worry meant that she was unable to work in any useful way.

Eight weeks in I needed a third operation as infection was still collecting in my brain. I had ‘drains’ fitted linked to bags on my shoulder – I looked like ‘Dracula’s Bride’ for a week or so.

This is a scan of my brain just before the operation on the left, and what a ‘normal’ brain looks like on the right – you don’t need to be medically trained to see the pools of infection and damage….

Scan 3rd September 2012

Scan of healthy brain

The result was a small improvement in all my symptoms; I managed to move a toe then bend my ankle.  I managed some ‘freedom’ with a wheelchair that I could push myself around the ward and, if Alyson came with me, to the café or even outside. Friends and family began to see some big changes in both my alertness and mobility.

Steve Ingrouille, the minister at my local Methodist church, came to visit and we had the strangest communion I have ever received sitting in a corner of the public restaurant. Steve did the complete service with the bread and wine used at my church the previous Sunday.
Alyson also had great support from church friends who rallied around to help and I believe that the prayers they gave aided my recovery. Val Mayers and our neighbours Stuart & Veronica Rhodes need a special mention. I continue to gain strength from my church fellowship and my faith.

My mood slowly improved and when mum visited me one Saturday as she left we hugged and she said ‘Love you son, keep getting better and see you soon’. These were the last words she said to me as the next day she had a heart attack and was put into a coma on a life support system for a week.  One Friday as I was taking my first steps unaided by physios I had a missed call on my mobile. It was my brother telling me that mum had died…she never got to see me walk again.

I was allowed out of hospital for one day to travel to her funeral 150 miles away and managed to stand using a frame to give part of her eulogy.

I had my laptop back by then to write and plan my ‘escape’ from the rehab hospital until my condition improved enough for Alyson to take me home in a wheelchair. The skilled consultants, surgeons, nursing team and physios had ‘fixed me’ – physically at least.

18 months of hard work started, to recover from my ongoing symptoms, regain my driving licence, and build my strength enough to stand on my own with a stick, and climb stairs. I did some part-time work in the IT Consultancy Business, helping the owners to sell the part of the business I was in. I knew about this before my illness but it meant me being made redundant. I then managed to get a little paid work with my church on finance and property.

Alyson went back to work as a pharmacy manager in a very busy community pharmacy attached to a surgery. This is an extremely demanding role with a team of around 20 to manage and unrealistic targets set. At least I was able to support her in this, being at home to look after practical things around the house, waiting for trades people, doing some of the household chores that until then had fallen mainly on Alyson. I was happy with a lower pace of life than before, and could rest when needed.

I had the hip replacement that I needed before going into hospital, and it was through this that I met Annette Turner, a brilliant physio specialising in hydrotherapy. When my consultant had signed me off in February 2013 he said it would be two years before we would know the lasting damage and implied this would be substantial. Annette convinced me that, whilst that was true, she could get me to the point where it might be that the only thing I couldn’t do was to move my little toe. That has proved to be the case.

In January 2014 I was encouraged by Beth Fisher, Service Manager from the Acquired Brain Injury service in Chester, to attend a support group who met for coffee. This is an amazing organisation who provide help for people with a brain injury to reduce the loneliness that can come from hidden symptoms, loss of confidence in social situations, along with memory issues and extreme fatigue. During the last few years this group has formed into a formal charity. I am now a trustee of Head Injured People in Cheshire.

Steve Price, an accountant who had been one of my project managers, had left to concentrate on his own business. In August 2014 he offered me the opportunity to work with him a few days a month to get out of his front room into an office,  taking on some people to help him.  I am eternally grateful to Steve and the team for the opportunity to work with them putting new systems, marketing material, social media, lots of new business processes in place as we grew. I became Compliance & Training Manager. (In April 2019 Steve and the rest of the team merged with another practice and he is now one of 5 directors in a company with 23 employees and a growing list of clients. I took the opportunity to retire).

I had another 18 months of physio and got to walk correctly and slowly, then six months later I decided to try running a few steps. I did a short route around our home in streets that I had used for training. It took me about 30 minutes to do a couple of miles with intense concentration on my foot placement and staying upright. I had to sleep for an hour afterwards. Fatigue is a lasting symptom of brain injury and several afternoons a week I sleep for 40 minutes, and each time I run I must sleep for around 50% longer than the time I take.

I don’t remember how I heard about Parkrun but in April 2016 I arrived at Delamere with my barcode and did the whole 5k without stopping. It was very emotional, and my account can be found at https://skatchat.wordpress.com/2016/04/.

Alyson used to come with me and walk the course before we started and meet me at the end but then two weeks before her 59^th birthday she announced that she fancied running it. As someone who has asthma and have never run before I was amazed. She did her first run in 37 minutes, beat my PB the next week and after 5 more successive PBs she now runs around 30 minutes. She even fell over once and after dusting herself off for a short while still beat me by four minutes.

So the 100th Parkrun completed yesterday was an emotional one too, coming as it did on the 7th anniversary of mum’s death. Alyson did her 24th and our son Michael volunteered.  My brother Andrew did his 100th at Newcastle on the same day along with his son Thomas.

As we lost dad in 2016 and have received some money from their estate, it seemed a good time to celebrate my recovery and use their legacy to raise funds for the three charities that have helped me. So next weekend I will take on 10k at Tatton Park.

So Whats the Story?…..where I am now.

Reflecting on the past seven years, I genuinely feel that I am in a better place than before my brain injury. Sure, it has been a tough time and I wouldn’t want to inflict the stress and worry on my family that was some of our experience. Overall the positives are;

• I am in a less stressful state than I was before – many people when they heard it may have been a stroke worried that it was due to pressure of work and church business that had caused it. I often say that my memory problems mean that I can’t remember what I am supposed to stress about
• I feel that my faith has been strengthened, as it says in Psalm 40
  

  I patiently waited, Lord,  for you to hear my prayer. You listened and pulled me from a lonely pit full of mud and mire. You let me stand on a rock with my feet firm, and you gave me a new song a song of praise to you

  and when I hear the story in Luke’s gospel of the paralysed man whose friends prayed for him and took him to Jesus – I can really relate to that.

  But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” So he said to the paralyzed man, “I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home.” Immediately he stood up in front of them, took what he had been lying on and went home praising God.
  Everyone was amazed and gave praise to God. They were filled with awe and said, “We have seen remarkable things today.”

There is no substitute for confronting your own mortality and asking the real
questions of what your life is about…

• I have been able to spend more time working for my local church on finance and property issues, to support the Leadership Team looking at new ways of working, recruiting some amazing lay workers to support our ministers and churches.
• I have had more time to give to Alyson and our family. Supporting them through difficult times at work and being there to help with looking after her parents and supporting her when they died these past two years. Our two sons are in well-paid roles and have been able to buy their own homes. They too have benefited from their grandparents’ legacies, and by that I don’t just mean the financial ones.
• We are fortunate to have built up enough savings to be comfortable in our retirement. I had several good jobs in companies with strong ethics and who made a difference to their employees and the patients/customers they served.  I have been able to help a friend build his business to repay his faith in me.
• I work with some amazing people in the head injury charity and have met some truly inspirational survivors, who live in much more challenging after effects than mine. Head injury doesn’t discriminate on the basis of age, wealth, personal background, education or experience. I am fortunate that the relationships with family and close friends have survived – that is not always the case.

So as I look forward to enjoying some travel and a forthcoming pilgrimage to the Holy Land, I wonder what the future holds, and the next challenge we will face. I hope that I am up to the task but know that I will have a lot of support.

Thank you for reading my story.

Ian Skaife, October 2019

Mothering Sunday – traditional & updated.

Even with all the advances in medical science and technology, I think we can be pretty certain that every person on earth has a mother. Many may not remember or even know who their mother is, many may have lost touch, but mothers and ‘motherly love’ form an important part of life.

We lost our mum four and a half years ago, which means I don’t have anyone to send a card or flowers to. However, I have the less traditional means of acknowledging the love mum showed by writing about it here.

Mum brought us up in a traditional church environment of Sunday school and Mothering Sunday is the fourth Sunday in Lent, a day when people go back to their ‘mother church’. Like many of the religious festivals this one has been taken on by retail & commercial interests – think Easter eggs, M&S Christmas adverts, expensive flowers & cards. In the United States & Canada ‘Mother’s Day’ is the second Sunday in May and has been officially since 1914. It is much more commercial, and has been taken up by over 60 countries across the world.

This morning I went not to my ‘mother church’, but to our local Methodist one, where Rev Den reminded us that the traditional family is a changing one. 9 million people in the UK live in single person households, many young women choose not to join the ‘traditional’ family of mum, dad and children. The number of children in a UK household has gone down from 2.4 and is around 1.7. There are so-called ‘blended families’ formed by those whose relationships have broken down, often more than once. Same sex couples adopting add to the wonderful variety of what we call ‘families’.

I wait to see this week’s documentary following ex footballer Rio Ferdinand and his journey taking on the ‘mother’ role to his children, following the death of his wife, their mother, from cancer almost two years ago. It will be full of many different emotions. I know of someone whose wife died giving birth to twin girls leaving him not only grieving, but having to bring up two young children – I can’t imagine how hard that is. In both examples I guess ‘Mothering Sunday’ takes on a whole different form.

We need to remember on this special day, those who have never felt a mother’s love, those who had a ‘difficult’ or even abusive relationship with their mother, and those who still don’t know who their mother is.

The day is also a hard one for those mothers who have lost a child and have no one to phone them, send a card or bring flowers. For those of us who follow a Christian faith Mary, the mother of Jesus, is an example of such a person.

My mum died suddenly when I had been in hospital for 10 weeks with a brain injury that left me unable to talk clearly, or walk at all. This was what I said about that in the tribute at mum’s funeral two weeks later…

I know that mum is now at peace and I didn’t feel the need to travel to be with her when she went to sleep, but I was pleased to hear that my older brother and my younger brother’s wife had been with her the night before, and dad  my younger brother were with her the moment on that Friday lunchtime when, as dad put it, she ‘looked peaceful and in no pain’. My brother had told her on the Tuesday when they turned the life support off that I had taken my first steps on the ward, and when I missed the call on Friday to say that mum had gone it was because I was taking my first few steps unsupported by the physios…..I like to think that mum was holding my hand.

We will all have some regrets for all the things which we could have done together and the times which might have been, but I will always remember the last words we said to each other as we hugged after visiting. I said ‘I love you mum thanks for coming’ and she replied ‘I love you too son and hope you keep getting better.’

My wife and her sister told me later that they believe that mum had done a ‘deal with God’, giving up her life to save mine. I don’t think God does such deals, but understand the sentiment, and I know mum, like many others, would gladly have offered her life to end my suffering.

There are people who believe that robins are a sort of angel who visit us on behalf of loved ones to keep an eye on us. Again I don’t subscribe to this, but it is good to be reminded of mum whenever I see one. Just this afternoon as I was thinking about this blog whilst cutting our lawn, a robin who is a regular visitor to our garden landed on a bush. I could hear its incessant call over the noise of the motor – ‘go on write your blog’ it seemed to be saying! This is a picture I took of it last autumn…

Mum was someone who enjoyed her garden and the new life that came from it. We put mum’s ashes under a flowering cherry tree that sits in the churchyard opposite her garden – the main picture at the start of this blog. As spring moves into summer it is a reminder of on-going life and vitality.

In addition to love and demonstrating Christian care, mum showed me that we need to remember those less fortunate than we are. This week would have been an upsetting one for her with television news having the following items:

• The plight of mothers watching their young children die as the result of famine in eastern Africa.
• The Westminster Bridge attack near parliament where Aysha Frade was strolling across on the way to collect her children from school when Khalid Massood charged down the pavement in a 4×4 and snatched her life away. She had just come from work, a school itself, where she dedicated herself to helping youngsters learn the language and culture of her native Spain.
• Comic Relief and the many appeals showing the suffering of children who had lost both parents, with daughters taking on the mother’s role.
• The appeal on the same programme to prevent mothers losing small children to malaria – preventable by a simple test and a cheap mosquito net.
• The children dying as a result of the bombings in Mosul in Iraq – more mothers left childless.

We need to acknowledge that whatever we think of Khalid Massood and his actions, he had a mother whose feelings at this time we may never really know, but can imagine.

For those, like me and my brothers, who had the loving example of a mother who cared for us & others, her life carries on in the way we act towards other people. As my friend put it in a poem to her mum after she passed away at the start of the year, following a long time suffering with dementia…

Mum you always said when we were young that we should try our best;
helping you live with dementia was a truly challenging test.
We hope you would be proud of us, if you realised all we’d done;
we tried our best and in the end our battle with dementia was won.

We shouldn’t dwell on the recent past, happy memories we have a plenty;
of a devoted mum, grandma, great grandma , teacher and friend to many.
….

These are the memories we treasure, the ones that involve the real you;
that stranger that came into our lives was only passing through.

On that dull January day you passed away, but you haven’t really gone;
in the way we think, and what we do, so much of you lives on.
To make a difference and try our best we will always endeavour,
so mum goodnight and God bless, all my love, Heather xx

God bless mothers everywhere.

 

 

Life & Death Part 2. Walking in the light, a life well lived, three orphans & time to move on…

Our mum used to say  ‘..as Methodists we have faith and don’t believe in superstition’. We had no problem holding dad’s funeral on Friday 13th January. It turned out to be a day that started with a light covering of snow, but this didn’t settle and we were able to follow the hearse from Thornton Dale to the Crematorium in Scarborough. On the journey there, and also on our return, we saw a complete and very bright rainbow. Adam, our funeral director and fellow Methodist, commented – ‘Seeing a sign like that, makes you realise all will be well’.

Light also had a part to play the day dad died at the end of December. We had been staying for the week at a cottage on the North York Moors, with my wife’s family to celebrate Christmas. It was a beautiful spot with views over the hills & valleys of the moors. We enjoyed stunning sunrises and on many nights the sky was so clear we could see an endless canopy of stars. With the only artificial light from houses in the village and RAF Fylingdales early warning station, it was a ‘dark sky’ area.

Sunrise over Fylingdales 27 Dec 2016

Stars over Fylingdales 27 Dec 2016

Dad was nearing death as the result of his Parkinson’s causing an inability to swallow two weeks’ previously. After a short spell in hospital – beside the crematorium that he would return to – dad was allowed to go back to his care home in Pickering for palliative care. Our cottage was only a 30 minute drive away, so we visited him several times. My younger brother, Andrew, and his family called in to see him on their way to relatives in the south.

The night before dad passed away I set off to drive the short journey, but a heavy fog had come down. It was obvious after taking 10 minutes to get less than a mile that it was a dangerous journey without streetlights or markings at the edge of the roads. A phone call to the home confirmed that it was they same there. I had already visited dad that morning and now he was settled down for a good night’s sleep. I returned to the cottage.

Next morning I woke up early; the fog had cleared and through the skylight a host of bright stars shone in. Lying in the quiet stillness I thought about dad and prayed to God that if it was His will then it was time to let go, and for dad to pass on to his next life. I also remembered my mum who had died four years ago of a sudden heart attack. Dad had missed her terribly and took about two years to get over his grief. Recently, in a cruel twist brought on by his dementia, dad had started asking us when we visited if we had seen mum, as she hadn’t been to visit him for a while. If we told dad the truth he looked shocked and said it was too much to bear. We decided not to lie but changed the subject and distracted him with something else.

As I got up and went down for breakfast, the sun was just coming up over Fylingdales and the sky was a beautiful pale orange colour. The air was still and a few tufts of high, white cloud were visible. Through the large glass kitchen doors overlooking the garden & fields of sheep, a tawny owl flew past slowly and gently settled out of sight among a clump of grasses. A rabbit hopped across the gravel driveway and under the wooden gate to the field. Four female pheasants came onto the lawn to feed on the breadcrumbs and nuts we had put out. A robin and sparrow sat on top of the wooden table where we had put the remaining food.  The place was teeming with life and the beauty of nature.

There was no mobile phone signal so we had been using wi-fi and WhatsApp to communicate. We finished breakfast and were packing up to leave, as we were due out by 10am,  when Anne Marie (the owner and nurse manager of the care home) sent me a message asking me to call on WhatsApp. I managed to speak to her long enough to tell me that dad had passed away a few minutes before. I heard her say it was peaceful then the signal went and I couldn’t phone back. Driving up the half mile farm track to the main road I managed to find a good signal to call Andrew. Anne Marie had called him already, and we shared a short silence and a sense of relief that it was over. I called the home to say I would visit after we left the cottage.

As I made the journey to Pickering the sun was rising higher against blue sky & reflecting off the rail tracks in the deep wooded valley of the preserved steam railway that curves through the moors. I passed the end of a narrow track off the road down which lie the ashes of dad’s brother and wife, overlooking the valley and the moors beyond.

The closer I got to town the fog, light at first, got thicker so that by the time I got to the care home it was dark, damp and cold. As Anne Marie took me to see dad she told me that she had checked on him at 25 to 9 and he was sleeping peacefully and five minutes later she came back and he had died. The night shift hourly care records all said ‘settled and sleeping quietly’. Dad’s earthly life had come to a peaceful and pain-free end. Anne Marie confided that when she awoke that morning she too had prayed the same words as me. When she had opened the window to ‘let his soul free’ as they do in many hospitals and care homes, I like to think that dad escaped the darkness of the town and soared up to see his brother and sister-in-law at that beautiful spot I passed on the way in. A place where the sky was blue, the sun shining and the birds singing. All would be stillness and peace.

Anne Marie gave me dad’s Bible to read whilst I sat with him. A bookmark was placed at the first chapter of John’s first letter; a section headed The Word of life, walking in the light.

God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.  If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth.
But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.

 There was a Post-it note in dad’s writing of two other passages about faith and actions and helping those in need. A further bookmark was at Psalm 121 which we had used in mum’s service. It seemed that I had been given the readings and theme for dad’s service of remembrance.

Dad’s was the first dead body I have seen. When I kissed the top of his head it was cold, but holding his hand it was still warm. I sat quietly listening to the hymns which had been playing all week at his bedside. I cried a few tears, but the overwhelming feeling was one of gratefulness & peace.

I am usually a blubbering wreck at funerals, even for people I barely know and who have been ill for a long time. I was always amazed that the family could stay so calm. However, having spent two weeks planning the service and writing dad’s tribute, for the service back at Thornton Dale Chapel, after the shorter one at the crematorium, it seemed natural to be calm and speak joyfully of dad’s life of faith and service. We shared lots of stories and some jokes with his church friends and family from near and far. This continued over lunch afterwords.

I was given a book for Christmas written by one of my cousin’s friends Rosalind Bradley titled ‘A Matter of Life and Death’, consisting of 60 short passages by various people sharing their experiences of death.  It asks us to treat death as a natural part of life. To think, talk and plan for it, so that when it comes – which it certainly will – we and those who know us can go through the process in a peaceful, ordered way. I have yet to finish it, but some useful words found already are;

Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.    Rabindranath Tagore.

Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfilment.  Dag Hammarskjold’s words as chosen by Arrchbishop Desmond Tutu in his foreword.

Our dead watch over us from inside our hearts. We talk to them, they talk to us, and their love and wisdom bless us.   Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg.

The picture at the start of this blog is we three brothers who can now be classed as orphans, standing next to ‘mum’s tree’ at Wilton in front of the small Anglican church. We buried mum’s ashes under a flowering cherry we bought to replace one that had died. The bungalow in the background was where mum & dad spent 24 years together in retirement. Mum loved her garden so now looks over that and the Wolds nearby. Dad will be joining mum in the spring. The photo was taken after the funeral service and the flowers are the cross from dad’s coffin and another wreath from our cousins (whose mum’s and dad’s ashes are in the valley overlooking the railway and moors near Fylingdales).

As we said at the end of dad’s tribute:

…we join our cousins in becoming ‘orphans’, we also join them as living testimony to the care and love of our parents.

The fact that we hopefully are contributing in a positive way to our local community and society, being aware of social injustice & poverty, the needs of our neighbours near and far, means we will continue to be a tribute to them.

And that love and care will continue as our families grow from one generation to the next.

We all need to move on to the next stage in our lives, to let go of, but not forget the past.