Running on Empty

It's been one of those weeks when blogging has been beside the point. Nightshifts don't help, because they tend to close down your thinking and conversation; you're just head down trying to get through.

The other reason why it's been nigh impossible to write has been hearing at second hand the agonies of my friend Rachel, who has just lost her mother.

I've also been thinking a great deal about eleven year old Rhys Jones, as I expect a lot of people have.

Anything I try to write or think about grief seems trite, which is strange because I don't think of myself as a particularly shallow person. But not to write about it, to blog about cats, or politics or the latest restaurant seems superfluous this afternoon.

Yesterday Lesley and I went for a long walk in Sussex. There was nobody about to speak of, and the fields went on for miles and miles, occasionally broadening to include a lake, or a small village with a pub in the middle. I get great joy from the fresh air, the greenness of our country, the ordinary texture of life.

So to Rachel and anyone else who is blinded and disorientated by loss I say, hang on, the flavour of being does return. And while life is altered, it remains an extraordinary thing, worth having and being in, at any price.