A Somerset Lad

16th April 1993 was a Friday.

It was a busy evening in the parish.  The Mothers’ Union branch in the parish were holding their annual sale in the parochial hall at 6.30 pm. At 9 pm, the hall would be the venue for the annual old time dance, that usually took place on Easter Monday and had been postponed that year for some reason now long forgotten.

The sale was an occasion where it was possible for a clergyman to be of some use, putting out tables, washing up the teacups, lifting boxes, but the old time dance was one of those moments just to be there and smile nicely, never having learned ordinary dances, let alone the refined form that went under the description of ‘old time’.

Between the sale and the dance there had to be found time for a visit to Downpatrick Maternity Hospital where our daughter had been born at ten past eleven that morning.

It is twenty-nine years since the birth of a girl named ‘Miriam’ after the feisty sister of Moses and Aaron in the Bible, ‘Katharine’ after her mother, and ‘Sorcha’ after the parish of Bright in which we lived.

Not many years later, a determined child at primary school declared her intention to become a doctor, an intention that never wavered in the ensuing years.

It is six years since a determined young woman qualified with a first class degree in medicine from Trinity College, On the second Monday in July that year, she was one of the new crop of junior doctors doing their first day’s work on a ward. The years of exhausting duties in hospitals were endured, the challenge of administering thousands of vaccinations was met head on. Later this summer, training as a general practitioner will be complete.

Having 16th October as a birthday means being sixty-one and a half today and it means being exactly thirty two and a half years older than her.

The passing of twenty-nine years has been long enough to make both of us into very different people.

For for one of us it has been the whole of a lifetime of achievements that continue.

For the young clergyman of 1993, it has been a time long enough to make many mistakes and for there to have been too many moments to regret. It has been a time when there have often been occasions to wish that there were opportunities to make amends for past hurts.

May the birthday be the beginning of another year of achievement.

Drifting in and out of a sleep, I woke with a start as the wheels touched the tarmac of the runway at Bristol Airport. Disorientated by the doze, I was not sure of the day, nor where I was going.

There was no reason for the tiredness, I had only worked until lunchtime and had travelled to Dublin Airport at a leisurely pace in the afternoon. However, such moments seem more common in the past year. Feeling inordinately exhausted by late afternoon is familiar.

The weariness does not arise from a lack of fresh air. I walk five or six miles in a typical day. Trying to use the car as little as possible, I tend to walk anywhere that is less than three miles, and catch the bus to anywhere that is further. I get odd looks from children in the classroom when I am asked how I get to school and I say that I spend thirty-five minutes walking there. ‘Why do you do that, sir, if you have a car?’

Sometimes, I think that being tired may arise from an inability to relax. Living alone for the first time in my life, I have realized that starting out on a solitary life at the age of sixty-one has little to commend it. Being a very selfish person, I have struggled with the fact that there is no-one to whom to talk about the trivia of daily existence, no-one with whom to share the difficulties of the day, no-one to whom to turn for a smile or a word of encouragement. Added to which, I work as much as possible because it is the most efficacious way of dealing with the depression that drifts in like thick mist if there is nothing to dispel it.

Of course, it could just be that I am sixty-one.

My right shoulder has been troublesome for more than a decade and now lets me know with jolts of pain that I am probably succumbing to the arthritis to which my family is prone (an uncle who is sixteen years older than me has had both shoulders and both knees replaced, and is now on his third hip replacement).

Sometimes, my right hand seems similarly arthritic, as do other joints. Kneeling to pick up sheets of paper from behind the copier on Wednesday, I was only able to stand upright again by pulling myself up with my hands. Descending the stairs on the bus can bring pains in the hips.

Perhaps the solitary life simply allows more time for the mind to dwell on the things that are wrong. Perhaps the tiredness is simply a consequence of working harder.

Avoiding hot chocolate in the evenings because of its detrimental effects, but missing its comforting presence, I took the advice of a wise Scotsman and bought a tin of cocoa. It has a pleasant taste, a calming effect, and has less potential for damage than the sickly-sweet concoctions that are now marketed as hot chocolate.

Not only does the cocoa make for a pleasant mood in the presence, it evokes happy memories from the distant past.

My first encounter with Paddington Bear was before 1969, for I was still in the infant class of our two teacher village primary school. Miss Everitt used to read to us from A Bear Called Paddington, which I later discovered had been published two years before I was born.

It seemed a story from an age before the loud and garish 1960s in which I had grown up, a time when the world was safe and reassuring.

To a child sat listening in the classroom, there could be nothing more reassuring in the life of the Peruvian bear than the daily mug of cocoa that Paddington shared with Mr Gruber, an antique dealer on the Portobello Road.

Now Paddington spent a lot of his time looking in shop windows, and of all the windows in the Portobello Road, Mr Gruber’s was the best. For one thing it was nice and low so that he could look in without having to stand on tiptoe, and for another, it was full of interesting things. Old pieces of furniture, medals, pots and pans, pictures; there were so many things it was difficult to get inside the shop, and old Mr Gruber spent a lot of his time sitting in a deck-chair on the pavement.

Mr Gruber, in his turn, found Paddington very interesting and soon they had become great friends. Paddington often stopped there on his way home from a shopping expedition and they spent many hours discussing South America, where Mr Gruber had been when he was a boy.

Mr Gruber usually had a bun and a cup of cocoa in the morning for what he called his ‘elevenses’, and he had taken to sharing it with Paddington. “There’s nothing like a nice chat over a bun and a cup of cocoa,” he used to say, and Paddington, who liked all three, agreed with him – even though the cocoa did make his whiskers go a funny colour.

Licking cocoa from my lips, I wonder what it would have been like to be an antique dealer watching the world from a deck chair.