Personal

I know I'll see your face again

Three years ago, at around this time, I was on the M25. My phone rang as I pulled onto the roundabout where a bridge my uncle built carries the motorway over the A12.

On the phone was Jez. I pulled over.

I'd left him and Mum caring for Dad a little under an hour previously. I was heading home. "He'll hold on until the weekend," we thought. Jez was calling to say that now he clearly wouldn't. It was an agonising decision to make, and I took too long over it. Mum should've been with Dad, but I dragged her away to talk to me.

In the end I carried on. As I pulled out onto the A12 the strings and guitars of The Verve's The Drugs Don't Work soared from my radio without even a hint of cliché. I'd made the right decision; Dad would have died before I'd made it back there.

The news was waiting for me when I got home. I put the heating on, pulled on my black jacket and took a long, slow walk by the river. Then, back in my slowly warming house I lit the candle Mum and Dad had given me nine days earlier and started to phone my friends.

I'm off to the river again now. When I return I'll burn a bit more of the candle. These rituals are meaningless really, but they help me remember. Let me indulge.