Little smiling hooks

Christmas is a weird time of year. I think it’s the ‘ist’ in Christmas that rhymes with Cyst that evokes malignant feelings of the festive season.

I spent a lot of this season with friends and riding motorbikes through mud filled fields and walking and drinking and swearing (not at the same time you understand) which was wonderful until I arrived in Wigan.

Like Marleys Ghost in a Christmas carol, I’d been avoiding going back to Wigan to see my past where I’d grown up, as in that past was loss. My friend had died earlier in the year and subsequently I'd made 2 promises this Christmas, one that I'd call by on his wife and daughter, and the other a promise to myself that I'd visit his grave. The grave was the first place I went, and in full bike gear I staggered through the stones and uneven ground towards his memory. With waves of unhappiness on the sight of his headstone combined with waves of joy that I was near my friend, I knelt down and cried at his gravestone.

I think the sight would have amused, clad in Kevlar and kneeling with my right hand out holding my helmet and in my left hand holding my tears, I imagined I would have looked like an odd modern day knight after battle.

Anger followed sorrow when I discovered one of his friends had left a cheap bottle of Heineken on his grave stone still filled with beer and sentiment. So I forced off the top with my knuckles and poured the contents on his grave as my friend had once shown me years many before. And as the beer slued out of its container like a snail falling off a lettuce leaf full on its steal, the anger rose and I wanted to smash the bottle on the gravestone, waste met with waste.  

But I resisted shamefully.

Afterwards I headed to his wife’s house, and upon discovering that she wasn’t in I couldn’t bring myself to write her a note to say I'd called by.  So I picked 3 smooth stones from the garden and placed them on her window ledge, 2 side by side and a third on top of these two. 30 miles and minutes later I got a text saying: “I know you’ve been here, and I understand”.  

To be understood was the greatest present I could have received this Christmas.