The End

Yes, yes I know that sounds awfully dramatic, but I do like a bit of drama.

It's just that this last weekend has had me thinking a lot about ends while trying to focus on the continuings.

Sunday was the fifth anniversary of the loss of my beloved James, an end that could not be more definite, the curtain call from which there is no encore. A lesson that love cannot conquer cancer but that it can allow you to hold on to memories, sad and happy, memories that show you have lived.

I was home for the weekend to celebrate (in advance) my birthday and to ensure I had enough love to wrap myself in when the worst of the memories come flooding back. There is always a lot of love when surround by my family, long may that continue.

Then on Monday I was literally stopped in my tracks by a sign that something else has come to an end. I drove down the lane to 5 High, my true north, to find the gates closed and padlocked. Indeed I didn't park in the yard as I always have. No-one lives there any more.

More memories: memories of the old wooden gates that were there when a studio formed a bridge over the top; the small yale locked door you unlocked to go in and open the big wooden gates; falling down the drain when standing behind someone unlocking the little door, my poetry book still tells the tale - I was clutching it at the time; catching the bumper of my Renault on the wooden gates as I reversed up the lane with Grandad yelling 'left-hand down' etc. - directions that never helped but served to fluster, he was a navigator and I can't tell left from right....

I guess the memories continue even when a part of a life ends.