I Asked My Father

Red Moss & Garter Cowl in Andes Alpaca and Wool for Lynda

When we were small, Lynda lived here and later so did her son, Jonathan.  I lived up the road ....

.... Lynda and myself used to try to travel around the whole block without letting our feet touch the ground by railing or redbrick wall...

.... Once I nearly impaled myself on one of the railing spikes, and Lynda broke her arm doing a cartwheel, but on balance we were pretty invincible... for a long time we and one or two others were the last children of that generation on that road.

Time passed, we all grew up - and one evening Lynda went out with her new baby, Jonathan, on one of their first forays and met my father, whose name was Patrick, out walking our dog, Juno.  My father was delighted to run into them - he was the kind of man to make much of a mother and her new baby. Very shortly afterwards though, my father came home and died of a heart attack.

I wasn't there but I expect Jonathan's childhood was spent on the same roads in much the same way as Lynda's and mine were. I know he did well in school and college, became an international journalist and all-round credit to his mother.

At the beginning of 2012, Jonathan took a trip to India and hasn't been seen since - an awful lot of people care very much about what's become of him. This morning I lit this candle in the church that was local to where we all lived with hope that he's well, as invincible as his mother and myself are, and that he makes contact with home very soon.