An odd thing that happened

My friend, Vaughn, sent me a bracelet about five years ago. It’s just a thin scrap of a thing. A peice of black cotton and a peice of white cotton spun around one another. I was surprised it had been allowed to be sent out to me. He said most other people he’d tried to send them to hadn’t received them.

I tied it onto my wrist and it has never moved. It doesn’t come off for anything. For some reason, leading up to the day of Vaughn’s death, I felt like it would probably break after he died. I’m not really sure why. I don’t go in for a lot of spirituality and fate and bigger meaning etc etc etc. But I just kept thinking it in the back of my mind.

I wrote to him once, shortly before visiting him, and told him I still wear the bracelet he made me and he said I was the only one. The people who did receive them had either lost or broken theirs.

Then when I visited him, at one point, lost for words and overwhelmed by it all, I touched my hand to my wrist to show him my bracelet and he did the same on his wrist, as he was also wearing one.

The day after he died, July 19th, I was in work. I work with food. I had some of those thin blue disposable gloves on. As I took the left one off, the bracelet came off with it. It had literally never moved from my wrist in the five years I had been wearing it. I put it back on quickly but pulled it thinner a bit as I forced it over my hand. When I got home, I noticed the bracelet was now bigger so I tied another knot in it, to make it smaller.

Ever since tying this extra knot, I’ve felt like it was going to break. I’m not sure why, as it looked pretty secure. I just had this unexplainable expectation that it would break.

Then last Thursday, four weeks exactly since Vaughn’s death, the bracelet broke. It caught on the arm of a chair I was sitting on and snapped, flying off. I wasn’t surprised at all.

I have tied it around my finger, unwilling to throw it away, but I know it hasn’t much time there. It will probably fall off soon.

Christmas Eve

I have just eaten my last advent calendar chocolate. I am about to go to work for the last time before having a little Christmas break. I am going to spend ten minutes before work reading Narnia. I am just up to the bit where Digory and Polly go exploring in other worlds and find Charn, and Digory rings the bell in the long room, like an idiot. I always get really irritated when he does that. I am looking at the pile of presents under the mini Christmas tree…

….and I am thinking about how lovely tomorrow promises to be. In a minute, I will eat some breakfast and try to decide what to wear with my fabulous Christmas jumper.

In the meantime, here are some pictures from last Christmas to get us feeling all festive.

                      Presents!

Christmas dinner – an amazing three bird roast

Yaya’s little sister, ignoring her presents and playing excitedly with some cardboard.

                Christmas pasta!

                     Mince pies

        Last year’s Christmas tree

HAVE A LOVELY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!

A dedication to my childhood friend

My favourite friend when I was a little girl at school had blond hair, like me. She was a little bit short, like me. And we were always together. People used to mix us up.

One time we swapped shoes for fun at breaktime and forgot to swap them back. Our parents were quite annoyed at us when we went home with the wrong shoes on.

We used to play with two dinosaur shaped erasers, one blue and one green. The game we played consisted of us burying the dinosaurs at break time then coming back at lunch time and digging them up. It was a pretty good game, if I remember rightly. We were about six years old and inseparable.

When we were about nine or ten, my favourite friend said she was moving away. They were moving Wales, which was the other side of the world for all I knew! I now know that it was essentially just down the road, a few hours at most. But then, it was the most far away place I could imagine. I was pretty gutted.

A few years of letter-writing later and we planned a visit. My mum drove a friend and I to her house and we stayed overnight. It was hilarious. We ‘made’ a Ouija board and made out we were terrified of looking in the mirror at midnight. We giggled and pulled our stuff into the front room, away from the mirrors, to sleep.

A few years later, my friend came to Liverpool to stay over. Another friend was there too and we had great fun. The next visit was a few years later, when my friend came to look at the university in Liverpool on an open day.

Then I left for Africa and lost contact with most people. I then went to university in Glasgow for a bit and one day, I decided to try texting her old phone number. She was still using it! Amazing! A bit of catch up and lunch in Liverpool next time I was back re-established the friendship.

Next thing I knew, I was back and forth travelling quite a bit before settling into a different course in London and we start emailing again. She’s in Thailand, teaching! Perfect. I had just started sponsoring a little girl in Viet Nam and was really keen to visit her. So I planned a trip to see my little sponsor girl in Viet Nam and my friend in Thailand. It was one of the best trips I’ve ever been on. It was such fun.

The next year, after she had returned to England, I went back to Asia with a friend and she came for two weeks of our trip. That was in 2007. She moved to Hungary for a few years next.

I don’t think we’ve seen each other since then. We’ve been friends a long time now. Over twenty years. I don’t think I’ve known anyone (excluding family) for that long!

And then, a few months ago, my friend Facebooked. She had a place on a postgraduate course at my old university, down the road!

This is very exciting. For a whole year, my childhood best friend will be living down the road, instead of across the world.

Tonight, she is coming for dinner. I am preparing a feast. When I get excited, I cook. I hope I don’t burn everything now, in a frenzy of excitement and forgetfulness.