A time to reflect.

Thank You Ma'am

 Being abroad at the time of the Queens passing, I wasn’t aware of the reflective nature of the country until I returned two days later.

For so many of us, the loss the country has suffered has provided a moment to engage with our own sense of loss and to think of those we have no more.

I have finished filming on the project that I cannot name, and moved on into my annual stint of conference directing, but as we brought my filming to a close, a lovely thing happened. They asked me, as is often the case, to provide photographs from my past to decorate my characters flat. On sitting down to shoot our first scene,my fellow actor pointed to a photograph and asked, “Who’s that?”

And there she was. Mum. Eating her way through an ice cream on Brighton pier with me keeping watch. How brilliant to see it on the mantelpiece of my fictional home. It made me well up, of course, but I know she would be proud to have been there watching over me.

She’s doing that now.

There is a picture of her here on the boat, behind me, and I often catch her eye and wonder what she would think of life now, here on the boat.

It’s a place of quiet joy and calm and the other people on our pontoon have provided a welcoming community to join and Scout is feeling like I have had no other home.

Except, that sense of loss creeps into a crack. When you have spent twenty-five years of your life with someone in every day of them, there are inevitable moments when your thoughts turn in that direction. Thoughts that are filled with anger, sadness, longing, and sometimes joy. In a world of digital media, it's hard to put things out of your life. The picture frame by the desk that brings up a snapshot of a previous joyous holiday. An object you pick up, you remember was a present.

And yet, we have to move on. The Queen is dead, Long Live the King. I’ve never been good at goodbyes, but the powerful one we are all sharing today will guide me in how it is possible to move forward and help others to process and copewith what, they too, have lost.

Those feeling will never go away, but they will temper with time.

“The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. “