You Know It Makes Sense | 8 August 2009

‘Father of three drowns in Welsh holiday tragedy’. This was the news-in-brief headline you nearly read last week. The father in question would have been me. Like all such incidents it came completely out of the blue. This is a thing I’ve noticed: you never wake up that morning with a spooky feeling of impending doom. One minute you’re carrying on as most of us do: as if we’re immortal or, at the very least, guaranteed to live to a very ripe old age. And the next: ‘Whooah! If it isn’t the Grim Reaper, hovering above me with his sickle!’

It happened like this: there’s a lovely house we take for two weeks every August in the Welsh Borders, and one of the many splendid things about it is that there’s a small river — the Edw — flowing past the bottom of the garden. When the kids were younger it was great for paddling and catching minnows in.