The People -v- Places

With the first anniversary of Frank’s death fast approaching the Little Darlings and I have finally made a decision about the ashes. That’s Frank’s ashes, not the ashes that may or may not be an old cricket bat depending on whether you think Wikipedia is reliable. The last time I wrote about the subject I was leaning towards the golf course but I have been counselled against it since the course or the game meant much less to Frank than the people he cared about. For the record, even though I’m invariably right, I do like to be told when I’m wrong, and I hold in the highest esteem the friends that have been brave and honest and not told me what they think I want to hear.

During this year I have realised that places are meaningless. Memories and people matter. It’s true that when I drive to Her Majesty’s Prison Dartmoor and pass a spot that Frank and I, amongst others paused for lunch during the Abbots Way walk in about 1997 I feel physically as though I’ve been gutted by a fisherman. It was a twenty-seven mile walk from Buckfastleigh to Tavistock across the moor, I’ll have you know, and we sponsored walked it with severe hangovers and no training back in the day when we could. Although I couldn’t walk for about a week afterwards. Frank can’t any more on account of being almost disposed of remains, and I have developed an aversion to exercising anything other than my wine glass raising arm.

The physical response to a place that evokes a memory does not make it a special place. Another spot I think of is where Frank proposed to me. At the time we were surrounded by our closest friends, and above us was a total eclipse of the sun (Bonny Tyler was nowhere to be seen). It was special that day, but now it’s just a field on the coast in the South Hams.

The Ministry of (in)Justice are contemplating closing HMP Dartmoor having spent the last three years investing your guess is as good as mine money improving it. That’s not turning it into a holiday camp if you navigated here from The Daily Mail Online, but installing proper flushing toilets and heating in a Victorian building with a microclimate akin to the Arctic Circle. In any event, if the closure goes ahead – it’s hard to predict with the number of U-turns in the Ministry of late – I won’t be passing that spot in future. It won’t make me miss Frank less. Even though I’m Frankless. But  it won’t diminish my memory of him.

So, if you’re still reading, the Goddards will be making a new place special – a spot under a cherry tree, in the garden of the Villa.