Mrs Landingham

My friend Baddog told me he spent the other Sunday evening watching the final episodes of the West Wing. How I miss them all: Josh, Donna, CJ, Charlie and of course most recently President Santos.

All this made me return again to one of my favourite episodes from an earlier series and realise with an unerring jolt how even more powerful it is than when I first saw it.

Mrs Landingham was President Bartlett's PA, an older lady with a wise head who had been around since his college days. She looked after the apparent trivialities and could say the telling word at just the right time.

She went out one day to buy a new car. On her first drive she was hit by a drunken driver and died in the accident. The power of this particular episode is the thanksgiving service in the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St Matthew the Apostle in Washington (see picture) or more precisely what happened afterwards.

Bartlett asks for the secret service to secure the building. He launches into a tirade against God for what he sees as vindictive thuggery in the death of his friend who he loved so much. The point at which he lights a cigarette and stubs it out on the floor of the sanctuary is great drama. The most powerful leader of peoples on earth rails in his frustration and grief against the Almighty and he is angry. Yet he is in the sanctuary.

So for Mrs Landingham read FreelanceNerd; for drunken driver read German (or Russian) lorry driver.What does all this say.

People ask me how am I doing, or they wonder how I stand up to it all. Readers of these blogs will know how much I draw on friends, but that is not the whole story.

I have this print in my office. It is almost unique in that I took it on a walk with FLN just the two of us on the last Friday of our holiday in Grasmere.To look at it captures the hole in the
universe which is now part of who I am. Clocks do not go back; the video cannot be rewound. I take in and absorb the grief of those I love, like Teapot, Mrs FLN and Big Al. I cannot fix things and now and again could do with a kicking post where I could apply a stout boot in frustration. I feel the tragedy of others all the more keenly: parents of a Vietnamese man who was killed after falling on the underground, of 4 teenagers killed in an accident on the A449, of Michael Blakey in Dharmshala in India.

Colleagues at work are great but time does not stand still. Things have to be done. Energy is spent.

Yet the light shines in darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. I will take hold of Christmas with this great truth burned in me....... and the church carpet is safe from burning dog ends.