Extract from a story on my web site

Sometimes I wonder if I unwittingly contributed to his death.

It is possible, even likely, that he died. I’ll never know, of course, but if I lived nearer I’d probably go to the factory and see what I could find out. There’s an element of guilt somewhere there. The memory of him comes back to me at those odd moments we all experience, when we suddenly feel very aware of ourselves and of our tininess in the universe. How fragile we are! How important we are to ourselves and how miniscule in the general arrangement of things.

It was very early, a couple of hours before dawn, one bitterly cold December morning. Winter temperatures in central France can drop very low. It was -20.C. My feet crunched loudly on the frozen and brittle grass as I strapped our three children into the car, and by the time I had loaded our suitcases and bags my toes had gone completely numb. I’d left the engine running to de-frost the windscreen and to warm-up the car but I nevertheless went around spraying the windscreen with Anti-Gel, all the while shushing the children to make less noise. The baby slept.

I reversed, turned, and eeked out of our drive, hunched forward over the steering wheel, willing the baby to remain asleep and trying to feel positive about the long drive ahead of me. I was very tense: unaccustomed to driving on the wrong side of the road, unused to motoring at night and unfamiliar with the route, I also had the responsibility of the children and black ice to contend with.