h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. I know I always tend to start that way, these days, but it really has been a busy week this week, with long term planning and only 50 weeks to go until Christmas! (now there is a cheery thought). It's also been a week of storms and problems. The "storms" bit is self-explanatory really.

We have lain abed listening to the wind crashing about in the trees outside, woken to find discarded branches in the driveway, driven through rain so hard that the windscreen wipers could barely cope, even on double click, and in the midst of all this, the engine on the faithful old car has decided to develop a serious head gasket problem, and is going off to the garage at Crosland Moor to be fixed tomorrow. I will be without it for three whole days and will no doubt feel like my legs have been cut off, even though Phil has boldly stepped into the breach and offered to chauffeur me to the warehouse and back. Just as well really, as stocktaking's still not finished, and the VAT return is once more overdue.

Tig, Freddie and Lucy have been as eager to venture forth for their daily "constitutionals" as ever. Deb and her mother, less so, especially when the wind is pelting horizontal sleet across the valley. The cats have been reluctant to leave the house except where absolutely necessary, but mainly spend their time drowsing and dreaming in various chairs and other warm places scattered throughout the house, whiskers twitching and paws trembling as they stalk the mouse of their dreams. Dusty has now firmly taken over our bed, Nigel has retaliated by seizing control of the armchair in the spare room,

Russell remains as near to the fire as he can get without singeing, and Kitty, well Kitty has a variety of places where she may be found, but not when she has to go to the vet. Twice this week, at the sight of Debbie approaching bearing the cat-carrier to get her inside to take her to Donaldsons for her quarterly "rodent ulcer" jab, Kitty has legged it through the cat flap. Of course, today, when Debbie was collecting the ironing from Colin's side of the house, where should Kitty be, safe in the knowledge that vets don't open on a Sunday, but curled up inside the open abandoned cat carrier, fast asleep and purring.

I've been working on the S P B Mais book, the web site, the accounts, and doing some marketing, turn and turn about, so I have been shamefully neglectful of things like emails and message boards. I know for instance, that one of the founding members of my I-church group has recently suffered a sad loss, of her mother, and coincidentally, Jonty from the Archers' web site has just lost his mother as well. I hope both of them realise that they can email me if they need anything, although I have done precious little to offer any condolences. In my experience of these things, when my Mum died in 1986 and my Dad in 1992, it's not so much at the time that it hits you. For me, in both cases, making the arrangements and sorting out the funeral etc was something which carried me along, it was only afterwards that I sat down and tried to come to terms with the loss. I went through many mornings of waking up not having remembered my dad had died, and then it suddenly hitting me. Sometimes I had dreams where I had long conversations with him, and occasionally I still do, sometimes he is bizarrely present in modern circumstances, chatting to people he never even knew.

You can also be angry with them for dying. My sister and I ransacked my dad's house, convinced he would have left us a note at least to say goodbye, but we never found one. In the end, we came to assume that maybe he thought he had more time than he did. It's a completely illogical reaction, it's the mind saying "now you've really landed me in it, what am I going to do". The important thing is to deal with it without feeling guilty. The other thing that happens is you blame yourself. If only you had done this or that, but in fact, it's usually not your fault, believe me. They would not want you to beat yourself up, if they could tell you this, they would want you to get on with your life and remember their love and their life in the best way you can.

The only consolation I can offer is that - again, in my own experience - the hurt does fade after a while and is replaced with regret, yes, but also affection, and remembrance. Especially remembrance. I constantly think how my mother and father would have reacted to situations I now find myself in, and in that way, they live on, through my definition of them. Strange as it may seem, I find myself laughing about what I know they would have said or done, if they had been in the situation I was at the time. My mother, for instance, was a big fan of country and western music. At the time she was alive, my sister and I both thought this was a bit naff, and used to pour scorn on people like Jim Reeves and Slim Whitman.

Yet, here I am, nineteen years later, driving to work this week with Martin Simpson on the cassette deck singing about Patsy Kline and "Hawkshaw" and the boys, in the wonderful "Love Never Dies". In one of the verses, the singer describes how the guitar he has given Hawkshaw survives the plane wreck that killed Patsy Kline (it must have been absolute murder driving across America in the 1950's dodging all these plummeting country and western stars falling out of the sky in their malfunctioning planes - look out! It's the Big Bopper! Over there! Buddy Holly! Behind you! Jim Reeves etc etc. Think of the insurance premiums.)

"Love never dies, lust loses its shine for sure
Friendship can fade or be forced to a close
Frost follows clear skies in the flatlands I come from, but
At that Arkansas truck-stop, love never dies"

Late last year, when the father of one of my ex's died, I sent her an email which said what a good bloke I thought he was (he was, he offered to set me up in business with a small shop, back in the 1980s, foolishly at the time, I said I would rather plough my own furrow) and I ended by saying that love never dies, and if you believe that, then you have to believe that the love that we felt for these people who have gone on before, and the love they felt for us, is still in the world somewhere, and we can still tap into it and use it.

When I lived with the girl in question, our house had six coal seams running underneath it, from the old Wharnecliffe Woodmoor colliery, which had closed long before we moved to Carlton. It was only later that I found out the rough poetry of their names: Barnsley Main, Top Haigh Moor Seam, Lidgett Seam, Beamshaw Seam, Winter Seam, and Kent Seam. We knew at the time though, from local records and what old people in the area told us, that there were still bodies under the ground in these seams, unrecoverable from the great disaster in 1936 which claimed 57 lives and was the second-worst pre-war mining disaster in Britain, beaten only by Gresford in 1934.

People used to ask me if the thought bothered me, and I have to say that it didn't. The dead have gone from us in body, and have made their final statements, their lives are sealed off from us, just in the same way as those shafts were sealed when the colliery was finally closed in 1966. But to the people who knew them, who called them husband, dad or grandad, they never left completely, they never really went away, they were always at the edge of their thoughts, just as my mum and dad are to me, now.

I am not about to say that they are just in the next room, and "death means nothing at all". It isn't that simple for me, partially because I don't have Canon Henry Scott Holland's faith. But as I have written before, the exciting discoveries of modern physics are telling us more and more that there are other places, other dimensions, where lives which have ended in this dimension may be continuing and flourishing. Maybe we can come up with a word for this. We could call it "heaven". I find this of comfort, I hope others might. And if Philip Larkin and Martin Simpson (the unlikeliest of bedfellows) both say it, then it must be true:

Love never dies.