Och Aye...

I just want to share this photo of Joel dancing at a Scottish Fiddlers Concert. Martha is part of the Poppleton Fiddlers Group and they unite with a similar group from Ayr for a concert in Poppleton every year. We attended last Saturday. Predictably it was full of people in kilts with very tenuous links to Scotland. You know the sort..."Me? Scottish? Well my Godmother's cousin has a neighbour who holidays in Fife..." Anyway, Joel (who had just shouted "It's a gorilla!" as the conductor took to the stage) insisted on an impressive display of free movement to express his genuine 50% Scottish geneology, (sadly equalled by his 50% Essex heritage from Mary's side.) He is now the only Halliday male willing to dance in public...thankfully.

Sunday Evening

First of all, thank you for the various caption suggestions that arrived by email, relating to the 'poetry reading' photo in the last post. Sadly, many of them can't be shared in this arena so the rest of you will have to guess what they were. Thanks also to those of you who commented that the three of us were looking haggard. It was a festival!! You are meant to look haggard and a bit rock 'n' roll... Anyway, I was trying to associate and blend with thousands of unshaven, worse-for-wear, desperately in need of 'Lifebuoy' campers, and in doing so conceal the fact that I was actually staying in a hotel.

This is just a quick post to say that Mary and I are gathering with just a few friends for a short service at York Minster on Sunday evening (23rd September). We do this from time to time, in the context of the Eucharist, to pray specifically for my healing . It is an important occasion for us, acting as a reminder that this is where our hope lies. The future is obviously very unknown and, if you believe the prognosis, very bleak. Our faith, however, provides important possibilities in what quite often seems like an inevitable situation. We genuinely believe that healing is possible; we would never say inevitable, or even likely, but we genuinely believe it is possible. If you are of a similar mind, please feel free to pray alongside us at sometime on Sunday evening wherever you happen to be. We would be very grateful for that. In the meantime, the pain relief is working pretty well, I am therefore slightly less grumpy and am resuming my weekly spin classes tonight!


I leave you with a poem about prayer...


Carried
They made an opening in the roof above Jesus and,
after digging through it, lowered the mat the
paralysed man was lying on. (Mark ch 2 verse 4)

Your fingernails break the surface
of the parched clay roof,
gouge down and through
until the words from the packed room beneath
well up,
spill towards me.
I wait as the hole begins to gape;
my route to the floor a fan of white light.

I have callused your feet
and blistered your fingers,
pressed to this canvas sheet.
But you feed the ropes through your hands,
leaning to counter my weight,
shrinking over the short distance
as I sink lower.
I feel the tremor of tight arms
transmit down lines
that will still be held
long after I have come to rest at
the speaker’s feet.

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The Scan

Before I mention the news from the scan, can I invite you to double click on the photo to the left (taken during the poetry reading at the Greenbelt Festival) and interpret for me the expressions on the faces of my two writing colleagues. Is Cole flicking through the book thinking, "Goodness me, I hope the others are better than this..." and is Martin plotting an escape route out of the tent? Perhaps we'll run a caption competition.

The news from our meeting with the oncologist this morning is mixed. The good news is that most of the cancer is stable, in that it hasn't spread since the last scan. The oncologist did, however, refer to "..all the little shadows on your lungs", and we had thought there was only one! The truth will out... Anyway,all the shadows on the scan have remained more or less the same. The bad news is that the cancer has invaded the bone of my lower pelvis, and this is new. I have been struggling with pain recently and this is why. They are going to leave it for now, as my new 'round the clock' pain management regime seems to be dealing with it. When this ceases to be the case, they will blast me with a single dose of radiotherapy to the affected area and they feel confident that this will reduce the tumour bulk and ease the situation at least for a few months.

Mary and I feel okay about this latest consultation. Of course, we would love for the doctors to be stunned by sudden and inexplicable recovery, but the nature of the illness means that whenever we go to see the oncologist we are braced for news that can always be bad, and sometimes very bad. Today, we have discovered that there has only been one change and that the doctors think they may well be able manage that when the time is right. We still, of course, stubbornly hope and pray for the stunning recovery and will continue to do so.

The family are well. We are all back to our various schools after a really good Summer holiday. Joel has had a couple days in his new school and seems very happy there. Today he was off donkey riding at the Donkey Sanctuary. A great way to end the week ...

How Green Was My Valet.

Mary and I had been debating recently whether or not we should trade our car in. It is just about to reach the 60 000 milestone and is in reasonably good nick. How sad it was, therefore, to discover three days ago on our way home from town that the answer to the questions, "Why am I inhaling astonishingly potent fumes and why can I only see purple?" lay in the fact that a can of green hammerite paint had emptied into the car boot at the last roundabout. We stopped to survey the damage ... Tinky Winky looking a lot more like Dipsy, sandals that would never see another beach, a car carpet that was proving to be very absorbent. Mary and I, not for the first time, enjoyed a short time of open and unstructured expression. She focused on the theme of surprise whereas I chose to make short statements of sadness and regret. So, a major cleaning project has been undertaken and the carpet has been ripped from the boot. A scrap dealer nearby has provided another and so we should be able to trade it in once the smell has gone(four years).

The picture at the top of this post was taken in Polperro, and we have recently returned from a holiday in Cornwall. (They haven't grown to become giants; they are sitting next to a model village). We had a week of beautiful weather and visited some lovely beaches (... patches of sand from them are now a permanent feature of our car boot!). We also spent great days with great friends and so the whole experience was a really positive one. We are now back and trying to savour each day before school begins again. The term always starts at great speed with harvest festivals, Christmas plans (yes, that soon), a batch of Governor meetings and we have the school's 50th anniversary to organise for the end of September. Any ideas for that?

On the health front, I have a scan due on 31st August. It is one of the three-monthly checks that they do and we will get the feedback from the oncologist on 7th September. We are really pleased and grateful that I have been able to get through the summer without any treatment. It is an obvious thing to say but our hope is that the disease remains stable so that I can keep working, and living fairly normally. There is the matter of the additional tumour to consider, but if that hasn't grown dramatically then I can hopefully push on to Christmas chemo-free.

We are hugely grateful for the prayers and support that we receive from you, and the interest that is shown in our situation. We never take it for granted and we thank you for it.

Greenbelt 07 ... shameful self promotion

Forgive the lack of subtlety, but the picture to your left is in fact the cover of a new book that I have co-written. It is a collection of poetry featuring three writers - myself, Cole Moreton and Martin Wroe. Cole is the author of two books (both published by Penguin) and is a lead writer with The Independent on Sunday. Martin is a journalist, formally on the staff of The Independent and The Observer but now writing mainly for The Times. (You can see why I feel a bit like Andrew Ridgely, or Ringo). We have each contributed twelve poems and they basically show our view of the world at the moment, "glimpsing the glory that lies in the dust". As Cole has said in the intro, "We write things down, uncertain where words end and prayer begins."

It is being launched at this year's Greenbelt Festival, with a joint reading at 4.30pm on Sunday, in the literature venue (wherever that is ...). The event is called 'Speaking of Heaven'. If you are at the festival, drop by. My recent visit to St. Luke's church in Cranham has made me aware that this blog is read by many people I haven't met, so if this includes you, please come and introduce yourself. I'd love to meet you.

If you would like to purchase a copy of the book you can do so by going to www.Lulu.com and putting one of our names into the search. It will shortly also be available from Amazon and Barnes Noble. If you are having any difficulties with this process, contact me and I am sure I can get a copy to you somehow.

Enough! My mother would be ashamed of me ...

Which Do You Want First?

We have a variety of news to report, very mixed. I will get the bad news over with early. I was contacted by my oncologist (never a good sign) to say that my most recent scan shows that I have another tumour. It is in my pelvic area and although small, it is of course an indication that the disease has spread into another part. We are knocked, to be honest with you. It is hard to reconcile to a positive view point and it seriously tests faith. However, life at the moment is a day by day thing and the great advantage of faith is that it widens the range of possibilities and means that you don't have to abandon hope even when the 'inevitable road' seems nearer. So ... we are hanging in there.

Now, onto happier things. Mary and I have been married for nineteen years! Hardly seems any time at all since that sunny day in 1988. We looked back at the wedding album ... quite a sight. We could both pass for fourteen. Thankfully I now only look thirty five years older than I did back then. The scary thing is that the twenty five year milestone is almost in sight. I remember my parents' silver wedding and at the time I regarded them pretty much as pensioners, who had lived the best part of their lives and were probably ready to apply for a warden controlled flat. My mother was only five years older then than I am now!

The truly great news, however, is that I survived the school Sports Day. Thank you for all your prayers of support! After a near-violent incident last year between the mother of a Year 3 boy and a nervous line judge, I had the job of choosing who was first across the line. Nightmare!! Here is the flow of consciousness I had as the infants began the walking egg and spoon race:

'...Okay, some children have begun to run and this is a walking egg and spoon race. Hopefully they'll drop the egg. Drat ... the runner is in the lead and is going to win. I should disqualify her, but she is only five; she's just over excited. Mind you, if I let her win, do I let the older 'running children' win in the next race? At what age should I start disqualifying children for running? Oh no, she has dropped the egg and has crossed the line ... first, but eggless. Does that count? Mum's on her feet and embracing her, shouting 'You've won darling! You've won!' I'll just give her first place .. no one will care. Why is there a group of mums standing together over there? Mrs Jones, whose daughter came second... she is storming over. Her daughter is sobbing and has thrown her egg into the hedge! If I were to disqualify the part-running, laterally-eggless winner claiming that she failed a doping test, would it make the press? "Hi Mrs Jones..."

Finally ... calm yourselves, but I have at last finished my MBA. I graduated on 12th July from Leicester University It only took me 7 years! I did, in my defence, have four years off in the middle. My tutor who during that period sent me an email simply asking "Where are you?" and another stating "Your time is up!" was very gracious and it all ended happily. My thesis is a rivetting read!! "Managing Primary Schools in Crisis" ... oh yes, I know how to party!

Anyway, enough for now. I will leave you with a brief poem about people hanging onto hope by the skin of their teeth:

.

.

.

.

Abraham

A father of nations?

Is that what you were told

as you stood there, childless,

like a dry tree, old and

creaking in the cold

of your constant winter?

Sarah, four score and more,

did she feel life flicker

deep inside an empty core?

Okay Father Abraham,

I'll put down this pen

and you tell me again ... and again ... and again.

May Day! May Day!

Now, I hope that title hasn't filled you with a sense of alarm as it is, after all, a radio cry for help. Funnily enough in recent years I have come to associate May Day with the desire to cry and plead for help, because in school life it can be a very big event. I had the honour last weekend of going down to my previous school and crowning what used to be the 'May Queen', but is now the 'Summer Gala' Queen. The May Day Gala became the Summer Gala in the year that I left. It had been unchanged and untouched for several milleniums and there are those who will hold that particular transition against me to the end of my natural life and on into eternity. (Apparently, the un-edited version of the Book of Genesis states that Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat from the one, central tree not because it represented knowledge, but because it had been laced with ribbons for my old school's first May Pole dance.) Anyway, I took the invitation to return as a sign of forgiveness and it was lovely to meet up with past pupils who only two years ago were tender Year 6s, but who are now 5 ft 8, shaving twice a day and growling in bass baritone voices. Some of the boys had changed as well...
In my current school we don't have a May Day celebration or even a Summer Gala. Instead we have a School Summer Fayre...a time when past pupils can come in and steal from us.

I also had a chance to visit our old church in Kettering. We were given a very warm and touching welcome. It is a truly humbling realisation that people, in the midst of their own lives and problems, are not only concerned about us but willing to spend time praying for us as a family. It was an absolute tonic.

We continue to look forward to the holidays as term nears its end. My health is still stable at the moment and we remain hopeful that it will remain so throughout the summer at least. Joel is currently preparing to leave his mainstream school as he was allocated a place in an excellent 'special school' nearby. We are sure that he is going to blossom there. We hope that those of you planning to have a few days/weeks away enjoy the break and get some bearable weather. I end this 'post' with a short poem that was written in honour of my previous school's May Day celebrations and the centuries of non-change that it represented...until that headteacher got the job!



Midnight On May Day

When the church bell tolls farewell
to the first day of May,
and the milky midnight moon
paints the playground frosty grey,
you can hear the snapped-stick clicking
of dusty brittle bones as
forgotten pupils from centuries ago
climb out of their cold churchyard plots.
Silently, they make their way down the hill,
push on the old school gate and rattle and scrape
towards the centre of the empty playground.
Slowly, in the loneliness they start to dance
round the memory of a Maypole,
getting faster and faster,
the wind rushing right through them
as they leap, skip and dash to their places.
They end in a circle, rib cages heaving,
and stand for a time clutching each other
like the bare strands of an old funeral wreath.
Finally, they turn to share frozen smiles
as if to say, "Now ...
that's how it should be done!"