It's the first day of Advent.
Just under a year ago, I stood on Alvechurch station, sucking in iced air and trying to appreciate the delays.
I didn't know it then, but I'd just had the last Sunday roast I'd ever share with my Grandpa. I stamped my feet and cursed London Midland Trains and felt, in the silence, like I was on the edge of everything, lost in intergalactic cold, and felt coolly at home.
Grandpa - Neville James Burton - caught flu that week, and never recovered. He was 89. Good innings. But it was a bleak day when he died, and the family home lost a supporting wall.
He paid, out of a lifetime's savings, for me to do my master's degree. It was an act of extraordinary generosity, which left me (and leaves me still) gobsmacked with thankfulness. He wouldn't have heard a word of the respect and praise he deserved, he would just have smiled and muttered and changed the subject, and we would have spoken about the cricket instead.
Without that degree, I would not be in Bangladesh, trying to work out how to bless people. Without spending that extra year in York, I would not have met some of the people closest to me, been given the honour of being a best man to the best man, found a home, or worked in the theatre. Without the time my Grandpa paid for, I cannot conceive of where I might be today.
Winter is about death. But it is always, always followed by life. There's nothing any of us can do to change those things.
So I hope I'm out here making him proud; I hope you enjoy this poem.
Advent
Summer's gone, the nights are now
All the day can really do
The whole world's turned inside itself
As heat recedes, the air is held
And stilled, past animation, on to death
We wait like juggled planets
Caught in coldness, frozen on the curve
Before exhilarating force comes up
To claim for us once more; we believe
As we flash out, go numb against the black
That we are done; that birth will be no more
We're wrong. But we won't know we are
Until we've held some breath, until
We've lost the way to gasp, and make
The sun stay where we want, until
We've waited
While the world shows us a different, distant face
And crows cry on cold country
With single voices yelling from the barren land of home
Of life we can't remember and don't want to be reknown; we'll stay
Inside, and wait for warmth to die around us
The sun's a shade of what it used to be -
Then birth. We learn again that
Physics' grace must carry us round orbits we can't change
And see the atmosphere remake the seasons
We cannot escape - life is despite us
All around us
In the turned air, we awake.
church on the high st
1 hour ago

