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You'll be reading this in early summer, but I'm writing it in late winter. You might be in your garden, or in a park, or at a table outside a pub sipping cold lager; right now, I'm wrapped in a blanket, drinking hot coffee, the world outside a frosty grey. Still, there are bouncing lambs in the fields nearby and the car no longer needs a kettle of boiling water poured over it in the mornings, and yesterday had something of the spring about it; bright sunshine, twittering birds, etc. So winter's end is within sniffing distance. It's been a particularly long and hard one, however, and at the risk of sounding like the opening of a Richard Yates novel or the end of a Thomas Hardy one, the season's been marked by an unusually high level of death (no, wait, don't run away; this column will lighten up shortly, I promise).

It began with the attack on Bombay; the blurry images of the gunmen, the Taj Mahal Hotel in flames. I'd stayed in the Taj only a few months earlier; that burnt-out and blood-splattered bar shown repeatedly on the news, I'd gotten drunk on cocktails in there and had a whale of a time. Leopold's Bar, too, where I'd eaten the best daal in the world and drunk buckets of Cobra, and into which one of the gunmen had tossed a grenade and pumped bullets from his machine-gun. I remembered the staff of both places, the lovely staff; the man in the Taj who beamed brilliantly when we complimented him enthusiastically on his curried potato pancakes; the waiter in Leopold's with whom we became friendly and who always made sure we had a smoking table, even if that just meant removing the 'No Smoking' sign (if other people's nicotine addiction irritates you, then don't go to India). 'Smoking table'; how that phrase has taken on a hideous new meaning now. These people, are they still alive? And, if they are, what horrors have they witnessed, what traumas have they suffered and will no doubt continue to suffer for many years to come? After the attacks, I fired off scores of emails to contacts in Bombay (as I've also had to do to New York, Madrid, London and Australia following the Bali bomb); I received replies to them all, which was a relief. No-one had been badly injured but, God, what horror stories they had to tell. And it struck me that, if you travel a lot these days, then your ongoing survival is simply a matter of timing. Not a cheering thought.

Then, up in Liverpool, I had a terrible row with someone who I thought was a good friend. I won't go into details, much less name names (they'd probably be familiar to you), but the event shocked and disturbed me for weeks. Then the snow came, and the freezing temperatures, and the country was, unsurprisingly, plunged into chaos; lack of preparedness was to blame, we were told, even though similar weather hits the country every year, so regularly in fact, that we even have a name for it, which is winter. And then my grandmother, my last surviving grandparent, died; she was 85 and had been horribly reduced by Alzheimer's for a couple of years, so her death was expected. But still sad. Her funeral took place on an Arctic morning in a foot of snow; I wore shades against the glare and pretended that I was in a scene from The Sopranos in my bulky black overcoat and suit.

And the grey days plodded on. They're here still; the sky outside is the colour of ancient coins and more snow is forecast. Yet here's the thing; I seem to gather strength, both mental and physical, as the winters progress. That's partly due to the long, cheek-pinkening walks to the pub and the pints of Guinness or ale before the log fire when I get there, and to the slow-cooked beef stews and mounds of mashed potato that I eat, and to the weights I lift to get the blood pumping and to combat the cold, and to those long recuperative nights wrapped in blankets reading, and to the deep and heavy sleeps that are induced by duvet'd and hot-water-bottled protection from the fiercely icy night-time hours. Come March, and my skin may be the colour of a raw parsnip, but my energy levels tend to be quite high. And, this year, there's been added fuel, added propulsion; my contacts in Bombay have formed alliances with people from Pakistan and other so-called 'states that sponsor terrorism' (thankyou, Mr. Bush, and sod off), and they're getting together regularly to cook and drink and swap stories and enjoy each other's company and, basically, concoct an antidote to prejudice and hatred and mistrust. My grandmother's funeral brought together the full extended family, people I hadn't seen in decades, and we bonded in a pub over bowls of scouse and nips of whiskey, and I looked around at all the lives that her life produced, all her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and I thought of the lives that will in turn be produced by them, a huge and million-limbed tree, and the seeds that will drop and grow from that and produce their own spores and so on and so on, forever, and it was immensely uplifting. People don't really die, I thought; they just live on in other forms. I made arrangements to, this year, definitely get together with my uncle, and then I ordered up another bowl of scouse and another tot of the old Jameson's.

So that's it; death strengthens the living. Winter's followed by spring - contains its own opposite, in fact. A simple observation, I know, but so what? When a light starts to glow inside you, you don't waste time asking who turned it on. So bye-bye the Bombay I all-too-briefly knew, bye-bye granny, bye-bye my once-friend in Liverpool, and hello to new friends and hello again to people I haven't seen in decades. Sunlight, here I am.
© Niall Griffiths 2009

Niall’s dark days make him appreciate the bright ones that follow

After darkness, sunshine