7 YEARS LATER

 I guess this should be Nikki's New Life Part 2, something I never thought I'd write.

 

On 28 June, 2017, my best friend and TG supporter, Barbara, died. On 29 May, this year, my life-long love, Pauline, who married me last year and grew to understand and support TG people passed away through cancer.

I want to write, to celebrate Pauline's life. That will come in its own time.

24/06 - Feeling raw emotions as I collected Pauline's ashes today. Very strange, in the bright sunshine of the hottest day of the year, walking with a carrier bag containing 73 years of someone's life across the road amidst the everyday traffic and over to Sainsbury's where the car was parked. Then home and so, where do I put those memories? Nothing fits, nothing's right ... this shouldn't be, but that's what life is, an interruption in nothingness.

Curiously, at the end of an evening laced with brandy, I find some solace in playing Bruce Springsteen on youtube. He sings with such vibrancy about life and I remember when we saw him in Frankfurt all those years ago, back in '81. I finally have to turn off youtube when, however good he is, he isn't playing with the E Street Band and switch to BBC Radio 3, a channel P and I adopted in the last year. That brings me to Mahler, but he must wait as it's late now.