Hindsight
My late brother Simon will never walk in 2023 like the rest of us. He died on the hottest day of last year - July 19th - in Dove House - the only hospice in East Yorkshire. They had placed him in The Princess Diana Suite. There was a framed photograph of her by the swing doors. She had opened this room back in 1992. It was cool like a cave and it only took Simon four days to die in there. Simon was a difficult human. I had given up asking him over to our house for Christmas so every year in the days just before Christmas, we would meet up at a venue half way between his humble rental cottage in the village where we were both born and my house in Sheffield. This was usually The Lakeside Shopping Village at Doncaster or the motorway services at the M18/M180 junction. There we would exchange gifts, drink coffees and converse about this and that. He smoked all his adult life and ultimately this is what killed him - cancer of both the trachea and the oesophagus. Any weight he h...
