My Happy Place

On Wednesday December 9th I took some time away from from my work and went online to read my local weekly newspaper. We had long since stopped having a physical copy delivered - a sign of these digital times, however I thought it would be nice to catch up with what was going on in my local area. Five minutes in to aimlessly flicking through a plethora of adverts, I was about to give up, nothing seemed to be happening In my hometown of Bromsgrove, I debated whether to give up and check what Piers Morgan was ranting about on Twitter, when I thought I'll just plough on to the end. When I came to the announcements page I briefly scanned the births, deaths and marriages. Having worked in the library in Bromsgrove for over twenty years I knew a fair amount of people and was wondering if there was anybody I knew. As I glanced at the page a name caught my eye and made my heart go slightly faster. My brain however told me that all though I knew the name it could not be the person I knew. I went back to the name and read the announcement, I knew the name of the person who I had died and his age and date of birth. It was somebody who had gone to school with and grown up with but had not seen for about 20 years. He had died unexpectedly at the age of 49. I was shocked, Immediately a flood of memories came back to the forefront of my mind and I became quite emotional. I checked with a friend on Facebook and he confirmed the news.

What followed was a longing for nostalgia, 2020 had been the most difficult of years for me personally. Like everybody else there was a pandemic to deal with, which in itself brought a myriad of problems and the death of a family member. Long before the pandemic, my mental health had been suffering, but during this year it worsened, a debate raged in my head every day, whether to carry on. Carry on I did and the only thing that got me through it was thinking back to my happy place - my childhood, when I was happy, felt safe and was surrounded by friends and family. By my age(48) life takes its toll - a divorce (and a bitter one at that), loss of family members and a complete loss of confidence has quite frankly made me a shell of that boy who I think back to. What happened to him? Where did he go? He certainly was not here now. What made me think even more about this was a school friend sending a photograph I did not know even existed. It was of my school football team when I was aged ten or eleven. I knew everybody in the photo and it was made even more poignant that the friend who had recently died was standing on the back row looking just as I remembered him. To say I cried when I saw this photo was an understatement, the tears poured out for about five minutes, some for my friend who had been given me some great memories as a child and some for the younger me who was staring happily back at me. I had hopes and dreams then and now all these years later that happy boy had turned into a shell of a person who every day made a Yes/No decision about carrying on with his life. I kept looking at the photo, I just wished I could go back to be amongst my friends, I thought about what I loved when I was 10.

For a week now I have been in my happy place and sometimes it is hard to get round the fact that 1982 is something that only exists in my memories and is somewhere I cannot physically get to, so it begs the question how do I move on and create a happy place that I can actually go to and save me another year of mental torment. I guess a lot of us are going through this in this most toughest of years and as Christmas approaches, for some of us that resolve will be tested even more and even more us will be searching for a happy place.