The Flamingo Diaries
M ost people I know say music is the soundtrack of their life. They listened to their parents’ music as children, then forged their own musical identities in rebellion, used music as a plaster for break-ups, make-ups and life’s many disappointments and triumphs. Not me. My mum and dad occasionally listened to classical music or Elvis, but we lived in a quiet house and they were keener to pass on their love of running and reading. And when I became a runner, chatting to fellow race participants was the backing track to my marathons, not a pre-prepared playlist. ‘If you ever spot me wearing headphones’, I once told a running buddy, ‘you should know that my race is going incredibly badly! I only use them in the direst of emergencies.’
My life does, however, have a soundtrack in the form of John Irving’s books. The first book to captivate me was The World According To Garp. The story of a fatherless misfit child finding his place in the world through writing mirrored my own teenage experience as a super-swot with few friends but literary heroes. Many life experiences later, A Prayer For Owen Meany became incredibly meaningful when my husband Graham was told he had terminal cancer. It tells the story of an outsider, the pint-sized Owen Meany, who talks in an unnaturally high-pitched voice. He learns Vietnamese and obsessively practises basketball, not realising that these skills will one day enable him to heroically save a group of Vietnamese war orphans from a grenade attack. When Graham was diagnosed I realised that, like Owen, everything I’d learned over the past 50 years – the courage that running over 100 marathons and ultras instilled in me, and the tools I’d acquired as a hypnotherapist and hypnobirthing teacher – had equipped me to be a resilient and resourceful ‘cancer thriver’s wife’, a role I felt privileged to have. And then there was A Widow For One Year, a searing portrait of grief. Here, too, I found many parallels with my own life after losing my husband.
WORDS TO GIVE YOU WINGS
The words of prolific American philosopher and naturalist Henry David Thoreau prove t
