The Grim Reaper, some wonderful books and a poem. -- Enid Richemont

 Most of us, when we were kids, have played some form of the gruesome verbal game of "Would you rather...?" Would you rather be eaten by a crocodile or swallowed by a whale? Would you rather be drowned in the sea or frozen in a deep freeze? Would you rather be locked up forever inside a chest, like the lost girl in the story, or would you prefer to be thrown from the top of the Empire State Building? For lucky children with kind and loving families, it feels like fun to flirt with terrible things, daring them to come on while knowing they are fantasies, and so we can push the improbable scenarios to impossible extremes. Nobody really believes in their own death, in spite of wills being drawn up (my daughter wrote an elaborate one when she was about nine) and funerals planned, often in great detail. These things feel like theatre, and the fact that we won't be there to watch a bit irrelevant, unless we believe in ghosts.

I have, very recently, had a reality check in the form of an unwelcome bodily guest, the one with the name beginning with a 'C' (but not Covid) which we all dread, and which in my case, seems to be not very treatable. It's odd that acual illness features very little in the horror fantasies of childhood, the gory endings being much preferred. As a child, my own first encounter with the Grim Reaper was via a schoolfriend who must have been one of the last very young people to die of tuberculosis. It was a strange, almost unreal situation. I used to visit her regularly, and apart from being in bed, she looked and acted normally. We shared the nonsense kids share. We ate sweets and giggled. There was no atmosphere of impending doom. I can't remember her parents, but I have no recollection of grave faces and tears, but she did die, and I was disbelieving, because I'd gone round to her house for a chat and to fool around, and was told that she'd died that day. We weren't really that close, so I didn't exactly mourn her, but afterwards I still remember going on a short country walk close to her home, and the colours of the sky that day, and the green of the grass, and the wild flowers, buttercups and clover, and that strange, indefinable silence inside me.

As always, friends have been hugely supportive, with flowers, and especially, books. I downloaded for my Kindle Maggie O'Farrell's short stories: Seventeen Brushes with Death. I'd never read her, but it had been very well reviewed, and seemed gruesomely appropriate. Her writing, predictably, is brilliant, and her life extraordinary, but knowing that each story contained its own horror made me eventually abandon it. One day I must read her "Hamnet".

A friend gave me Jenni Murray's "A History of Britain in 21 Women" which has totally grabbed me - there was SO much I didn't know, and SO many fantastic women to meet, like the early 19th century Ada Lovelace, Lady Byron's daughter, who became a mathematician and one of the pioneers of computer science, actively remembered into the 21st Century, with Ada Lovelace Day to raise the profile of women in Science, technology, engineering and Maths. Most people will have heard of the great astronomer William Herschel, but not of his sister, Caroline, who was possibly more innovative. A learned paper she wrote, however, had to be delivered by her brother to the Royal Society because - well, you've guessed it - she was a woman. Oh, and what made Boudicca really cross with the Romans, before the rape of her daughters etc, was that her husband had died and left her an inheritance, but under Roman law, women weren't allow to own property, so they claimed it as theirs.

Other literary delights have been a return to "Restoration" by Rose Tremain which opens with a lot of erotic naughtiness and "All Among the Barley" by Melissa Harrison, but the most unexpectedly and most comforting  work during this trauma has been an Edward Thomas poem called "Adlestrop", which became almost like an ear worm, repeating itself over and over again during some of the more unpleasant procedures. It's from "A Bracelet of Bright Hair", an anthology by poet (and friend) Frances Thomas, and it was the last two verses that just sang inside my head, providing a island of peace, and I didn't choose it - it was just there for me. If you don't know it, Google it - it's worth it./