The Wave on the Horizon

These are some very personal thoughts, as we get very close to being ready to launch the site and start to tell people about it.

My mother and I have been discussing it a great deal, and thinking again about the joy that this has brought both of us, and the fact that in a troubled world this feels like a good and a loving thing to bring out into the world.

But I'm also aware that for me, there's going to be a moment one day where I'm stranded in mid-read in one of the novels. Inevitably, it will happen. My mother will die. And what am I going to feel like that day? I'm looking ahead, and maybe thinking that the need to read, and to keep going with the novel, and in a way honour that memory and that thought, will be something I'll want to do. Maybe I'll need to take a break.

It's interesting, I write poetry. Not necessarily very good poetry, but I write poetry. And I can sort of see this wave massing on the horizon, the grief that is going to come. I don't know whether it overwhelms me, but it's certainly going to be pretty brutal. As you can guess, my mother and I are very, very close. She is a remarkable woman, a woman of some genius, who has brought a great many very important things and thoughts to this world.

Ten years ago this year, I gave a TEDx talk on bereavement and grief, and on how it was to support somebody through bereavement and grief. It was in the aftermath of my father dying, and seeing the grief that my mother was going through, for my father, who she loved very, very much indeed, and who was a wonderful, wonderful, gentle man.

And so I do this, and I launch this, with some trepidation, about making what is, in some ways, a very private act, public. My mother and I, as I said just now, have weighed that all up, and decided that in the end this was a loving and a lovely thing to do. The thought that we might spark a movement, and there might be far more people reading for people they love, and sending them readings, humming across phones and emails and WhatsApps and signals and telegrams and various messaging services, that is a lovely, lovely thought.

For me, it has become a very sacred part of my day. Normally it's the end of the day. Sometimes there are reasons I need to do it slightly earlier. But it's a sacred thing.

And I'm aware that one day, one day, it's going to be a day where it's going to be very, very difficult to do indeed. But I'm hoping that maybe, by making it public, I'll feel I can continue somehow to send these stories out there, if they have found another kind of audience who are loving them too.