Bryn

I recently took my backpack out of its winter quarters and, to my considerable surprise, out rolled a tennis ball.

Now, a tennis ball weighs somewhere around 57 grammes, and some physicist will probably have worked a formula out long ago for calculating how many joules of energy it would take to move that dead-weight over 1,000 miles. If and when someone comes across the research, perhaps they can let me know. I have skin in the game.

You see, when I thought about it for a bit, I remembered that the tennis ball had been placed in my pack by a friend on the night of 7th March 2022, the first night of my walk from Lymington to Cape Wrath. It would, he said, with an air of conspiratorial confidence, give me something to roll my tired shoulders across each night, and would be both cheaper and better than any physiotherapist. We Green Jackets are like that: trained experts aren’t nearly as interesting as gifted amateurs. Not that you tend to need an expert at all when one of us is around.

I never once used that ball, mainly because I never once saw it again, but still it went the whole length of the trip with me, snuggling inside a pair of waterproof trousers that I also never really used. When I got back home and tipped my pack upside down on the kitchen floor, it obviously got caught in a little fold somewhere, stayed there, and that was that.

Now that I have re-discovered it, my friend is no longer around to share the joke. In yet another version of that age-old story that becomes depressingly more familiar with each new decade (stomach pain, back pain, GPs, tests, more tests, diagnosis), pancreatic cancer developed inside him and it was too late. He died on April 12th this year, and was carried down the aisle of Salisbury Cathedral a couple of weeks later by a unique and happily lop-sided assortment of the injured servicemen whose lives he had made it the work of his own to improve. ‘The blokes’ he called them, even though they were both men and women, and the blokes they remain.

Much has been written about Bryn, not least a full page in the Times the day after he died, (which he might have quite liked) and I’m not going to add much to what has already been eloquently and fully expressed. He was just an extraordinary human being who, along with his equally extraordinary wife Emma, got that one opportunity to change the world and seized it. If I am allowed just the four adjectives for him, then I will choose: heroic, loving, exasperating and funny. If I am allowed one more, it would have to be far-seeing. I feel no guilt at using the word ‘exasperating’, partly because he would have rightly said exactly the same about me, and partly because it’s a quality that positively defined him. You may have noticed that orderly and reasonable people are great to have around, but rarely change the world.

Unlike Bryn, I have another chance at an adventure. Who knows? More than one, maybe. During June, I will be walking down the west coast of Scotland, from the top down to somewhere near Glasgow. So, with Emma’s permission and a devout sense of the ridiculous that its inspiration would have recognised and understood, I am taking that old ball along with me again. I won’t roll my shoulders across it any more than I did last year, but it will make me smile, which is really the whole point of life.

‘A bit like Wilson in Castaway?’ asked Emma.

Indeed, I thought, but hopefully a bit more lively. And you can search for all the metaphors you like in this little story, pick the one you most like, and you will probably be right. Sometimes, metaphors are all that we can grasp onto in trying to understand this world of ours.

Time moves on, but Bryn’s tennis ball and I are off on an adventure.