Seventeen Gifts for Frannie and Jess by Nasser Hashmi

Author:Nasser Hashmi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
Published: 2016-06-05T16:00:00+00:00

DAY TEN

I spend the whole morning rewatching last night’s tumultuous events. Jessica, luckily for me, had remembered to record most of the action and I sit, with a coffee and an edition of the Sunday Telegraph, to relive some of the incredible things I witnessed. I keep using the remote control to rewind to pivotal moments: Jessica Ennis in the 800, Greg Rutherford’s winning jump and, of course, Mo Farah’s thrilling pursuit of 10,000m glory. But I keep pausing it again and again at Mo’s embrace with his daughter; the Union flag stuck in between them, it’s an image seared into my consciousness. I cannot say how wonderful it makes me feel. If the tears are an indication, then I must be in dreamland. There is also the small matter of all the other gold medals to catch up on from yesterday: two in the rowing and one in the Velodrome. It’s the best day for Britain for 104 years. We now have 14 golds and 29 medals in total, sitting third in the medal table. Seeing all those smiling British faces on the podium again and again feels like a trick of the mind. Are we that good? Maybe we’re not as bad as we think.

After this wonderful, lazy morning (and I don’t feel any stiffness either after yesterday’s marathon stint), I go upstairs and tidy what is now Jessica’s bedroom. She is working this morning and, perhaps as she had to rush to London to beat the Sunday transport restrictions, her bedroom is what she likes to call a lot of things: a tip. So I begin picking up the clothes strewn on her bed as well as the odd magazine, a summer dress, socks and an empty bottle of water. I wonder if she’s always this disorganised or the mitigation of our frequent London trips – at unsociable hours – should be taken into consideration. The neatly-placed picture of her mother and father that she’s placed on the bedside table makes me think the latter. After a few minutes, the bedroom looks how I want it but I cannot help go through some of things Jessica and I trawled through yesterday. The old photo album and the shoebox of Test cricket stubs bring a smile to my face. I didn’t expect them to do that. Donald looks so pleased in some those pictures that I imagine him standing on a podium, with a gold medal round his neck! For some reason, I’m drawn to the happier photos today rather than the ones I tended to highlight when I was with Jessica yesterday. I enjoy going through the shoebox with the Test cricket stubs. On the back of the stubs is a single word describing the day he spent at the cricket ground: ‘frustrating’, ‘enthralling’, ‘captivating’. It was Donald through and through: patience and analysis; it was why he managed to stay in the army for so long. I leave the bedroom and head back downstairs, in the kind of uplifted mood I’d never thought I’d experience again in this house.

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