The 50 List – a Father's Heartfelt Message to his Daughter by Nigel Holland

Author:Nigel Holland
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-01-24T18:30:00+00:00

17 April 2012

To my great relief, it does stay that way. Better than that, even: although my pupil isn’t yet back to normal, my headache has now completely gone, as has the tenderness at the side of my face. Which must be a positive, surely?

‘Yes,’ says the consultant when he comes to see me today. Better still, he pronounces me good to go.

‘We’ll see you in three months,’ he says. ‘Sooner, of course, should any of your problems reappear. But, yes, you’re good to go.’

‘See,’ Lisa says, as we drive home at lunchtime. ‘I told you everything would be OK.’

‘Did you always think that?’ I ask her. ‘I mean, really?’

She smiles. ‘A lot of people have been praying for you at church, Nigel.’

I’m not sure what to say to that. Not even sure what to think. Does praying make a difference? I wish I knew.

Or, actually, when I think about it, perhaps it’s best that I don’t know. All I know is that I’m very, very thankful.

* * *

I suppose God, religion, the idea of heaven and hell, and all the rest of it, were not concepts that troubled me much, growing up. I was raised, as most people in Britain were in the 1960s, in a loosely but reassuringly traditional Christian fashion. Christian in the sense that we were Church of England, at any rate. My mum and dad really weren’t churchgoers. Bar Mum’s attendance at the odd Christmas Eve service, weddings and funerals were pretty much the extent of it. But my schooling was firmly traditional and of its time. We had assembly every morning, said grace before lunch, had harvest festival and sang carols at Christmas – though, as already recorded, my star turn in the school nativity play had little to do with the birth of baby Jesus.

By my teens I was beginning to enjoy more earthly pleasures, and at the age of 16 – a little younger than many of my contemporaries – I began to really spread my wings a bit.

It was at that age that I left Martindale School and transferred to a residential college geared to those with disabilities: Hereward College, in Coventry. I had always wanted to study chemistry, physics and biology, but my grades weren’t quite good enough for it to be clear I’d succeed at them, so I was advised to stick with what I was good at: business and commerce.

And they were right, in that I did get good grades in those subjects, but a part of me will always wonder what I might have done, career-wise, had I put my foot down and insisted. Either become a scientist or blown up a lab, I suppose. If I’m honest, I suppose probably the latter.

Once again, a big focus at college was sport. I took up swimming pretty seriously, I competed once again at Stoke Mandeville, and I also joined the table tennis team. At this time of my life my disability was pretty stable, and I remember thinking

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