The Reason I Run by Chris Spriggs

Author:Chris Spriggs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Summersdale Publisher

PHOTOGRAPHS

No story lives unless someone wants to listen.

J. K. Rowling

January arrives and doesn’t seem happy about it, lines of drizzle score the windscreen as my family and I drive to Great Grandma’s house. The clouds have slumped themselves down for the day. In Roman mythology, Janus (after which January is named) was the god of beginnings and transitions and was often depicted as having two faces, one looking back, the other forward. Pretty handy for reverse-parking, or doing the Macarena. I think back over the last 6 months. I feel I’ve come so far – learning about MND through personal stories, training with wheelchairs, banking hundreds of miles of running, and meeting inspirational people along the way. Now it’s 2013, the year of our marathon. There still seems such a long way to go. Do we look back more as we get older? How do we make sense of life?

Visiting Great Grandma at her Bedfordshire bungalow, I take in the photographs populated on every shelf and mantelpiece, curious about all the stories. There are four generations of family on show. It’s like a story told backwards, pictures of toothy children in high-definition colour at the front, photographs of adults with bad haircuts sheltering in rows behind, through to faded black-and-white postcards at the back, with army uniforms and serious expressions.

‘I thought we’d all go to the pub for lunch,’ Great Grandma says to my wife, breaking the spell, ‘by car.’ She’s clearly not keen on me pushing her there.

As I drive, with Great Grandma in the front passenger seat, I wonder about those photographs. The connections of love, the hidden stories.

We pull up in the pub car park. There is one other car. The children’s play area is a single slide in need of repair. Walking into the pub I notice there are over 50 ‘specials’ chalked up on the blackboard, rendering the meaning of the word special null and void. We take a table in the middle of the pub. Toby bangs his water bottle on the high chair for attention, Caleb flaps the menu at his face and Maisie-Joy muses over a Princess crossword puzzle.

We get talking about Great Grandma’s childhood.

‘Well, I wasn’t raised by my mam and dad was I?’ she tells us. ‘After five months I was carted off to my grandma round the corner.’ Hannah and I pose questions between the banging-flapping-scribbling noises of our children, our usual weekend soundtrack, and place our orders. The food is with us in minutes, suggesting it was ready before we arrived.

‘My younger sister came along soon after I was born, so I was turfed out and then a brother, Thomas, came along. I never knew much about him. I lost my sister when she was nine, I’d just turned ten.’ Great Grandma pauses, then cuts into her soft vegetables. There’s nothing wrong with her memory.

There are moments like this when you learn some tiny fact about someone and it casts a new frame around your perception of them.

‘What happened to your sister?’ I ask.

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