Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em

Being minus a mother, there are times when I feel the absence of said maternal being more keenly than others. Mothering Sunday (March 26 in the UK) is just one of those days.

Now, Chicken the Oven Ready is well aware of my feelings as regards this particular day. Even still, he announced to me on Friday night on arrivng home from the rugby (Wigan were not terribly good, he couldn't see much because of the fog, waste of bloody money etc), that he hadn't managed to get his Mother's Day present yet and so could I possibly source an orchid for him?

The reason for this request was that he was racing remote control cars in Wakefield the following day with our neighbour, TechyDave, and a bunch of other weirdos who despite being allegedly adults like to buy expensive bits of kit that require putting together, painting, covering in decals, radio gear and electrics and remote control purchasing separately and so on at great length. It's an expensive hobby, but they enjoy it and it gets them out in the fresh air. And if he ever finishes building the second-hand Super Sabre he bought off Ebay, I will have a car of my own to race.

So, Saturday morning dawned. I was kicked out of bed at 8 am (on a Saturday! Argh!) and sent off to Dave's Village Bakery (another Dave) to buy breakfast. He departed just after 9 am and I headed for the net to find a local florist to enquire about orchids. Three hours later, I remembered why I'd actually gone on line and located a florist locally who had orchids. I presumed he meant a spray orchid, so asked them to keep one for me and then rang him to confirm. No, he actually meant the whole growing plant. I knew they had some of those too, so no worries there.

His mum is now the proud owner of not one but two phaleonopsis plants, both displaying different shaded blooms. She is delighted with them. Buying them was something of a production though, involving me ringing himself trackside and describing flower colours to him over the sound of revving engines and excited squeals from TechyDave. Not the easiest thing to do, really. 'This one is sort of pale greenish with kind of yellow-pinky stripes on the bloom. Yeah, it looks very orchid-y. You like that one? It's 14.50. You want two? The same or different? Yeah, OK. Well, there's one that's like a white with dusky pink in the centre and then dark pink stripes? Or there's a dusky pink one with no stripes but stronger pink. The first one? You sure? Yeah, okay. Gift wrapped? Well, the one you already said is in a gift bag. Plastic. Sort of you know, thing. Hallucinogenic. No, you know what I mean. Yeah, yeah. That's what I said. Oh, didn't I? Well, it's what I meant'.

We had slow-roasted lamb shanks for tea, with melon and serrano ham to begin and meringue nest with raspberries and ice cream for pudding. Very lovely indeed.

Driving home, I had the radio tuned to Radio 2, which is usual for me. The tape deck packed in a few weeks ago, and given that the car is being junked soon there is no point in having it mended, even if that were to prove possible. So, I drove along listening to Canon Roger Royle. He has a half-hour programme on a Sunday evening from 8.30 in which he plays some of the nation's favourite hymns and psalms. The theme of the last few weeks has been connected to Lent and tonight was about the prophet Elijah who went off into the wilderness to try to escape the voice of God. Of course, he couldn't.

Elijah was indeed spoken to by God. There was in the wilderness an earthquake, a storm and a fire. These are all ways in which God was said to communicate. But it was not in the noise and tumult that Elijah heard God, but in the calm that followed. There was a lovely piece by I think Mozart, and this was followed by one of my favourite hymns, Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, sung to the tune Repton. My absolute favourite. Now, the good Canon had already made reference in passing to it being Mothering Sunday. As drove along, the words of the hymn and the beautiful tune swelling around me, I had tears in my eyes and I couldn't at first think why.

It was then that I remembered. I chose that hymn in particular for my mother's first funeral service at the local church in Ullapool. Funnily enough, it isn't one of the hymns they especially like in the Church of Scotland - I'd never heard it till I was a student in England and began going to church on a fairly regular basis, after ten years or so of estrangement from the established Church. You'd have thought a congregation of some 400 souls would have been able to sing it, but no. Even the minister didn't know it. There was myself and maybe two or three others who sang it. That kind of fits in with the words towards the end.

Drop Thy still dews of quietness,
Till all our strivings cease;
Take from our souls the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess
The beauty of Thy peace.

Breathe through the heats of our desire
Thy coolness and Thy balm;
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still, small voice of calm.

Somehow I felt like that still, small voice of calm. I felt so buffeted by emotion and assailed by the sense of loss and anger that came with losing someone I loved so very much, I felt as though the best thing I could do for her to was be calm and to be still and to accept what had happened. Singing on through the hymn was my tribute to her.

Driving on through the night, my eyes filled with tears, I felt her presence so keenly I cold have stopped the car and sobbed on the roadside. Instead I dashed the tears away and drove on into the night.