Some months ago, I collected from my Mum a folder entitled "Various verse" - a random stack of dusty old bits and pieces of paper, all of them bits of text written by my late father.  Mostly poems, as the title of the folder suggests, but a few items of prose too.

Prompted recently by a conversation with my sister, I remembered that I had them, and had a bit of a read through.  They turned out to be not quite what I'd expected.  Dad was a prolific, one might say obsessive, writer of poetry.  He wrote verses all his life - mostly short and humorous.  Or so I thought.
What I found was a selection of mostly serious poetry, written in the latter half of the 1940s, and a few up to the early 1950s.  Many I found to be quite breathtakingly beautiful; indeed profoundly moving.  The early ones in particular, written while he was in Belgium, during the "clean up" after the Second World War, mostly typed on the backs of old German requisition forms, chart a captivating fragment of his life that I'd never even considered before.  He seems to have been a popular and happy man at that time (as he was most of his life), a little sentimental (no surprise there, given my own weakness in that direction!), and clearly revelling in the strangely beautiful ruined Europe in which he found himself.

I'd always considered myself to be quite similar to my father.  We certainly shared some great similarities in terms of personality.  However, one thing struck me like a blow, reading these outpourings - the contrast with some of the gloomy nonsense that I've often posted here on this blog.
In amongst the pages upon pages of, admittedly wistful, but nonetheless optimistic and positive text, was one single solitary poem, that hit a darker, bleaker note.  A single piece of writing that spoke of despair, of loss, of hopelessness.  Just one.  And written at the bottom of it, presumably sometime much later, in his own handwriting, the line, "what on earth prompted me to write this?"

If ever there was a testament to what a positive outlook on life he had, that was it.  Not only was there, among all the moving things he'd written, just the one truly sad poem, but it was a sufficiently rare experience for him that he felt moved to comment upon it.  Not for the first time, I wished I'd really got to know my father better.  We were very alike, certainly, but in this we differed - he never acquired the habit (never allowed himself to acquire it) of wallowing in self-pity.  He had as many knocks as any of us, in his lifetime, but they were never allowed to define him.  Lesson for me there, I think.

Just over an hour ago, two families were travelling through Romford by car.  As luck would have it, they both arrived at the traffic lights outside my flat at about the same time.  One of the cars, it scarcely matters which, jumped a red light.  The two families, who might otherwise never have met, came together about as violently as it's possible to do.

An hour later, all traces of the encounter have been cleared away, but:  Two people left by ambulance, one of them injured badly enough that they had to be cut out of their car, and lifted carefully, oh, so carefully, on to the gurney.  A small child has had an experience that will probably give it nightmares for a long time.  Two more people are severely shocked.  The two cars involved are just so much scrap metal.  All their lives will have been severely blighted for a fair while.

I don't know any of these people, but this all makes me very sad.  Not in any judgemental way; I'm not complaining about careless driving or suchlike - every driver there's ever been has made mistakes at one time or another; nor even in a "somebody should do something" sort of way (especially not that) - just sad for the trauma caused to these five people.  Life's a harsh bugger.