FIDELMA COOK

ALL around us in my favourite restaurant the buzz was of the French enjoying Sunday lunch en famille. As always it was a shock to glance surreptitiously about and see very small children eating what they were served and behaving impeccably.

At a neighbouring table I heard two English voices, rare at this time of the year when the well-heeled locals take over this much-loved family-run establishment.

At my table was H, Dutch and R, his Scottish wife, who has lived abroad for more than 40 years since moving to Holland for work aged 21. We had never met before this day. But as one we raised our glasses in a toast skywards.

A toast to Reg Macfarlane, R’s father who died two years ago aged 90 and my, I suppose, pen pal, whose emails over several years of the column both amused and touched me.

I never met Reg either but I knew of his daughter, her family, her life in Spain and of his wife who, he often claimed, hovered in the background sending her good wishes as he discussed my latest column.

So R showed me a video of her mother, now 91, dancing with her great-grandchild and told me her mother wanted me to see it.

Since I started writing this column I have been the most fortunate of women in many, many ways. Thanks to the immediacy and ease of the internet, I have built an extraordinary, even intimate, relationship with so many people I will never meet.

Reg, like many, began his first email with the words: “I have never done this before …”

He was enthralled with the whole new medium but also couched his words in the formal script of letters. And so began our correspondence.

He asked for a photograph and I feigned shock that he was seeking a little more than was on offer. I could feel his horror of being misunderstood in his rapid email return and quickly sent a calming reply with an attached photo of Portia and me. In return he sent a lovely picture of him and his wife.

I could see kindness, intelligence and a little shyness in his smile, and also a frailty.

A few of his emails alluded to an ongoing medical problem but with the casual, apparently cavalier attitude of his generation. His last return to hospital was, in hindsight, a premonition of what was to come and I told him I would be lighting a mental candle for his return.

It was dictated to his daughter, as he was too weak to write himself.

The next email came from that daughter, who sat before me now, to tell me of his death.

I was not surprised but I was a little shocked at how much his death touched me; how much I knew I’d miss his little bursts of gentle wisdom, and how tears came easily at the news.

And also how time was taken, or thought of, to tell me, a stranger.

Often since then he comes to mind for some reason and I say a little prayer and light a mental candle. In a way that’s why his daughter was before me now. We share, it seems, a belief in little signs. My book in a tiny Spanish class in Catalonia was the main spur for contact after her father’s death, along with other little signals.

And so, while visiting Toulouse for a few days, she suggested a meeting and here we were. I listened as she talked of Reg, her gentleman father.

How strange this life as a columnist is for someone who has practised detachment all her journalistic life.

There are other Regs and Reginas who write and tell me of all that befalls them and I vicariously share in their hopes, their joys and, often, their miseries. I consider it a privilege that my readers feel, for all my sometimes still childish outbursts of rage here, that they can tell me anything and I will understand. It baffles me too.

They also give me sage advice and counsel that often lifts me and quells the child that still dwells within. They make me a far, far better person than I am.

Over the years some abruptly disappear and I am left wondering if they still live, but cannot seek the answer in case they’ve merely moved on.

Others pop up every so often almost as if slightly ashamed of all they’ve told me. Don’t worry – those secrets really are safe with me in these instances.

Some only need to touch base now and again as if to say: “Still here. Keep going.”

Others still dip in to offer sanctuary in houses they own far from here if I feel in need of fleeing both heat and terminal boredom.

And some, like Reg, are/ were always here.

Just writing this, I remember the many emails of great kindness and empathy and become rather overwhelmed by it all.

I tell all this to the couple before me. A couple I know will visit again.

I sense Reg smiling up above and so we raise a last toast to him on this day.