MY WEEK WITH FRANCIS GAY

Sometimes they drive us mad, but we’d be lost without friends, they provide the comfort blanket, that creates the perfect blend, friends can be a lifeline, creating good times and fun, to make sure you have good pals, be sure to be one.

Sue is raising three children by herself and sometimes it gets too much. So, she phones her dad. He lives too far away to be a practical help, but he’s good at listening.

She told him about pressures with work and child-care, how her car was due its MOT. Her back garden looked more like a meadow, with grass and buttercups as high as her knees. That was next on her to-do list. That’s when Dad did the dad thing. “Before you cut the grass,” he said, “give yourself an hour. Or half an hour. Lay a blanket down where the grass is tallest. And lay there with a book. But, don’t read the book. Put it over your eyes. And listen to the birds, and the breeze. It’ll help!”

And it did!

It seems dads can help from any distance. And Mother Nature is always willing to embrace a worried heart.

Helen couldn’t get over his kindness. He had been taking a divan bed-base to the tip and removed the drawers.

Behind them, he found a vacuum-packed bag.

He asked his son, whose bed it had been, if he knew about it. He didn’t.

So, the man traced the history of the bed-base.

It had supported his son, his son’s friend, and the friend’s grandad, who’d been Helen’s nighbour!

She thought the drawers were empty when she gave him the bed, and no one had looked behind them since.

Until that final trip to the tip.

So, what was in the bag? Her wedding dress, and her (now grown-up) children’s baby blankets.

It was very kind of him to go to all that effort to return them. Of course, it was Helen’s kindness in giving away the bed that made the rest of it possible so, fair’s fair.

Shhh! Don’t tell the parents!

Danny should have made sure his grandchildren had shoes on, but he hadn’t anticipated the fun Nathan, 3, and Annie, 2, would have running up and down the garden path.

Nathan was determined to be the fastest and Annie was determined to keep up. They ran, giggling to the garden gate and back again, then back again, and back again.

Their simple fun took him back to his own childhood. Enjoying the moment he tried not to think of the state of their socks.

It was only when the rain came on that he scooped them up and carried them, laughing breathlessly, into the house. Then he put a washing on!

Danny has often complained about the amount of electronic gadgetry the children in the family have. But those moments of simple fun reassured him of one thing – childhood may have changed, but children haven’t!

Nicola had a special bond with her Gran Sadie. It’s one of the great regrets of her life that her gran didn’t live long enough to meet her daughter.

Just recently, at a house clearance for a relative, a picture of Sadie when she was about one-year-old turned up.

Nicola asked for it, and now it hangs on a wall in her home.

No sooner was it up than her twoyear-old daughter, Evie, wanted to see it.

The little one focused intently on the baby in the picture, then turned to her mum.

“That Evie?” she asked.

And there was actually a strong resemblance.

“That’s when I realised we never lose our loved ones,” Nicola told me.

“Because they live on in us.You only have to look close enough to see that.”