MY WEEK BY FRANCIS GAY

A stitch in time will patch up the biggest family rifts

A true friend is a blessing, So treasure them with care, When you are ill or worried, Remember they are there. A problem can be daunting, When we don’t know what to do, Turn to that special confidant, They will see you through.

Ithought her embroidery project was just a good way to pass the time in the airport departure lounge. But it was more.

“I’m off to Canada to visit my sister,” she said.

“We had a serious falling-out 12 years ago and have hardly spoken since. There’s been all sorts of ramifications. I thought that was long enough.

“And I’m hoping she’ll be glad to see me when I get there. The trouble is, nothing was resolved, so I have a hundred reasons for turning back.

“But this embroidery requires thousands of stitches. So, as I fly, I’ll focus on the stitches as the reasons, the miles and the old hurts get left behind.”

I wished her blessings for the journey and prayed her welcome would be a warm one.

She was, literally, stitching her family back together.

The young woman was sleeping in an underpass. In a puddle. Johnny couldn’t bring himself to walk past. He helped her sit up and tried to talk to her, but she didn’t answer. He half carried her to his car and drove her to hospital.

They sat together, with her drifting in and out of consciousness.

But, as she was being taken to a ward, she handed him a grubby piece of paper with a number on it. He was tempted to throw it away, but…

He phoned it. A man answered. When Johnny explained, he heard the choke in his voice.

“She’s my baby,” he said. “I haven’t seen her for a year. Drugs, you know. I’ll get there as soon as possible.”

“I’ve walked past a lot of people on the streets,” Johnny told me. “It’ll be more difficult now – I’ll be thinking of each one as somebody’s baby.”

Alison had to take her fouryear-old daughter to hospital late one evening. Her husband worked night-shift, so she also had to take their 18-month-old baby. She put a message on social media asking for help.

Tony saw it. He also saw no one else was responding. He guessed the others were asleep. But he knew nothing about babies – or hospitals.

But he couldn’t imagine dealing with a sick child and a baby single-handedly.

So, he turned up at the hospital, saying he probably couldn’t do anything, but…

She put him to work. While Alison and the doctors made the older girl better, Tony walked the corridors of the hospital, pushing a restless baby in her pram until daddy arrived in the morning.

“I knew I could walk. I just didn’t know it would be such a useful skill,” Tony told me.

We all have times when we wish we could help but are sure we can’t. Turn up anyway.

Phil was on his way to an exercise class.

In his sixties he had never done anything like it before, but it was a class for people with heart problems or who had suffered strokes.

He couldn’t praise the group highly enough. In the two years since his stroke, he had looked into the mechanisms of his illness and become fascinated by how his brain found new ways to work around the damage.

That fascination led to a course of study on the workings of the human brain.

What with the new mental stimulation and the fun he was having at the exercise class, he has rarely enjoyed his life more.

A stroke or other illness will inevitably bring changes into a life, but not all of those changes have to be bad.

Phil is a shining example of that!