As I began to recover from the stroke that kept me in hospital from December ’23 till March this year, I managed to write – or rather, type – a significant amount of poetry and other things, all of which helped me to focus on thoughts which were not just about the depressing and disorientating ordeal I was undergoing. This is an example:

The Docklands, Not Long After The Last Ships Had Gone: A Memory

I was walking on the Bermondsey foreshore at low tide, the clear water at the edge of the shore just covering the shining gravel.

The river before me was silent, as was the bare flat land behind me, where once had been a community and the rows of terraced housing which supported it.

I became aware of a sound at the very edge of my hearing, a soft, tinkling, almost musical sound.

I thought at first it might have been the cries, distorted by distance, of the gulls wheeling in high swooping circles above me in the blue sky.

But when I realised I could not tell where the sound was coming from, I knew it could not have been that.

So I looked around me; and then I looked down.

The glaring sunlight which seemed to be powering the gulls brought out the bright colours of the gravel stones beneath the cool, shivering water. I saw that amongst those were colours that could not have been gravel, sparkling and glinting.

I realised then that I was looking at an uncountable scattering of fragmented glass shards, tiny translucent pieces of blue, yellow, green, being gently pushed and pulled by the rippling water, back and forth, back and forth, striking the gravelstones like distant bellhammers; the sweetest, gentlest of death-knells.