Howard's Reef !

I visited Paul 3 times over 2 days (1st and 2nd May) with Penny, on my way home from ski-touring Italy.

Paul was delighted to see Penny. She is really marvellous with Paul and she seems to have an endless supply of energy, such that I commented to her that I felt a bit like Margaret Thatcher's PA at times during my 2 day stay!

I shook Paul's hand and he had a firm grasp. I was surprised and delighted when he said, 'You've been in the Pyrenees?'. Penny had told him this the previous day. I told him a bit about what I had been doing. Among other quite brief exchanges, I talked about our impending trip to St Kilda at the end of May. Afterwards I did feel that perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned it due to his obvious inability to participate, but Penny assured me that any subject, that sparked interest, was worth discussing.

We visited twice the following day. It was too cold out side to do anything more than give Paul a change of scene from his ward and wheel him around inside the hospital, and we did manage a look at the beautiful cherry blossom in the gardens.

My overall impression was of Paul slowly 'waking up' from a very dark place. His improvement in awareness over the 2 days was really quite marked. There will be minefields to cross, and there will also be highs and lows. However, Paul's essential and unique character appears to be more or less intact.

I wanted to put together a DVD of life back home for Paul and perhaps repeat this every so often, (say monthly). Thus I hope to film activity at The Whitehouse, puffins on the Treshnish Isles, fishing, and include clips from friends for example. I have the editing software and the camera, but I'd be grateful if people could e-mail me any video clips or photographs which might interest Paul. I can convert most formats so don't worry about the file type nor size (say up to 70mb). Paul adores watching The Salmon fishing DVD and I think would really appreciate visual news from home and friends. An idea would be for friends to record a brief greeting to Paul with some news! I can put it all together so please send in video clips and photographs to ulvahoward@aol.com

I said goodbye to Paul and suggested that we organise a fishing trip to 'Howard's Reef' (a good fishing spot near Iona) when he got home. He said 'Ok, next April!'

JAMIE HOWARD 03 May 2009