How To Survive Tragedy – 2
Having lost both my wife and son in recent years, I can sympathise deeply with the Norgroves, who lost their daughter, Linda, in Afghanistan.
But they refuse to apportion blame and just want to celebrate the good times and the work their daughter did.
The Mirror in common with other papers describes their feelings.
There is never any point in apportioning blame, as that gets in the way of trying to make sure that it doesn’t happen again, by changing attitudes and making the world a better and safer place.
This extract shows that they are doing that.
Mrs Norgrove said: “She knew I wasn’t keen on her going back but there was no way as a parent I would stop her doing that. I knew that she’d grown to love Afghanistan and love the people and I knew that that’s where her heart was and she wanted to do humanitarian work there.”
Her husband said his daughter was a “very adventurous girl” and was determined to go to Afghanistan four years ago when she worked for the United Nations.
“At the time I said to her that our worst nightmare was that she might be kidnapped,” he said. “But at the end we had to accept that she’d been adventurous, she’d done risky things before.”
The couple, from Lewis, had just climbed a mountain when they were told she had been abducted while looking into the development of agricultural projects in the east of the country.
The couple have now set up The Linda Norgrove Foundation to promote the causes she supported.
The charity will fund women and family-orientated schemes in the war-ravaged country.
Good luck to them and the Foundation.
How to Survive Tragedy
Alan Dickinson, a solicitor from Sudbury, was nearly killed in a train crash at Little Cornard two months ago. Today, the East Anglian Daily Times reports how he got back on the train again.
Mr Dickinson, a partner with Tomlinson and Dickinson solicitors in Sudbury, faced his demons today as he boarded the branch line at Sudbury for the first time since the crash.
“I need to get the monkey off my back,” he said.
Waiting on the platform to board the 9am train this morning, Mr Dickinson said he had no fears of returning to the scene of the smash, which almost claimed his life.
“Rail travel is very safe, I have no concerns,” he said.
Mr Dickinson was the worst injured in the crash, in which he was struck in the chest by the table in front of him in the carriage.
Despite walking off the train with fellow passengers, Mr Dickinson was flown to Colchester Hospital then the Royal London Hospital with internal bleeding.
But just two months after the smash, Mr Dickinson, who has lost a stone in weight since the incident, was once more aboard the Sudbury train.
He also bears no ill-feeling towards the tanker driver, who has admitted causing the crash.
He has certainly got all his dignity back too!
Incidentally, in the paper he is shown holding a copy of the Racing Post, so perhaps he knows something about luck and the real odds in life!
I’m Programming Again!
I may still have pain in my face, a left hand that doesn’t know its Alt from its Control or Caps Lock, but I have to do something so I’m starting to program again. Or should I say reprogramming again as I’m only updating each of my Daisy Web Tools for 2011!
The first one that I will reprogram is the Presentation Browser. I wrote this a few years ago, to solve the problem of being able to print or capture a clean image of a web page, without the toolbar and all the other things that insist on being printed, when you do this from within Internet Explorer or another browser.
I shall announce the program here when it is ready. All of the Daisy Web Tools, will be available separately and free.
The Anonymous Widower 