HEAVY THINGS TO CARRY

Do you know what it's like to carry something very heavy?

I feel like I'm always lugging heavy things around. My piano is annoyingly weighty, all 32kg of it, back and forth from the car, through doorways and up flights of stairs. I keep complaining how it's getting heavier, but no-one seems to believe it.

My rucksack too, is accumulating stuff - usually my work laptop (they make us take them home every night). I think I've pulled a muscle in my left arm, just through hoisting it up and over my shoulders.

How does this happen? How does life get so... heavy?

There are other things weighing me down as well - some I just can't talk about at the moment: fears, dashed-hopes, thoughts and anxieties. Some things are awfully heavy to carry, and unlike a massive bulging rucksack or a gigantic digital piano, these ponderous burdens are sadly invisible.

Plus, I still haven't moved house. The Vendors are getting 'twitchy' apparently. And who could blame them?

One thing I don't have to carry though is the thought that today could be my last, or that this land on which my shadow falls might no longer be my own.

There are no tyrannical dictators threatening the immediate invasion of our shores, there is no distant sound of jackboots or the clicking of rifle bolts from across the ocean. We live in a relative amount of freedom, where all of us have a voice and none of us have to live in fear of such things.

But you don't need me to tell you that we have that because someone else carried the weight of it for us. When it mattered, our grandfathers and our great grandfathers stood up and were counted among the brave. Through the disease-ridden trenches of one world war and the fiery skies of the other, they pulled us into freedom, wound by wound, battle by battle, knowing that many of them would never realise whether it was all worth it. It is hard to imagine anything heavier.

Perhaps the only thing that comes close is the weight carried by those they left behind; those who waited, and those who wait today... every day, half-expecting the knock at the door and the pendulous dread of pride and sorrow.

It's bravery like that that puts my 'heavy' life into perspective. And today, on the day when we remember those who fell for our freedom, I think it's OK to carry the tiny weight of a poppy and lift two minutes of silence in honour of them and the values they fought for.

Because I don't know what it's like to carry something that heavy, but I know how to say thank you to those who do.