ALL IN THE HEAD 1

THE WISHING WELL

For approximately a year and a half during the mid to late nineties, I worked as a chef in a hotel in a small town quite the way away from my actual hometown. I took out a flat and it was nice to get away, be somewhere else, among people I had previously not come across or known anything about. It was nice to move at a slower pace than what I had been used to and all these things added up to become food for the soul.

About a fifteen-minute walk or so from the town I had come to be in, depending on how quick you walk, there is a pitch and putt golf course I used to go to every once in a while. I wasn't a great player or anything like that, but it was a good place to go to, chill out and knock about a golf ball for an hour or two, especially on days where the weather was nice. Again, more food for the soul.

There were times during my eighteen month stay when while I was out walking, I would head towards the golf course and just keep on going for a few more minutes until I came to a little wooded area and then I would continue to walk up a hill and go past the numerous trees until I came to this very old well. It was a nice peaceful place to take a walk to, a really nice place to come to and relax.

Back during that period in time, I used to like to think that if you came to this well with a wish and you wished hard enough and long enough then maybe your wish would or could come true. And do you know what? Well ... perhaps I'll just come right out and tell you.

If history past, present, and future were to remain constant then I am not or at least was not meant to meet my friend Fred until la the in the month of April 2008 but instead I met him in September 2006 and I met him before he was to meet me. This might throw you a bit ... there is a reason for that.

During the last two weeks of July 2006, I had been on holidays in Puerto Rico in Gran Canaria. I have a thing for podiums especially when I'd have had a few drinks on me. That being said ... one night in particular, after having had a fair few drinks, I tried to jump onto a wooden podium which was about a foot or so high and as I was doing so, I lost my footing. My right foot landed on the podium and my left leg banged against the side of this podium.

I didn't think much more about it until I had got back home to where I live, for at the time I met the podium there had been nothing more than a slight nick and there indeed had been drink too, but unfortunately by the time I returned from hols, the damage had been done.

A splinter had gone into my leg and a little hole developed in my left shin right where I had banged it. An infection in my leg had been eating its way out from inside my leg and this created the hole. The strange thing was that it didn't hurt so I assumed that this would simply heal by itself, but the hole was getting larger. I had let five weeks pass before I went to get it checked out. I had to spend ten days in hospital getting treatment and that is where I met Fred.

Fred had been in a strange, well accident if you can call it an accident. He was out his back garden when something fell from the sky into his shed causing damage to the shed and to Fred as he had been in the shed at the time. Fred's left leg received the worst of the multiple injuries that had come his way. So, in September 2006, we were both in two different rooms on the same general ward in the hospital of my hometown.

During the second day of my stay in hospital, a man was passing by my room. There was a total of eight patients in my room with indeed myself being one, and as this man looked in, he took a look at each of us individually. When he looked my way, it appeared to me that he recognized me. I didn't know him, but he called me by my name, grabbed my right hand and shook it before hugging me as if we were two close friends who had not seen each other in a while.

'Sorry, do I know you?' was all I could manage to ask.

He apologized before proceeding in telling me that his name was Fred, and he went on to tell me the strangest things. He said that we were or are indeed best friends. Apparently, I was his best man at his wedding. He continued to tell me that he had been married to a lady named Jane for twenty-five years. She had lost her battle with cancer soon after their twenty fifth wedding anniversary.