Laptop on table, Costa coffee on table, mobile phone, pens, paper, unlimited free wifi, 24 hour use of electric plug sockets, (if I don’t get moved on for loitering with intent to write). I have spent so many hours in service stations, recently here on the M20, but formerly literally weeks at both Clacket Lane Eastbound services on the M25 around the year 2011, and also at Rownhams Westbound on the M3 around 2018 time.
I spent a total of nearly 100 hours hitchhiking for a lift in just yellow Ferraris at Clacket. I got offered a lift in a beige Maserati, but that wasn’t a yellow Ferrari was it. When do you settle for just less than your goal, and when do you just stick to your guns? To me, turning down the Maserati was a success in itself.
After spending days writing in Rownhams I managed to secure a job in the services’ carpark washing HGV lorries for a small business there. It was a great job, hard work, but the money obsessed owner always made a point of thanking all his staff at the end of every day. I have never forgotten that. It gave me inspiration to turn up bright and breezy the next day. It was winter time, so it was always cold and always dark, both as work started and as it ended.
So now it’s Maidstone services on the M20. It’s my day off from picking apples for a local business. There is a big harvest this year and they are crying out for helpers to finish the two week season off. Do you know a team of 5 reliable people who could help them out and want the work?
Terribly sad news the other day. The remains and belongings of dear Leah Croucher the 19 year old girl who disappeared on the 15th February 2019 from Milton Keynes were found in a loft of a house just half a mile from where she disappeared. How utterly tragic for her, her parents, her family and friends. And it trickles down through society to those of us who could only look on in despair at yet another true story of a Missing Person. The only apparent saving grace is that Leah’s whereabouts is known to the family. Their agonies will continue but not the harrowing one of not knowing where she is. God bless them All.
If the police had considered searching every loft in the immediate neighbourhood Leah may have been found earlier. But was that realistic? When people disappear the scenarios of what happened to them can be endless. To check every shed, every woodland, every nook and cranny of our towns, our neighbourhoods, our industrial estates, our sewer system, our countryside would take enormous amounts of time, money, man and woman power. Some people are found quickly. They are found in accessible and open places, but so many lay missing for years in places that are never searched, or never thought to be areas of possibility.
Leah seems to have been found perhaps by chance. It seems, (and I am speculating here) that a random person went into the loft, perhaps looking for something else, and came across her remains. I do realise though that someone may have known where she was, somehow, and went to specifically look.
But for many people who eventually get found there is that notion of the happenings of chance, where for whatever reason circumstances come together to reveal a body, their remains, someone who had been searched for for weeks, months, years.
But surely there must be some way of reducing the agony time of those that are looking for their missing loved ones, and there are so many instances of this. Leah was one of the 8 people I had listed on this website, and Georgina Gharsallah is another young woman also listed.
Georgina disappeared from her hometown of Worthing, UK on the 7th March 2018. She will be 35 years old this coming Saturday, and her family, including 2 young boys, agonise in their wait to find out what has become of her.
As in Leah’s story there were and are little to no clues as to what happened at the time of their disappearances. Andrea, Georgina’s Mum has a daily fight to keep Georgina’s plight in public view, yet seemingly there are no clues to her whereabouts or timeline of what may have happened to her.
How can we help Andrea, her two boys, her father, her sisters, family and friends find out what has happened to Georgina? Can we help create the right circumstances for life to reveal the answers? Not only can we help, but how do we help create those circumstances so that this agony can end, or at least be greatly reduced for them? The truth is always out there, but how can we safely and speedily help reveal it? Surely, it must be possible. Surely we do not inhabit this earth to just create and have to put up with such agonies? Surely there are moments in time that we say to ourselves, and each other, enough is enough, let’s concentrate our minds on beginning to end the agonies of so many people and so many families.
If I was to put myself forward for this job, this role, this honour, because it would be an honour in my opinion, how would I go about it? I have the belief in miracles. I have the belief that the truth is always out there, despite the myriad ways humanity might want to hide it. I have the experience of finding a missing person, years ago, where I witnessed that definite moment when the right people were in the right place doing the right thing for the right reason.
How can I create this role in my own life? And I hark back to my last blogpost with the three sayings in it, “When nothing goes right-go left”, “Go and wake up your luck”, “Don’t wait for the opportunity-create it”.
My way at the moment is to sit and write and get my thoughts down. I firmly believe that if one makes a firm enough request to the universe, that the universe hears that request and replies in turn. But where do we look for that reply?! Over the past couple of decades, although not recently, I used to try and help many families of those that had gone missing-but that wasn’t right. It took me a long time to learn that the Universe would use me when it could. I needed to step back, not try and force results, but wait to see where I could be of use, knowing that God, the Universe, Nature, all knew best where I could be used. Compared to them, I know nothing!
But where to put that energy of what seems like a burning passion, a vocational gift? Where to put my energies when on waking every morning, within minutes, often seconds, I am thinking of finding people who have gone missing, of listening to the concerns and horrors of those that have missing relatives and friends.
There must be a way of carefully, sensitively, and increasingly speedily, alongside God, the Universe, Nature, whatever that energy might or might not be, of ending the horrors of the Missing Person phenomenon. There is. I know it.
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