Kelvingrove Park, 15.54

And then it snowed

Walking in the blue dusk wrapping itself now around the university buildings on the hill, light hitting the snow that fell overnight. Earlier, I opened my blind to a white world, the sound of children playing in tenement gardens cutting the sharp air. Their raw glee at waking to this unexpected first snow of the winter.

Cross the bridge over the river Kelvin, its parapets lined with small snowmen, some with heads unattached, sticks for arms, leaves for eyes, in front of me, a monument to the fallen of World War One. Stop to read to the plaque, a Miller with an e, none with an a. But I know the story of this regiment and I know the catastrophic fatalities they suffered at the Somme, how many boys so quickly just gone, and I know too how nearly there was a Millar with an a on the same plaque; Arthur, not out of university even but leading the charge as the men walked from the trenches to their death, and Arthur that morning, shot in the neck, barely missing his jugular but still, miss it it did. He was called lucky after that, and never spoke of it again.

And I am lucky surely that his name is not there, I would not be here, leaning closer to read the names as the dark gets thicker and everything feels tenuous, fragile.

For a long time, I was not allowed to believe in luck. Too close to magic; too far from God. But when I was seven, I won a competition my mother told me I had no chance of winning. Chance, she did not think to think, is a game maths more than anything else. After that, I believed myself to be lucky. Although perhaps The Last Days exists as testament otherwise but that’s the thing with luck. I call my son lucky. There’s a litany of reasons for this: born blue, meningitis, scarlet fever, and on it goes. I do not think to call my other son, who’s suffered none of these things, lucky, although perhaps the logic there is flawed. It would have been luckier for Arthur to never have gone over the top that morning. It would be luckier for Avery to have been born screaming and loud like the rest of them. And yet, I call him lucky and I believe myself to be lucky, the collision of circumstance and maths so improbable that this moment shouldn’t really be happening at all. Maybe sometimes luck isn’t about what happens to you, or the likelihood of what happens happening, but about the likelihood of recovering. Avery likes to tell me and everyone else he can, that he nearly died, THREE TIMES. It’s the maths of chance and recovering that he likes. It is maybe this that appeals now, as I wrap my arms around myself to ward of the intensifying cold, it’s not the bad luck of the shitty things that happen, but the low chances of ever being here, of still being here.