Sinclair on life: A letter sent from the heart

By PETER SINCLAIR

This is a thank-you letter. Please read it; because, among others, it's to you ...

It's a letter to those particular friends who make it hard to say thanks. Hard? Impossible, in some cases.

The people who are there for me, the people without whom I wouldn't have much of a life at all, the people who take off when they see a glimmer of gratitude in my eyes.

The people who are gold right through.

I'm talking about people like Ronnie who is, quite simply, a saint posing as a landlady.

If nothing else, without her constant reminders to wrap up warm I'd probably be dead of pneumonia long since.

She is also an expert wheelchairist, unlike Belinda, who (on her very first try) hilariously dumped me right out of one in the carpark of the Mercy Hospital before an audience of one truckie, who picked me up, plonked me back and said in an ironic sort of way, "I think you and me better change jobs, lady!" before roaring off. Needless to say, she will never be allowed to forget it ...

How do you thank someone who, in response to a idle remark, combs entire Greater Auckland so that you can satisfy a sudden nostalgic pang for a really good chocolate eclair, the kind they used to bake when you were a boy?

That's Diana for you. Or someone who lends unfailing comfort and support when one of these columns, or my spleen - or both - are giving me hell? That's her partner, Chris.

And their young daughter, Monika, who knows I'm heading off down the yellow brick road but treats me like a perfectly ordinary human being anyway, which is about the nicest thing anyone can do.

Then there are the providers - Annie, whose powers of ham and cheese verge on the divine, Joan, Fig Queen of South Auckland, Maree, whose roasts are right up there with anyone's mum's and Gayle of Dellow's in Herne Bay, who every lunchtime delivers a banquet disguised as a sandwich.

Andrew 1 checks me out every day to ascertain that I have got through the night in reasonable shape, while nearly every day Andrew 2, who's a cartoonist, sends me a little drawing to ... well, cheer me up isn't how you'd put it, exactly, since my condition is never allowed to interfere with the blackness of his humour.

I mustn't forget the miracle-workers, either - Don, whose command of computing approaches sorcery; Colleen and Pam and Dawn who somehow make sense of the chaos which are my affairs and the pigsty which is my flat.

Or the comforters, like Roger, who have the knack of setting my fears to rest - Roger is my GP - because, to be honest, you do get a bit scared sometimes.

Then there are the writers - Steve, whose puckish e-mail makes bearable those bad black F. Scott Fitzgeraldish hours which have no name, when the errors of one's life gather at the bedside in the dark, and Joy, whose letters from the Wairarapa remind me of that other New Zealand I used to know, which smells of silage and sheep dip and smoke rising straight from the chimney on icy mornings.

How do you thank a boss who offers to send a radio station's Black Thunder bulling through taxi-less, rush-hour traffic to get you from one specialist's waiting-room to another? - that's Graeme of Classic Hits.

Or a friend who, when you happen to remark you wouldn't mind re-reading some Evelyn Waugh, arrives with a bag bulging with every last title available in the city and won't let you pay?

That's the kind of thing Nigel does.

And, as I said, it's to you, too, though we've never met and probably never will - all of you who have e-mailed me and said things which touched me, and things which heartened me, and things which made me want to go on living.

For sometimes, when I think of the friends who won't accept thanks for anything, it almost makes me want to sit down and howl like a little kid from sheer gratitude.

Which seemed a bit unproductive - not to say feeble - so I decided to sit down and write you all this thank you note instead ...

* pete@ihug.co.nz