You never know what someone has been through just by looking at them .Everyone has had good times, bad times, pain ,joy – it is just not equally distributed .
My second favourite character ( my first being Will ) in W1A is Simon Harwood , played brilliantly by Jason Watkins.
So on Sunday night , while watching The Baftas ,I paid more attention to what he was really like , when he collected his award for his portrayal of CJ in ‘The Lost of Honour of Christopher Jefferies’. He stood at the podium and sort-of wobbled and then made a very emotional speech , which ended with him showing deep respect to both Joanna Yates ( the drama was about her terrible murder and CJ being wrongly accused by the police ) and her family . He then spoke of whom this drama was dedicated to – his daughter Maudie , who died just 3 years ago . To see his pain , broke my heart . His pain was the same as my pain – horrible .
Of course now with Tinternet I googled him and this is what I read
”Critics pointed out that the real victim, Joanna, had been reduced to something of a footnote in the telling of Jefferies’ story. But for Watkins a parallel sense of bereavement was ever present; on New Year’s Day 2012 he and Clara suffered the terrible loss of their younger daughter, Maude, aged just two.
“Ten days after Joanna Yeates died, I found Maude dead in her bed one morning,’ he says, choking back the tears. “She had flu but she died of sepsis. It was around the time of the winter vomiting bug and we took her to hospital twice but her flu symptoms masked the sepsis and she went undiagnosed.”
Together with a barrister friend, Watkins pored over Maude’s medical notes and examined every step of every procedure at the hospital to find out it anyone could have acted differently and saved her. The subsequent inquest concurred that nothing more could have been done. Watkins, who has two teenage sons from his first marriage and a daughter, Bessie, aged eight, was devastated.
“You don’t think you’re ever going to get out of bed in the morning,” he says. “The grief is so all-consuming you can barely begin to parent the children you do have. You don’t believe you will recover, but somehow you do; the trauma heals but the loss never does.”
This is not about me or Rosie or my family , except it is .Because it is another poor group of people who have suffered terrible pain and who I feel deep love and sadness for .