“Dad, come and look at the TV”
One of my daughters called me into the lounge to see a young woman being interviewed at the Burghley Horse Trials.
“Isn’t she great?!”
Indeed she was. It was Claire Lomas talking about her latest fundraiser. Quietly at ease with the attention, a smile to capture everyone’s heart and a passion for her cause that simply poured out of her.
“Dad, she would be great at one of your events.”
I emailed Claire the next day and a couple of weeks later I was heading to a village just outside Melton Mowbray, home of the world’s best pork pies and, as I would come to know and love, home to one of the most amazing humans it has been my privilege to call a colleague and a friend.
Claire opened the door to my slightly hesitant knock and within a couple of minutes had told me all about her morning hand-cycle, her current fund-raiser and made me a cup of tea. I’m not entirely sure if I said anything in this time, except to say “yes please” to the offer of a cup of tea.
And so it began.
For twelve years we worked together on all my leadership events, at some of our LBCambridge events, and at many other team off-site meetings. Sometimes I would interview her, sometimes she would just tell her story. She was an exceptional storyteller. She had great comic timing, an eye for the detail that allowed her audience right into the heart of her world, and an extraordinary capacity to be both implausibly courageous and totally vulnerable all at the same time.
Nothing she ever said was as clichéd as “you can do anything if you want it badly enough”, instead there was practical and plausible positivity in every anecdote that became a heady mix of “try to take one small-step” and “why not”.
I loved working with her, and I loved her.
The running joke between us privately at first, and then awkwardly for me in so many events, was whether my fear of heights would eventually succumb to her determination for me to fly with her in a two-seater microlight aircraft.
And so it was, in October 2023, at a small Northamptonshire airfield, Claire’s irresistible insistence on that flight finally defeated my stubborn baked-into-my-DNA fear of looking down. The afternoon was turning chilly, but the sky was cloudless and blue. Pid, her wonderful assistant and friend, pushed out the skeletal remains of a modestly sized lawn mower-cum-wheelbarrow, slung by bootstraps beneath a stretched cloth that would not be quite big enough to cover a small table in an unpretentious pizzeria. To my inexpert eyes, it was not so much a flying machine as a sixth-form engineering assignment. It would have won great marks for being inexpensive to build, but might have been marked down for its propensity to roll rather than to soar. But Claire was a gifted and expert pilot, the kit was of course top drawer and I knew absolutely that I would be safe in her hands.
“Looking forward to the flight Paul?”
Pid, could hardly stop himself from laughing, although to be fair he wasn’t trying. However, I think he noticed and appreciated my very best Paddington Bear stare that I could offer in return.
I won’t pretend for one second that I loved flying with Claire (I am still scared of heights) but I loved that she made me do it. I loved that she never stopped asking me and I loved her joy in our little adventure together. So much more than this, I now have a wonderfully precious memory of my dear, dear friend, and I am holding on to it so very tightly right now.
You will have noticed, I’m sure, that I have not once mentioned her wheelchair or her riding accident that paralysed her from the chest down. There is no need to mention it, she was more able-bodied than most of us who have never suffered as she has suffered.
She wasn’t defined by her disability; in fact she was propelled by it. However, she was always searingly honest about the trauma of what had happened to her. The agony of loss was real, and the initial realisation she would never live the life she had hoped for, took her to the sort of dark places of the mind we must all hope that we never go to ourselves. More mundanely the sheer effort to move, to constantly have to manage her background health, and to have a reliable supply of TENA pants, represented a quiet daily routine that she shared not to garner sympathy, but to let us see behind the curtain of heroic endeavours and into a world of relentless effort just to get up, to shower and to get the girls to school.
It was this realism, with no filters, that made her so compelling, so relatable, so encouraging for us ordinary mortals, and so beautiful to know.
Her first and most famous London Marathon, the one in the robot suit, brought her story to millions of people here and around the world, but a few weeks before this defining adventure she could hardly stand in it, let alone walk twenty-six miles. A few steps into the marathon she had no idea if she could make it to the end, but she told herself that she would definitely get to the next lamp-post. So she completed the marathon one lamp-post at a time. It is a metaphor for life that I hold close to my heart and try to practice every day.
To my dear beautiful friend Claire, you have made a wonderful and indelible mark on my life; you will never ever be forgotten and you will always be loved.
At this time of unbearable sadness and loss, we must try to get through this for you, one lamp-post at a time.
These few, inadequate words, are all I can do, but they are written with love for everyone who met Claire at one of our events and who felt inspired by her words, and for all my Faculty colleagues who worked with her, loved her and now miss her terribly too.
Above all, these words are for Dan, Maisie and Chloe, for Martin, Joyce and of course for Pid.
Take care. Paul xx
