Patrick Comerford
I have been in and out of Milton Keynes University Hospital twice over a 48-hour period, having an ECG heart monitor fitted to me on Thursday afternoon and then returning with it this afternoon (5 April 2025).
It has been a painless but awkward experience, with the minor embarrassments of having wires hanging out of me and dangling around the top of my trousers, unable to take a shower for the past two days.
It is all part of the way, it seems, that everything is being monitored at the moment: my heart, my lungs, my breathing, my kidneys, my B12 levels, my sarcoidosis, my calcium intake, my bone density … I have been reassured about a slight mark on my heart that seems to have been caused by my pulmonary sarcoidosis and about a small cyst on my kidney that is benign and seems to come with age.
It seems I am getting the ‘full MoT’, and I cannot be loud enough or vocal enough about how good the NHS is and how caring and attentive everyone is in the hospital in Milton Keynes.
Each time I was in the hospital this week, I went to see the magnolia tree that is in full bloom at the moment in the Eaglestone Restaurant Courtyard on Level 1 of the Blue Zone. When I was in the same hospital three years ago, Charlotte and I sat under this tree so often in the early Spring sunshine in those weeks after my stroke. The tree came to symbolise the road to recovery from my stroke in 2022, and the love and care that sustained me through those weeks on that journey.
The magnolia is one of the most ancient plants, and fossils from two to 65 million years, when vast forests surrounded the arctic regions, prove this.
In all, there are 300 species of magnolia in the wild. The first magnolia to come to Britain was an American species, M. virginiana, acquired by Henry Compton, Bishop of London, from John Bannister in 1687. It was followed in 1730 by another American species, M. grandiflora, collected by Mark Catesby ( 1682-1749), a botanist who wrote The Natural History of Carolina.
This is the best time of the year to see magnolias in full bloom, and I seemed to notice them everywhere earlier this week while I was walking around Tamworth and Comberford village by the banks of the River Tame in rural Staffordshire.
I spent Tuesday in Tamworth where I was invited by the Tamworth and District Society to speak on the tercentenary of the Comberford family plaque erected in 1725 by Joseph Comerford in the Comberford Chapel in Saint Editha’s Church.
On Tuesday morning, when I arrived at the church, a beautiful spreading magnolia tree was blossoming in the churchyard, on the north side of the church, close to the Comberford Chapel in the former north transept inside the church.
As I walked around Comberford in the early April sunshine, in the village, by the river, and through the fields, there was a smaller magnolia in a garden beside a farm.
Then, as I walked back into Tamworth in the afternoon, a tall magnolia tree was in full bloom in a front garden on Comberford Road close to the corner with Gillway Lane.
I realised as I was walking around Tamworth and Comberford on Tuesday that it was 1 April and the third anniversary of the day Charlotte had come to collect me when I was discharged from the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. I had been moved there from Milton Keynes Hospital on 29 March and able to leave on 1 April. After another overnight stay in Oxford, I returned to Milton Keynes two weeks after Charlotte had first taken me to hospital with that stroke on 18 March 2022.
Since then there have been numerous return visits to Milton Keynes Hospital and the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, and two visits to the hospital in Sheffield. When I went in search of the magnolia tree in the courtyard in Milton Keynes Hospital yet again this afternoon, the flowering leaves were falling, and the tree was surrounded by what I imgained briefly as a thin, gentle, soft pink silk scarf on the ground.
There is so much to be thankful for in life and in love on this evening.
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