Human Remains

their neighbours, or choose to believe that someone else will be checking up, someone else will know where they are, someone else will take responsibility. In reality, there may be no one else.
Dying Alone – the Shame of Our Communities
     
    The increasing number of bodies found a long time after death in the Briarstone borough has shocked us all in recent months. It has become clear that the community spirit that once made Britain proud has changed – no longer looking out for our neighbours, we have become a nation of curtain-twitchers and NIMBYs. Who do YOU know in your road? We took to the streets of Briarstone to ask.
    ‘Time was, you knew everyone in the street,’ said Stan Goodall, 64. ‘You looked out for each other. You always knew when someone needed a hand.’
    ‘I don’t know my neighbours at all,’ said a younger female, who asked not to be named. ‘They keep themselves to themselves and that suits me fine.’
    ‘I’m scared of dying alone, yes,’ said Ethel Johns, 78. She looked frail but unbowed as we discussed the recent discoveries. ‘I knew Judith Bingham, who was found back in March, and it plays on my mind that nobody noticed she wasn’t around any more. I hate to think of her lying there all that time.’
    Mr Alan Wilson, 47, agreed. ‘It’s a disgrace. Call ourselves community-spirited? It’s a joke.’
    Your
Briarstone Chronicle
is launching a new campaign to highlight the tragedies of these Unloved. Now is the time to check on neighbours who live alone. Make regular contact with people. Form support networks within communities. Look out for events in your area in the coming weeks, supported by the
Chronicle,
at which you can get out and meet your neighbours!
     

Shelley
     
    Sometimes these things happen very slowly, so you don’t notice them at the time. With me it was a moment, a single second that divided my life like a scythe, so that there was always a before and an after.
    5th May, 2011. It was about three in the afternoon, a fine day, and although it had been hot for weeks, stifling, that day was cooler. There was a breeze, relief from the heat. I was going to the supermarket in the car thinking about my friend’s wedding, which was the following weekend, and wondering if the weather would hold. It was also the Bank Holiday, which is relevant because of course if it had been a normal Monday I would have been at work and it might never have happened.
    I was at the roundabout waiting to turn in to the supermarket , and was about to go when a car came from the right at speed. So I braked. I remember having time to think something like
Glad the brakes work
when a van slammed into the back of me, propelling the car on to the roundabout and into the path of the other motorist.
    I was lucky: the injuries weren’t too bad. I had cuts and bruises, especially down my right leg, which was trapped by the impact. The other two drivers were alright. The whole drama happened in stages: waiting for the emergency services, while lots of people milled around and talked to me reassuringly through the smashed window; then, when the fire services arrived, the long process of cutting me out of the car. Then the hospital. Graham arriving. The police, asking me questions.
    They let me out the next morning, with a prescription for some painkillers and instructions to get my GP to sign me off work. I remember thinking I’d had a lucky escape. That evening, Graham and I were enjoying a glass of wine – medicinal purposes, he said – and I was smiling despite the shock of it all, smiling with him when he said I must be made of rubber or something.
    It took time to realise that we’d been laughing too soon. Something, somewhere, had happened inside my body at the moment the car struck, and I had broken.
    The pain was constant after that. At times it would quieten down, like going through the eye of a storm, and I could function properly, walk to the shops, put on a load of washing – but then it would rise in a surge and on bad days I could barely move without crying out.
    They said it was whiplash, since sometimes the pain would be isolated in the neck, and that it would be possibly months before it healed. The insurance company arranged for physiotherapy, eventually, which didn’t seem to help at all. Besides, the pain moved: it was in the neck, then the next day it would be my shoulders, then my lower back, even sometimes in my legs. Wherever it was, it was always there, a demon that