Mark My Words – August 2026
Hospitals and Hotels
Not my Pizza, obviously, but the regular morning fry-up in the hospital canteen.
Dear Friends, New and Old,
This month’s newsletter comes to you from Pizza Express in Camberley. After nearly a week of hotel and hospital food, I thought I might venture further afield. I discovered there’s a Pizza Express a couple of miles away, and I still have an affinity towards the chain, instilled by jazz nights in Soho and the occasional Sloppy Guiseppe out on the terrace in Belsize Park on a summer’s evening much like the ones we’re now frequently experiencing.
Tonight’s experience doesn’t quite live up to those fond recollections. Even though it’s past eight o’clock, the restaurant is LOUD. The place is still full of noisy families, and the noisy families who have already gone home have left piles of detritus I must wade through to get to my table. I look at the menu and see that my friend Sloppy G was introduced in 1999. It’s still a novelty to me. I am getting old.
Why Am I Here?
The view from my room, The Aviator Hotel, Farnborough FAB.
The above two paragraphs were all I was able to write before my pizza arrived. I didn’t get around to telling you why I was in Camberley. Sad news, I’m afraid, and one which puts all my writing shenanigans in the shade. Along with my brothers and sister, I was at my mother’s bedside. I’m proud to say that at least one of us was with her for every hour of her ten last days and nights on this earth. She slipped away peacefully at 3.20am on Monday morning, one of my brothers holding each of her hands. My ‘shift’ had ended an hour and twenty minutes earlier, but we all gathered to pay our last respects.
She was an amazing woman; she abseiled from buildings, jumped out of a plane and did a half-marathon in her sixties, all to raise funds for the Red Cross, of which she was the Berkshire President. She was a Justice of the Peace, too. I accompanied her on Red Cross business to Eswatini (then Swaziland), and in later years was privileged to help her knock the Pyramids at Giza and the Northern Lights off her bucket list.
Ironically, I was back at an airport for her final departure; my hotel near Frimley Park Hospital was the Aviator at Farnborough FAB. Have a smooth last flight, Mother.
Her favourite pop song was Marianne Faithfull’s As Tears Go By. If you knew her, give it a spin and share a quiet moment with that memory.
Margaret Jean Blackburn OBE, 12th November 1932 – 10th August 2026.
Calendar of Events
There are other events happening in the next few months, but in the circumstances I’m only mentioning one. I had undertaken to take part in the Bracknell Book Fair on September 19th as it’s taking place literally a few hundred yards from her home, at Oaktree Garden Centre, where my sister regularly took my mother to lunch after the hairdresser on a Friday. I thought I’d combine the event with a visit. Obviously, that will no longer happen, but I’m going ahead with it, and my talk at the event Adventures under the Heathrow Flightpath featuring extracts from Final Approach will be in memory of her. Please do come if you can.
I hope my next newsletter will be soon and more uplifting. In the meantime, if you want to reach me I’m at mark@markblackburn.co.uk.
markblackburn.co.uk 