Turning Points , livre ebook

Lion Hudson - Julia Ogilvy

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78 pages

English

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When tragedy touched Julia Ogilvy's life, she found herself reassessing the way she lived. Married into a life of privilege - her wedding was attended by the Queen and Princess of Wales - and recently acclaimed Business Woman of the Year, she took the decision to leave her career to found a charity. Her story provides a powerful example of how a successful and glamorous life does not always bring peace - and how her new role gives her the fulfilment she sought. Julia's turning point was the death of baby Cameron, and after telling her story she charts the journeys of others whose lives have been similarly changed, from Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Bob Geldof to a young carer in an impoverished inner city environment. This book will provide inspiration to anyone disillusioned by the empty materialism of society.

Sujets

Charities

Sociologie, société et politique

Charitable organization

Memoir

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Publié par	Lion Hudson
Date de parution	21 novembre 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780745958255
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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T URNING P OINTS
We cannot choose our circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them.
Epictetus
T URNING P OINTS
J ULIA O GILVY
Copyright 2009 Julia Ogilvy This edition copyright 2010 Lion Hudson
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A Lion Book an imprint of Lion Hudson plc Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Road, Oxford OX2 8DR, England www.lionhudson.com ISBN 978 0 7459 5380 9 (print) ISBN 978 0 7459 5825 5 (epub) ISBN 978 0 7459 5824 8 (Kindle) ISBN 978 0 7459 5826 2 (pdf)
Distributed by: Marston Book Services, PO Box 269, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4YN
First edition 2009 First electronic format 2011
All rights reserved
Text acknowledgments Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version published by HarperCollins Publishers, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, and are used by permission. All rights reserved. p.25: Late Fragment is taken from All of Us: The Collected Poems of Raymond Carver published by Harvill Press 1996, by Raymond Carver. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. Also reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd and The Wylie Agency.
The interview with Gordon Brown was conducted in September 2006.
Cover image: James Ogilvy
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
To the loves of my life: James, Flora and Alexander
In memory of Cameron and Hayden Lord
C ONTENTS

C OVER

T ITLE PAGE

C OPYRIGHT

D EDICATION

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS

P ROLOGUE

1. M Y S TORY

2. T HE R T H ON G ORDON B ROWN

3. C LIVE S TAFFORD S MITH , OBE

4. J OHN W OOD

5. F RANNY M C G RATH

6. P AULA L OWTHER

7. B OB G ELDOF , KBE

8. D IANE I RABARUTA

9. O LIVIA G ILES

10. C HRIS M OON , MBE

11. S EAN C ORRIGAN

C ONCLUSION

A PPENDIX : C HARITIES AND COURSES MENTIONED IN THIS BOOK
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is about people and their stories. Some I know well and others simply intrigued me. They became part of my own journey as I explored the impact of turning points in people s lives. I am immensely grateful to all those who allowed me into their world and shared many of their innermost thoughts and emotions.
This book would not have happened without my stay on Skye in 2006 and the encouragement I got from Stevie Siegerson, Willie McIntosh and the wonderful team at Columba 1400, as well as the joy of being with the young people from Wester Hailes. The long car journey home with Colette Douglas Home and Kate Mavor and the enthusiasm of my darling husband gave me all the impetus I needed to get to work. My deepest thanks to Gay and Charlie and all of the Lord family (who are our family too) for their encouragement and support and willingness to relive the sadness at the heart of this book.
Friends like Jerry de Groot, Sharon Roe, Bruce Rigdon, Susan Golden and Mark Douglas Home have been wonderful advisers along the way. Hannah Hurley was an excellent researcher and Marjorie Bruce a brilliant transcriber. I owe so many thanks to my agents Maggie Pearlstine and Jamie Crawford for their enthusiasm, to Matt Bayliss and Brian Hunt, to Ian McAteer and Jenny Kelloe at The Union, to Sarah Warren and Stephanie Heald and to Kate, Julie, Miranda, Rhoda and the staff at Lion Hudson.
I have many happy memories of my business career before my own turning point and owe many thanks to Naim, Richard, Vicky, Jonathan, Nell, Stephen, Malcolm, Denzil, Jamie, Jill, Pippa, Charlotte, my landlady Kate and so many others for all the support, belief and laughter. In recent years I have been lucky enough to have mentors and friends like Stuart Mitchell, Norman Drummond, Tom Farmer, John Moorhouse, Ian Chisholm and Stuart Miller, to whom I owe so much. My life-changing trips to Medjugorje have been the gift of Kristina Rogge, Charlotte de Klee, Matthew Proctor, Father Michael and the Sivric family as well as my dearest friends Fi and Tamara, and I am lucky enough to have the fellowship now of Holy Trinity Church in St Andrews. I am also eternally grateful to those who helped develop ProjectScotland, particularly Jack, Neville, Graeme, Euan, Colette, Ian, Kate, Susan and Rucelle, and all those who work tirelessly every day for our volunteers. My thanks too to Sharon, Alison and Pete for their loyalty to our family and to the many families and friends who keep our life full of joy. I am always inspired by the love and friendship of my prayer group - Sarah, Tamara, Charlotte, Fiona and Bridie - and all the other remarkable women in my life.
But above all, my thanks to my family: my loving husband and children, my sisters Eleanor and Charlotte and their families, my grandparents, my much loved in-laws and my parents Jill and Charles, who have all taught me so much and been there when they were needed.
P ROLOGUE

C ameron Lord was an angel. How else would you explain the impact of her brief and magical appearance on this earth?
Born in Boston, Massachusetts on 4 May 1999 to Charlie and Blyth Lord, Cameron was a beautiful blonde baby, a sister for their daughter Taylor. Charlie recalls thinking at her birth that her life would be extraordinary, and indeed her first weeks of life were full of joy for everyone. But that happiness was shattered only five months later when the family learned that Hayden, her eighteen-month-old cousin, had been diagnosed with Tay-Sachs disease.
Hayden had not been well for a while, but doctors were slow to diagnose a disease most commonly found in those of Jewish extraction, which did not apply in this case. Tay-Sachs is an incurable genetic illness that causes children to die slowly and painfully by the age of four or five, never learning to walk or talk. They become blind, deaf and are unable to swallow. Terrifying seizures and bouts of pneumonia punctuate their short lives. Hayden s devoted grandparents wrote: This is the beginning of a long struggle that we will have to help his parents endure.
The particular significance of this diagnosis for Cameron s parents was that her father and Hayden s father were identical twin brothers and carried the same gene. The odds that both brothers would have married wives with this rare gene were slight; that both would then go on to have an affected child were beyond measure. Tragically, they would not beat those odds.
Blyth felt devastated by the news of Hayden s diagnosis and was scared for his parents, Tim and Aliey, yet began to worry that she herself could be a carrier and that her precious daughter Cameron might have the same condition. Cameron began to show a marked startle reflex, a possible symptom, and then blood tests revealed the news they dreaded. Blyth recalls literally writhing on the floor at home, finding it physically unbearable that the child she was still nursing was going to die , not knowing how to tell Charlie s parents that they were to lose a second grandchild. From then on, all priorities, all of life, would change.
In August 2000, Cameron had a special holiday on the American island of Nantucket with all generations of her family around her. Her beauty was startling, breathtaking, and yet her senses were starting to shut down. She was suffering increasingly from fits and was no longer able to communicate properly. She was invited to a christening party and lay in her beautiful pale blue floral dress in a chair at one end of the room being fed from her special bottle. Barely able to swallow her liquid food, she kept those around her calm by never crying or struggling. Her gentleness and serenity gave an impression of an extraordinary inner life and wisdom beyond her years.
Her father Charlie remembers her last, tender gesture before the full throes of her first seizure would take away her ability to communicate physically: She reached up and stroked my cheek as if to say all would be well. It is hard to explain but somehow you knew that she was at peace, that her death was not something to fear. As it got close to the end of her life, friends recall our home being awash with a special aura; her spirit seemed to bring peace to the whole house. Cameron died peacefully at home on 9 May 2001, four months after her cousin Hayden.
The Ogilvy family has been a part of the Lord family for over twenty years now since we met in St Andrews, and we have always shared summers together on Nantucket Island. I was the one who fed her that special day and it changed my life forever. It was a turning point that started me on an extraordinary journey of discovery. Somehow that simple moment with Cameron challenged me to think about my life and my future, to take the opportunity to make more of the life that I had been given. She is my guardian angel, appearing in my dreams, laughing and smiling and acting as a kind of moral compass for all who knew her.
1
M Y S TORY

I remember every detail of the moment when I heard that two-year-old Cameron Lord had died. I can still feel the physical pain, the sobs that left me gasping for breath. She wasn t my child, but in her short life I had come to love her as if she was. She was my turning point, leading me to leave a successful business career and to live life differently.
I was born into a happy middle-class English family. My father was a successful businessman who commuted to the City from our pretty thatched-roof house in an Essex village, and my mother devoted herself to bringing up her three daughters. We roamed around the countryside on bicycles, learned respect for institutions such as the monarchy and values like honesty, fairness, loyalty, hard work and a sense of duty to others. Life revolved around the church, and Christmas would often be shared with elderly neighbours who lived alone.
I was eventually sent to board at a Norfolk prep school and then to the leading girls school Wycombe Abbey, where I struggled to achieve credibility and confidence and find true frie