We make seating systems and manual chairs. There are sixty-one of us now. It is not a fortune and I am not a person with a helicopter, but I own a company and I have been on a clinical advisory panel for that hospital trust since 2019.
That is why I was at Corwen General that Tuesday. Not sentiment. A meeting about a procurement framework.
And in thirty years I had thought about Rye Colvin perhaps four times a year.
Not romantically. It was never that and I want to be clear about it, because everybody assumes.
I thought about him the way you think about the one person who behaved decently in a room where nobody else did, which is to say constantly and without knowing you are doing it.
I gave a talk in 2018 about design and dignity, and there is ten seconds in it about a boy at a dance in 1995 who said then we’ll find another way, and I have never used his name.
PART 3 — THE THREE STEPS
I found out the rest over the following eleven days, mostly from Rye himself and some of it from a porter called Delph who has known him for six years.
Rye Colvin was a paramedic for nineteen years.
He did not go to college on a football scholarship; he blew a knee in the first year and came home and did the ambulance service instead and by all accounts was extremely good at it.
His son is Ozzie. Ozzie is twenty-two.
At nineteen, Ozzie came off the back of a flatbed on a site and has a complete injury at a level that means he has no function below it and will not get any back.
That was three years ago.
Rye left the ambulance service eleven months after that, because a rota that puts you on nights cannot be run alongside being the only care a young man has, and because the care package they were assessed for covers four hours a day.
He has been mopping floors at Corwen General for two years because it is days only, it is eleven minutes from their house, and he can get home.
