Hello and welcome to Happy Place, the show that finds ways to say out loud what we're all

trying to grapple with in our own heads. Today I'm chatting to Clover Stroud. The pain

of the death of somebody you love is so physically excruciating, mentally tormenting, but I was

also at that time really aware of a strange kind of breaking open of myself and I felt

like sensually absolutely awakened to everything that was going on around me and I started noticing

very very bright colour like a bowl of fruit would suddenly be really really brightly coloured

on animal a deer across the other side of the field would be bright brown in a really

really beautiful way. Clover is a journalist and the author of The Wild Other and My Wild

and Sleepless Nights. Her latest book The Red of My Blood examines her relationship with

death after her beloved sister Nell died of breast cancer at 46 years old. I met Clover

at an event last year and I was so excited to invite her over to my house to have this

really beautiful chat. Just to set the scene for you she came over on the day Storm Franklin

was whipping and whistling around. Part of my studio in the garden was sort of falling

apart the corner of the studio was flapping in the wind which was slightly disconcerting.

Franklin even managed to get past the lovely pink sound padded walls of my studio at

home at point so you might hear the whistling wind or the crashing of a tree branch from

the side of the studio so I apologise about that. I was Franklin. Anyway I got an advanced

copy of The Red of My Blood and I just felt so strongly that I needed to explore more

of Clover's thoughts with her. She talks so exquisitely about the beauty, the colour

and the life that death brought into her personal world and how death can teach us that it's

the tiny moments in life that truly matter. It's the in jokes, the day-to-day funny

glances and human connections that we remember when someone's gone and that should be liberating

...