With this giant change in his personal life, the vicar recently decided to retire from parish duties at his church in rural Northamptonshire, and instead volunteer with prisoners.
Coles said: “When your life partner dies what dies with them is your future and I realised I wanted to be with people who I love and care about and know well and it just so happens that some of them live in Sussex and one of my oldest friends, a house two doors up from hers was up for sale, and she said ‘why don’t you move here’ so I did.
“I think David on a good day would have wanted me to face forwards and step forwards; on a bad day he’d have loved me to stay at home stirring polenta and thinking of him again.
“But it’s just part of the process of bereavement, you get used to a world in which the other person’s not in it and then you start thinking, ‘well, I’m in it’, so what am I going to do?
“I think I’ve got some more to do.”
You can read the full interview in this week’s Radio Times
