Thought For The Day – Wednesday 14th May 2025
Vulnerability and Resilience
This week is “U.K. Mental Health Awareness Week”. The theme for 2025 is Community. This is very appropriate for not only is Community one of our values T.B.S.H.S. values but Community is essential to people’s individual and collective wellbeing.
Through Community, we appreciate, contribute and develop and grow. Through Community, we care and support, and are cared for and supported.
A key part of our emotional, physical and psychological wellbeing are the ideas of resilience and vulnerability. In many ways, these are connected.
Resilience is bouncing back, finding a way, keeping going, digging deep. Sometimes, often times, people open themselves up, becoming vulnerable, to gain support and make those essential little steps of progress. We treasure, and support, vulnerabilities in others. We treasure, and support, vulnerabilities in ourselves. The truly resilient, and strong, person is the person who is willing to be vulnerable and who supports vulnerabilities in others. Compassion and empathy.
On Sunday evening, there was a very moving BBC2 documentary, “Unforgotten”, about the Bradford City Fire Disaster of 11th May 1985, when 56 supporters went to a football match between Bradford City and Lincoln City and did not come home. Many more were injured and traumatized. A fire devastated a main stand, just before half time, in 270 seconds.
It was a season when Bradford City had won the Second (Then the Third) Division Championship, their first for nearly fifty years. The start of, and before, the match of 11th May 1985, at Valley Parade in Bradford, the last some would ever see in this life, was a time of great and joyous celebration as all the community came together to pay tribute to a wonderful team. The game began with players, including the inspirational captain of, who was born in, Bradford, Peter Jackson, and who would visit the injured in hospital later that very day and attend funerals, and organise charity events in coming days and years, holding up cards saying “Thank You Fans” (pictured below).
40 years on: the families of victims; survivors; players; emergency services; first responders; and reporters; very movingly shared their traumatic memories, and showed their truly inspirational community, resilience and vulnerability, as this short extract, “It needs to be remembered”, shows: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0l8rm4z . Peter Jackson is the second person to be interviewed on this extract. One person who shares her story elsewhere in the documentary is the truly wonderful Mrs. Greenwood, whose husband and two sons went to the match and did not return home. There are no words.
In response, the Bradford community inspirationally came together in the deepest vulnerability, resilience and support. This included the establishment of a pioneering “Plastic Surgery and Burns Research Unit” at the University of Bradford by Professor David Sharpe, who passed away in 2023, and who treated many of the injured at the time and, in so doing, revolutionised the treatment of hand injuries globally. Care, health and safety today in the present is always based on the past and the future.
Very appropriately, forty years after the Bradford City Fire Disaster, Bradford City won promotion from the Second Division in May 2025, scoring in the 96th minute of their final game. There was a one-minute silence before the match to remember. A memorial service is held every year in the city on the 11th of May. There will be a “Bradford City Legends” versus “Bradford Fire Station” charity football match on Saturday at Valley Parade.
This year, 2025, Bradford, in Yorkshire, is the “City of Culture” in the U.K.
