Just under two days in Tromso this week. Midnight sun land. Well not much sun but spectacular sights. And so much daylight. Which was strangely mesmerising. I learned a lot from colleagues about life in northern Norway. Including snow management techniques. The importance of building capacity to allow space for snow. Built on an understanding that the snow ain’t going anywhere fast and everyday life needs to continue.

Sloven and OCC don’t seem to understand the need for this space when it comes to grief and families. Instead they just shovel, or try to. A process that’s destructive, counter-productive and hugely damaging.

There are policies that try to create space for grief within the NHS. The sensible and straightforward Being Open framework, for example. But policies are just words if they’re ignored. As meaningless as the non-apologies identified by Ally, LB’s cousin, in her recent dissertation on Sloven communications.

There are obvious differences between heavy and sustained snowfall and grief. But I find it hard to understand how the grief stuff, something so agonisingly accessible – most people can, if they can bear to go there, have the beginnings of imagining what such grief feels like – is dismissed or ignored. Intensely human, deeply emotional and gut wrenchingly awful experience is trampled over, ignored or worse, by the public bodies responsible.

How do we get it so blinking wrong?