OLIVIA’S large and beautiful eyes were the bluest I have ever seen. One glance and they nailed you to the nearest wall. Her smile completed the process of captivation as it turned your legs to jelly.

You were a prisoner – and a willing prisoner at that.

She needed no words, neither soothing nor scolding, to make you stay. She would dismiss you in her own good time, again without so much as a syllable to announce that the ‘audience’ was at an end. Yet you still looked forward to your next visit.

On Tuesday I went to her funeral. Banbury Crematorium was packed to overflowing with people old and young, there to regrettably say goodbye.

Olivia was 385 days old.

She was born with Spinal Muscular Atrophy and confounded her medical experts by living for as long as she did. Her parents, Max and Sam, were warned that to reach her first birthday would be a bonus. They should not pin hopes on any false dawn as the anniversary on May 9 approached.

They must take one day at a time, some days calm, others fraught with emergencies.

They showed brave faces, but sadness and dread of the inevitable were never far beneath the surface.

But reach it she did, thumbing her cute little nose at the pessimists. The little lady had, from the first, shown determination to the point of stubbornness.

Everyone in our small village loved her for it.

Twenty days later she died. Instead of waking to another day of pain, she chose to sleep on.

You could be forgiven for expecting my years of working in newspapers, with the Aberfan disaster, the Dunblane slaughter of the innocents and the myriad of incidents and accidents involving children I had written about, to have better equipped me to deal with this event.

My association with Helen and Douglas House, the respite centre and hospice for children and young people, should have made me realise that tragedy comes with no regard for age or fairness.

But it didn’t.

On Tuesday, I unashamedly wept not only for my little chum but also for her grieving parents who had lived with the inevitable since the day their only child was diagnosed with her cruel, no-cure condition.

Parents shouldn’t outlive their children. It’s unfair to both parties.

The service was uplifting, even though it isn’t for us to always understand what the Head Man in Heaven has in mind.

There were many words of comfort and a few for smiles. It was far from being mawkish.

However, while I willingly believe and accept the MD in the Sky has the last word, on the Day of Judgement, when our lives’ triumphs and failures are laid bare, I’d like to pose a few pointed questions in his direction before he frowns at my transgressions.