Very, very sadly, my Mum died two weeks ago. I didn’t feel comfortable blasting my grief across social media – but now it feels very odd not to confide in you brilliant, kind and witty people who’ve been such good company over the past couple of years.
If you’ve been through this,  you’ll know the wretchedness and childlike disbelief. You’ll understand how ridiculous  it seems that flowers she bought are only now starting to fade. The way I can’t sit in her kitchen and look at a plastic bucket or tin of shoe polish or the fruit cake she bought at the village fete two days before she died, without resenting the way they survive and she does not.
We’re a very close family and we’re doing our best to help each other. My lovely Dad, who met her sixty years ago, when he glanced up from the dance floor to the balcony of the Ritz ballroom in Manchester and spotted a pair of red shoes, has cried with us and shared his love, his memories and his agonies over the loss of someone he forever saw as that striking woman he walked  to Victoria Station to catch her last bus home.
I just wanted to let you know.
