Mum

I'm sure this isn't going to be the last time that I talk about my Mum. Indeed, she's already featured.

This isn't, I think, going to be one of those stories about an unnaturally strong attachment to a mother. For much of my childhood my mother appeared tired, impatient and angry.

That's because she was clearly all of those things.

She was working hard (nights as a nurse, a stint as a dinner lady - making ends meet kinds of things) whilst trying to make the time to be there for her family.

She could be wildly unreasonable (I will always remember a blow-up she had at me because I'd not done something that she'd forgotten to ask me to do - "I'm not psychic!" I shouted at her..."well you should be!" she shouted back!) but she could be gentle and poetic too (singing songs about Fred in the back seat of the car....putting together imaginative games for me and my friends at parties where you had to pretend to be different types of firework).

A lot of the time she seemed so disappointed. Life's letdowns were so crashingly tiresome but, at the same time, inevitable.

There's one memory that's always stayed with me.

I always knew that she was brainy and that she'd wanted to go to university but wasn't allowed to by her parents. I remember asking her how she felt about "having" to cook and clean for these three boys all the time instead of "going out to work like Dad". She said that that's what she was meant to do - that it was her lot in life.

I felt so sad for her. It seemed so wrong.