How do you lose your mother? How do you lose anyone? It's not the same as losing spectacles or keys. I lose those constantly, and my family have learned to say, ‘Don't panic. They are where you put them. Have you actually looked for them?’ Well, I have actually looked for my mother, and I suppose that I can say that she is, if not a hundred per cent right, a hundred per cent here. And a hundred percent not here. I don’t believe in life after death, I don't believe she's looking down on me smiling indulgently (or even furiously, or exasperatedly). But like everyone who has lost someone, and we all have or will unless we are very, very unlucky to be lost before everyone else, I have to deal with, and live with, memory.

When I lose my glasses or my keys, my family says, ‘Think where you were when you last had them, and work from there.’ Good, helpful advice. But where was I when I last had my mother? I can think of the day she died, but of course the longing and the loss started long before that. I joke with friends who have young children: ‘Ruin them emotionally when they’re young,’ I say, ‘or they will leave you.’ And in fact I do believe that one of the greatest ironies of parenting is that our crowning success comes when our children can go off into the world and make their own lives, becoming adults. I went off into the world and did well, and for Elsie this was in many ways a great betrayal. And to be fair, although I never would have admitted this to her, I was actively betraying her. I wanted out, I wanted my life, and I made sure that, like Shakespeare's Macduff, I was ‘untimely ripped’ from my mother, leaving us both scarred. In some ways, however, I had lost her long before that, when she needed me to be something other than her child. Psychoanalysis would, of course, say that every birth is a traumatic separation of infant from mother. You lost me at Day One, and I lost you.