Builders and family reunions have kept me offline for a week. So I’m cheating now: the following 673 words are from a novel I wrote last year.

Sunday, 30th, December, 2007

Dear Mother,

It is three months today since you died. It is two weeks since your eightieth birthday, the eightieth birthday you never had. That all sounds quite normal, normal for other people at any rate; dying at seventy nine that is. I am struggling though, still really struggling with the very notion that you are no longer here.

I wrote you a card for your birthday even though…