Rachel Dixon’s piece about “dusking” (‘All you need is a chair and a view’: could daily ‘dusking’ make us healthier and happier?, 1 March) gave a lovely name to something I having been doing all my life, beginning as a child in the company of my Nanna, in a gas-lit kitchen in Wembley in the 1940s, with no view to speak of – just a back yard. I can see Nanna clearly, sitting on a chair wedged between the dresser and a table, the gas mantle yet to be lit by a taper that stood in a clay pot on top of the range. “Let the night take you and you will sleep all the better for it,” she used to say.
And I was always a night-long sleeper – still am as I approach my 82nd birthday. Now the view is a back garden in Beeston; I sit and watch, as the night draws in, in an Ikea chair bought for £9 in 1996, and warm thanks to central heating. If only my Nanna had known such comforts. She died when I was 15, a year after we got electric light, and I had been at work six months, never having the chance to look after her come the time, as I would have done.
