It was springtime, two years ago, and my mum was dying. The crocuses bordering the paths of my local park were in full bloom and every day the plucky sprays of purple, yellow and white seemed to inch further skywards. How thoughtless their ascent looked. How perilously close spring suddenly seemed to winter.
I had just rushed back to Edinburgh as the country was going into lockdown, and by country I mean the nation, not its leaders. In London, my mum lay in the hospital where she once worked as a cytology screener, assisted by machines and some mighty inner force that for a few hallucinatory weeks seemed to rise up in her. My mum, who in my childhood memories was usually found hitching up her sari to snip a cutting from a stranger’s garden. My mum, who was finally dying of the breast cancer she had been so valiantly facing for years.
