Real life | 14 March 2019

My mother is a classy lady. I have always known this, but it still affected me in a way I can’t quite describe to see that her handbags have bags.

I was helping to move the folks into their new home when I discovered this rather wonderful fact about my mother.

Praise be, by the way. HS2 finally played along and the sale went through. We packed up the house in which my parents have lived for 50 years and on the morning of the move the builder boyfriend and I took the spaniels for our last ever walk in the fields at the back of my childhood home.

The shape of the high speed railway is now carved into the land. A vast ploughed tract runs for miles across the fields in which I used to picnic and ramble.

It was an idyllic childhood, I now realise. I remember walking with my father and mother in these fields, picking blackberries.