Prato

Prato is about twelve miles north of Florence and it's a bit like going to the moon in preference to visiting the earth. But there is so much to recommend it, not least having the place to yourself, especially in October. We did mean to visit Florence - I had it down twice on my itinerary - but the charms of Prato and the peaceful life got to us.

We stayed in BB.Magico, which is just off the cathedral square. Being so central meant that no monument or museum was more than a ten minute walk away, which is about all I could manage with a fallen arch. It was a working trip - researching the life of Filippo Lippi - but we needed a holiday as well. I'd seen all the Lippi's by the end of the second day (or was it the first?) so after that I could just concentrate on being there. The Calvana hills are a backdrop to the city and one day we sat outside a bar looking at them in a severe rain storm. Only the English. . .

As the week progressed, we got deeper into the project. We'd asked where Lippi had lived but no one could tell us. Then, on Sunday evening and out on a fruitless walk to find somewhere open where we could buy something to eat, David crossed the street to read a marble plaque. 'Here lived Filippo Lippi'. I'd spent the week thus far making up the location, given the paucity of information - I'd got it wrong by about twenty paces.

Then we told the lovely Cristina, who lives on the first floor of the house we were staying in, what we were looking for, and she thought she knew someone who could help. Enter Simona, on our last day - a whirlwind of facts and information.

I haven't mentioned it before on this blog, but perhaps now is the time to come out. I anguished for a long time, once the trilogy was complete, as to what my next novel would be. A nudge from a friend sent me hurtling into the 1450s. It's a prequel, and the trilogy is set to become a quartet. Amongst other things, it deals with Botticelli's youth. I hope to be finished next year, in time for his 500th anniversary.

Sybil Grace Proud

I went in to say goodnight and she had gone. At least I thought she had. David wasn't sure, either. It's not as easy to tell as you might think. After this morning's rain, it was a very beautiful afternoon, a perfect summer's evening and now, at midnight, it's calm and still. We have a candle burning as we await the doctor. Tomorrow the storm of paperwork and phone calls begin, but tonight it is calm and quiet. Deep peace of the running wave to you, Mum. God bless.

It was this time last week when a visiting out-of-hours doctor decided enough was enough and put Mum on the Liverpool Care Pathway. This recognises that death is imminent and puts comfort as the top priority. Our GP gave Mum 48 hours. A week ago.

It seemed foolish not to spend the time anticipating the funeral. After all, when somebody dies you spend a frantic week making snap decisions, not always the right ones. This time I would be prepared. I do so love to be prepared. So over this week I've been devising a funeral to honour a lady who loved bright colours, laughter and large earrings - funky but not so funky as to be inappropriate. So I've trawled the net and researched coffins, urns, shrouds. I've discovered - to my horror - that I've lost my taste for hymns and find them maudlin and sentimental. I've also discovered that there's no such thing, apparently, as 'non-Christian hymns'. A 'non-Christian hymn', someone replied archly to just that question, 'is called a song'. So I've been through other people's lists of great funeral songs. I've thought of some of my own and discovered the joy of thinking of something and less than a minute later hearing it coming out of the computer. An idea of 'bagpipes playing Amazing Grace' presented quite a choice on YouTube but the Royal Dragoon Guards stood out as if their music actually had an extra dimension to everyone else's - kind of quadrophonic out of two speakers. And so I've had fun, learned things, had my mind blown. Then today, thinking about her smile, I began to conceive a powerpoint presentation of just that, Mum's smile. And then the grief set in.

It's all very well being prepared, but I'm now in full-scale bereavement while Mum's still breathing, and that is horrible. I want to wake her up, out of her drugged dreams and shout, Smile, Mum, for God's sake, just one more time. But no, she insists on playing the withered, breathing corpse, with lips drawn in and puckered over protruding cheeks and sunken gums. Rembrandt would have loved to draw her right now.

I suppose the chief merit of preparing a funeral is that you get the chance to get all cried out before the event. Then you can stand tall and impervious while everyone else sobs into hankies. 'Smile' will bring the chapel down - we'll be carrying 'em out on stretchers. Anyone left standing will be downed by Amazing Grace. I've been to too many funerals where my objective to remain dry-eyed has been too easily achieved. Not this one. I'll get 'em all.

Do you know, the music of Smile was written by Charlie Chaplin?

Night Visitors

I woke up around two in the most profound presence of the Muse. As before, she came in the guise of a male poet long dead, but so alive in the imagination that awakening was a shock and a bereavement. In my half-asleepiness I either picked or knocked a spot on my leg which began to bleed profusely. And downstairs Mum was wailing. But I had to hold to the vision for a little while at least, for just long enough to remember in my waking state what it was I had been given: a novel, whole and complete, in a shell the size of a hazelnut. That's the way it happens: it comes packed in minute potency and 'writing' a novel is just a matter of unpacking it and translating. Water-to-water, that was the gist of it. But how wonderful, to be visited by the Muse - like meeting a water-carrier in the middle of the desert and knowing him as someone so utterly familiar. I haven't written, not properly, for months now. Somehow or other, the draft of a novel - a prequel to the trilogy - has emerged, but it's like a patchwork quilt. So here I am, in this aridity of creative work, being offered the opportunity, suddenly, to work on two novels at once.

So downstairs I go to help David with Mum and lights are snapping on and things being said which don't do self-esteem any good and Mum's wailing and wailing. We administer a sleeping draught to this writhing bunch of twigs. And while all this is happening, I clutch at my hazelnut and hope it doesn't get forgotten or trampled in the mud of frustrated negative emotion. Then back to bed to lay there thinking, air-writing, developing a frozen shoulder, until a couple of hours later Mum's calling again. I think she's feverish and may have an infection, although the thermometer says different. All normal. But now I'm at my desk, it's dawn and I must try and recollect as much as I can of the song I was given in that magical time which is 2am (see R L Stevenson and Travels with my Donkey).

I've been listening to Adam Nicolson's reflections on Homer on BBC iPlayer - a facility which prolongs your opportunity to hear something but at the same time makes it feel even more ephemeral since the caption tells you how many days left you have before this programme is wiped forever from the aether. Nicolson, as usual, is magnificent and his insights into the Iliad are startling. For instance, Troy wins the war when Priam kisses his dead son, Hector, in the presence of Achilles 'and Achilles understands'. Nicolson says the book is dealing with two main archetypes - Achilles, the cold-blooded killer, and Hector, the family man. These two are in all of us, he says; he also says that he hasn't resolved the tension within himself yet, which must have made unhappy listening for his wife. Whether as Achilles or Odysseus, Nicolson needs to travel alone to write. This is the image that haunts me; perhaps it's the image that provoked a visit from the Muse, immediately attended by all hell letting loose within the family.

And so it is dawn, and the spooks begin to vanish, normality returns - whatever delusion that is - and soon carers will be bouncing in full of life and blissful ignorance. But somewhere on that far horizon of grey and pink, the notes of an Orphic lute are sounding.

The Long Vigil

I've been lying awake fretting that it's only the end of July. I have never known such a long year, not since I was a child, wanting to be older than I was and seemingly stuck in a wet summer vacation without end. Wet, wet, wet. While I was out on the allotment in a break between showers yesterday, taking photographs for a competition with the theme 'summer's plenty', I saw the first signs of rot. The tomatoes are blighted and the onions I strewed about to confuse the cabbage butterflies have gone to mush.

The reason the year is long is my mother. She's spent most of the time in hospital in three long stints and nothing makes time stretch like repetitive activity, and there's nothing quite so repetitive as parking the car and walking the corridors of the JR hospital on a daily visit to someone who usually does not know you are there. I occupied myself getting angry about things, and there was plenty of scope for that. She came home again, perhaps for the last time, Monday before last. We had had four lessons in hoisting at the hospital but by the second day of her return she was deemed doubly incontinent and bed-ridden, and by the third day I was sending a stool off for analysis as the horrible truth dawned, that she had been returned to us - knowingly - with a renewed attack of c. difficile.

Since then we've got ourselves into a routine of watching and waiting. At first David and I took turns in sleeping. He'd stay up until 3 at which point we'd swop watches. But we've learnt that when my mother screams, wails or calls for help, there's nothing any human can do so we turned the baby monitor off and learned to sleep through it all. Until now. It's 3am and I'm up for some unaccountable reason. No one is calling but my soul. Or is it my conscience?

'Vigil' is Latin for 'awake'. According to the dictionary it means 'a period of staying awake during the time usually spent asleep, especially to keep watch or pray.' It's that latter part that's important, because my final clause of that definition is too often, 'especially to sit with your head in your hands feeling sorry for yourself.'

I said something to one of the carers yesterday about waiting until Mum died and she looked shocked at my candour, but why pretend? This brittle, bruised, tiny little form who, every day, looks more and more like the figure of God in Philip Pullman's trilogy, cannot survive much longer. It is not possible. The week they called us in to say our final goodbyes, back in May, was the week my cat died, a seemingly robust little creature not yet two years old. She just laid under a bush and died.

Do I wish my mother dead? That is the shocking thought I prick myself with every day. But why shouldn't I? After all, she wishes herself dead. If she was my most favourite, best loved dog, I'd have put her down long ago to spare her any further agony. Her pain is physical, of course, but more it is spiritual, an existential misery that bursts out in screams of hair-tearing frustration. She has very little hair left.

Meanwhile I sit and wait, no longer sure what I shall feel when the wait is over. I try and pray but get taken with a fit of embarrasment before I can reach the end of any sentence. I am more vocal with God when I take him to task for his design of the human bladder. 'What a mess that is and you think you're so high and mighty, the great designer!' At Art in Action a sculptor from India gave me a tiny figure of Ganesha. It was a cheap piece of tinsel that made the aesthete in me recoil. I mean, really, do they have crackers at Diwali, and did he find this in one of them? But the little plastic God painted silver sits on our dining room table and each time I spot him, I ask Ganesh to remove all obstacles, for that is what he is god of, the imposition and the removal of obstacles. It's easier, you see, to pray to a little piece of plastic. It makes you forget, momentarily, that the person you are praying to is your own Self.

I don't know why, in the great scheme of things, that my mother was revived after her heart attack. Has she learned anything since of use to her in her soul's journey? It seems impossible. But it happened, the resuscitation. And now, thanks to a living will which is rolled up in a bottle and kept in the fridge (don't ask me why), it won't happen again.

Even so, even so, as I sit here awake in the middle of the night, I am ambivalent about the right to die, the hot topic of the moment. I often say to friends that, if the thought of the journey was not so horrendous, I'd have taken Mum to Zurich before now. I say that my views have changed. Throughout her life, Mum has believed in euthanasia - and she was never one to hold an opinion about anything other than 'it's all wrong!'. In her 80s she actually spoke to me directly about it. When the time came, would I help her? I said no, I wouldn't. I had principles I did not wish to contravene. Anally-retentive bigot or what? What do I know about anything? Where are my principles now? But if it came to it, here, in England, could I give the nod? I don't know.

This is my position at 3am in the morning at the end of July 2009. I am glad there is a debate. I am glad the law may become clearer if not actually change. I have great respect for the law. Many principles I've held in the past have been overtaken by the law and we always seem to be the better for it. [This is a slight divergence, but I've just finished reading Adam Nicolson's excellent book on the translation of the King James Bible, God's Secretaries, and he makes the point at the end that the language of that book, so beautiful it touches on the miraculous, is not only the product of a committe, but is also the product of men who didn't think twice about martyring their opponents. Nicolson says such language, such religiosity, is beyond us now, who live in a society where tolerance is practised although not always achieved. So what we would rather have, poetry or sweetness of life? I can't help but think that, as time passes and views change, we get more Christian, not less]. So in a cowardly fashion I shall sit back, wait for the law to change and then have no trouble in following it afterwards.

There is a school of thought, you see, which I've always subscribed to, which says that life is sacred and that every moment of it counts towards the next one. I do believe that. But what we're faced with here, as we watch and wait, is a beautiful theory pitted against an agonising reality. Those men who, in battle, put their guns to their horses's heads were not murderers - they were victims of love, the love that will do the worst to save the beloved any more pain. This, too, I think is in the great scheme of things and something our principles need to accommodate.

Gardening for free

On this rainy Saturday in June, I've been sorting out papers and came across something I must have scribbled in May 2008. But it's relevant to this year, too, except for the weather pattern which has been quite different.

As the primroses appeared in March, I stood on the garden path and scratched my head, for I could not remember planting them in the lawn. Granted 'lawn' is now a misnomer for that side of the path which I've surrendered to the wild. A golfer would call it 'the rough'. I have the leather jackets to thank for it, and the birds. The plague of craneflies a few years ago left a generation of grubs that ate the grass at the root. The next time we mowed, half the lawn disappeared into the mower like a wig going up a vacuum cleaner. I put down grass seed and the birds came to gorge themselves.

Looking up 'ground cover' on the internet, I found I already had a couple of the recommended plants growing in the rockery so I transplanted some pieces of bugle and dwarf comfrey and left Nature to it.

Nature is a consummate artist. Much of what has happened since has been through the agency of seed, so the snowdrops and primroses and species tulips are being spread about - but how is it that they grow in just the right places, as if by design? And who is it who plants the bulbs? Several years ago we dug a shrub out of the other part of the lawn - that word again, which just about qualifies in this case - and filled the hole with home-made compost. The following spring saw a bunch of red tulips in the place. 'Well,' we said, 'they came from the compost.' Except I hadn't composted any. Over the next couple of years, the tulips were joined by daffodils. This year neither appeared apart from a few leaves spearing out of the grass. 'Well, that show's over,' I thought. Two weeks later, a bunch of bluebells appeared. Just behind them, in what you might call the border, only it's more like a frayed edge, an iris suddenly bloomed.

This spring has been a discovery, of the violet under the rambling rose, the centurea I've always wanted but have no recollection of planting, the border in the front garden which I did plant, but not with this result in view, a glorious tapestry of merging plants rising and falling in height.

Someone came to read the meter. He was dull of face and looked as if meters are all he reads, but he suddenly asked me, 'Who does the garden?' I gave him the wrong answer. The true answer is 'Nature'. All I do is crawl about on my hands and kness in an exploration of wonder, giving a helping hand here and there, pulling out some goose grass, live-heading the dandelions, grubbing up the moon daisies for which I have a dislike bordering on superstitious dread - they are so very invasive, so very weedy. Sometimes I trim the grass, and the wheat and barley that grows under the bird feeders, with shears. Mowing is for high summer only, when all the visitors - the toads, frogs and newts - have gone. I divide snowdrops and dot them about. I shake the seed heads of annuals on to fresh ground. There is no cause any longer to go to garden centres and buy plants, so expensive that I can only ever afford one at a time and never the three or five always recommended. As for 'drifts' - they are for the seriously rich. I have surrendered to nature and am her willing handmaid.

I went cautiously into the front garden last week. After a spring that has been long, cold and wet, it was the first visit of the season, and I expected to spend all morning writing a list of things to do that would take weeks to achieve. But there was so little to do that would I just did it, taking the seed heads off the iceplant and cutting down the ornamental grasses and penstemmons. No, nothing else to do but crawl about enjoying all the surprise free gifts.

My surrender to nature came when I decided not to have the front lawn treated anymore. Yes, four quarterly treatments did create a handsome lawn worthy of the name, but I missed the daisies. Now the front is turning into a rough like the back, but is there anything quite so glorious as watching your cat chase flies in long grass? My only job for this year is to look after the cowslip seeds chilling in the fridge. I've waited five years but they've never arrived on their own, so I guess I shall just have to put them in the ground myself.

And then the JR again

After two weeks, Mum returned to us from Witney hospital. Another two weeks and we had just about restored her, got her eating again and even, finally, got her eyes tested. Two weeks after that, the glasses arrived. Five days later, Mum was rushed back into the JR with a strangulated hernia. We did not dare send the glasses with her.

At first all seemed well after the operation but a couple of days later she had a heart attack, all her beats and pulses stopped and she flat-lined. They resuscitated her, at the cost of a few ribs. Twice we went in to say our last goodbyes, but every other day she revives. Now it's June and we're still waiting for a place at Witney. Mum must be the longest ever resident in the Surgical Emergency Unit, but they are treating her well. And we have trusted them with the glasses, which they've bar-coded.