Sometimes Mum does not remember her Grandchildren’s names.

Or if she does, they are muddled and mismatched; she attaches the wrong grandchildren to the wrong child. Or the wrong name to the wrong person. There are no neat lines anymore. Just a messy cat’s cradle tangled with crossed lines which we gently, sensitively, try to unpick or avoid.

The last time I saw mum, just before this pandemic broke, she forgot who I was. Just like that. One day she was sure, the next she accused me of being a stranger. She had been staying with me for two months. We had sat opposite each other every single day those two months for every single meal. We had walked together. We had played cards. But that day – I’d vanished.

‘How do you know you’ve had an elephant in the veg patch?’ I ask mum.

How, she wants to know.

‘Because of the footprints in the dust as big as dinner plates’, and she hoots with laughter.

Now, when she reads, it’s as if you’d put all words in the world into a colander and were trying to push them through the holes. They mostly squeeze through in the end, the little ones with greater ease, faster, but it can be arduous and is always slow.

Our anchor had come loose, slipped a knot and mum is disappearing over some far away horizon that I can’t see, because the darkening sky has slid into a black sea and blurred all my outlines. There are no sharp shapes anymore. Only shifting ones.

I takes courage to pick up the phone to mum. I brace myself for recognition. Or not. Today she is very confused. And I think of Nicci Gerrard’s words;