This is the time of year when mum comes to mind. It is six years since her health took a turn for the worse and, after a rapid decline, she left us in late February as the Beast from the East swept across the country. February, the cruellest month, is now associated with this time. Those weeks spent back at my childhood home, taking turns with my brother to look after her. Sitting by her bedside, as the first stirrings of spring were held in check by the freeze, time seemed to stop. To stop and yet also to cast me back into my childhood and family memories, even as I now had to parent her.

­­Memories of mum, a seamstress’s daughter, sitting at the dining table running up a new outfit on the sewing machine and teaching me how to do the same. Of dad reading Dylan Thomas’s ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ aloud on Christmas Eve. Of the home-decorating and DIY projects that filled weekends and holidays; wallpapering, painting and tiling, stripping and re-upholstering furniture, clearing out and organising the attic and garden shed. And of our yearly holidays on the Gower in South Wales, where we would stay with our grandparents.