The meadow seems to float within an impossibly large East Anglian sky like an island moated by cloud. Particularly when it is misty, the sky laps up against the side of it. As a result we started to call this place Skymeadow. It is here that I have dug our new garden into the side of that most unusual thing: an East Anglian hill. And it is now that I recognise it has been the distraction of doing so that has given me the oxygen and machinery I needed to grieve.

My mother, Christina, hadn’t been right for a while before we moved; via a series of unpleasant interviews with doctors it was established that she had lung cancer. This was evidenced from an x-ray because she pointedly refused to let them do anything else to her. In a rather old fashioned way she seemed to accept her circumstances and the last thing she wanted was for “modern medicine” to poke, prod and irradiate her into feeling worse. She soldiered on and ignored any advice that was given to her by conventional medical practitioners and passed away in January 2015, aged 76 – separated by two days and three years from the death of my father, David, aged 65, in January 2011, following a heroic five-year battle with Motor Neurone Disease.