Even though I knew it was going, it came as a shock to see the space where mum’s beautiful little Georgian bureau had been. Although I don’t see her sat there (Edwardian lady-style) writing floral letters to old friends, it was full of stuff - a mountain of assorted cards to send, for every occasion, a pot pouri assortment of photos across the generations from faded sepia to monochrome black and whites to the somehow’old colour’ to the the sharper, more ‘real’, but still not now colour of the more recent past...that somehow seems to have more colour, more life blood in it, than now.

My niece is taking it with her to her new home. I have no room for anything much and am not sure I want anything. And anyway, it would be ‘out of place’ if I took it and would look impertinent anywhere else. I feel ambivalent about ‘stuff’ and yet feel a shock, upsetness and a dislocation of moved, or ‘separated’, objects that had every appearance of being bolted to the Earth. A faulting and fracturing of ground that I wasn’t even sure of in the first place and so made all the more confusing. And a sense of no other solid ground to jump to or retreat to. Untethered. Knowing rationally that objects are not stable. They are just objects. They hold no special power. Yet they can last longer than people, be more reliable, more solid. Everything , and nothing at all. The space they leave representative of nothing, the vastness of eternity ... that gets filled by a chair. And that chair leaps into that space held by that prior object and occupies it with its own stack of association and its own familiarity ...of cushions that don’t stay in place, of never being comfortable, of all the awkwardness of father.

(Writing this at 3 a.m. on the morning of 31st Aug. It seems to take me ages to catch up, process, bother. In spite of enervating day at work, a long swim and late home, I still manage to wake at an unearthly hour in a state of spiky brainwave agitation for no good reason and with a heavily booked day ahead of me ....ugh...ugh)