I have been employed now for almost a year and been a resident at my little pigeon-loft apartment in Chatham for almost eleven months, but until today my mum had never seen my flat. So today we enjoyed a good seven hours together in the Medway Towns.

I collected my mum from Chatham railway station and brought her to see my flat, which she absolutely adores! (who wouldn't!). Yes of course I showed her my water-canon! Then we bimbled into Rochester on foot, taking in the little row of terraced houses in which one day, I would like to own a property, and then on to the completely mad musical gates I have previously shown to siblings. After that, the very lovely Rochester High Street and the Huguenot museum there - loads of stuff about how Britain welcomed highly-skilled artisan refugees from overseas, how their presence here has enriched silly island Britain and interspersed with the odd grateful note from modern mid-Eastern refugees. Lovely! And our entry tickets are valid for a year, so if you ever wish to pop by . . .

From there I took mum to the cathedral. I'm not normally big on cathedrals but I am awfully fond of this one. The section farthest from the altar (nave?) has no pews and so it had been temporarily transformed into indoor crazy golf and there was a huge queue! I showed mum my very favourite bit, which is a fabulously preserved medieval wall-painting depicting Fortuna presiding over the Wheel of Fortune. Mum was convinced that it must have been restored, but no, it hasn't, it's been preserved because for 7 centuries it was covered by a pulpit and nobody knew it was there. The colours are all still fresh and bright. After that I took her to see the cathedral library. I happened upon this by chance several months ago and was utterly gobsmacked. Last time I was there a librarian was showing an original 12th century book to someone doing a PhD in medieval-whatever and so I took mum there just in case we got lucky. Lucky we got! Another medieval PhD student was in the library and we were able to share her viewing of several 800-year old original books with an incredibly enthusiastic explanation from the librarian. Mum was almost weeping with treat, but characteristically coy, so when we were done I explained to the cathedral librarian that mum had worked at the National Maritime Museum and that as a schoolchild, I used to visit her at work in my half-term holidays and been shown hand-painted atlases pre-dating the discovery of the Americas. It was the cathedral librarian's turn to weep with envy :-)

After that it was a nice simple lunch, a bit more bimble, back to the flat and back to the railway station.