The day our mother died was a day of liberation.

For my sisters and me, 58, 50 and 46 years of misery respectively came to an end that warm July night. I made a few calls to people who might be vaguely interested in her demise, then sat in the garden, drank wine and had two fags. She was gone. We had missed the final moments. The old witch hung on until we’d left the hospice, then she died. Typical. Difficult to the end.

Of course, she wouldn’t have considered it to be a warm night. She had lived in Spain for 22 years but, at the age of 77, decided for the first time in her life that she wanted to ‘be with her family’, so spent the last two years of her life in Scotland, wrapped in numerous jumpers, dissatisfied with the whole world and, in particular, Gordon Brown.

She spent most of those two years on a sofa in which she insisted lived a mouse, hurling insults at the TV. She was never warm; she was never happy. Her teeth dropped out one by one and she seemed unconcerned. Her nails grew to an alarming length. She lived on a diet of sardines, choc ices and red wine. She was miserable, and it was all Gordon Brown’s fault.

Ironically, it was the sun that killed her. A carcinoma that she failed to have attended to eventually started eating away at her nose. She’d had an operation which left a cavernous hole, and sported an over-sized dressing until she was persuaded to have cosmetic surgery to fix it, a procedure carried out by a surgeon we nicknamed Dr Death because he had once managed to kill a patient while carrying out a routine nose job. We didn’t dare tell her that, of course. He was a dusky looking gentleman with a certain presence and she enjoyed flirting with him, seemingly oblivious to the fact that she only had half a nose and very few teeth. I imagine the 17 jumpers were a bit of a turn-off too.