Association and loss.

There are many things I will associate with my late mother.

Cheese and wine. It didn’t matter what day it was. A Friday or a Tuesday. Mum would put out wine, cheese and some sort of cracker as soon as she walked through the front door.

Chocolate digestives. Mcvities, obviously. Nothing but the best, despite own brand at Waitrose being half the price and tasting exactly the same.

Cooking too much food. Because my mum always liked to feed the five-thousand.

Sailing. My mum loved to sail..it was one of her special interests. She’d never had the time to actually do anything about it since she was in her twenties. But she always talked about it whenever we got on a boat.

Christmas. Because every tradition is tied up in the perfect family Christmases my mum tried so hard to create each year and will forever be a reminder of my childhood.

Southampton. Because that’s the city I grew up in. And my mum was every part of that growing up..even the bits I hated.

Falkirk..a small but pleasant town in Scotland. After buying a house on the outskirts of nearby Stirling, where I had been swallowed up some years before, we visited Falkirk as a novel opportunity for shopping. Stirling was full of memories of my ex and I was trying to create new memories and locate new places to spend a Saturday. I visited this town several times across the following two months, three times with my mum, having only been there once before in 7 years. She died 6 weeks later. I can’t drive through the town without remembering our last shopping trip and our last argument that formulated the last time I ever saw my mum.

A house that matches. This is a difficult one. I think the day my mum was most proud of me was the day I bought my own house. I grew up in a show home and from the point I could argue, I slowly transformed my mum from aspiring house-proud middle-class perfection to ‘im sure I dusted a month ago’. Still, she kitted out my first ever home, a year ago, with curtains and wall paint and an emerald green duvet set, blanket and rug combo from the Range. Since she died, I can barely look at these items. I lost all interest in making my house a home and remembered that, without my mum’s interference, I had managed to live from one random sofa/shed to another for almost a decade.

There are lots of ways I lived my life like my mum..even if on the surface I thought I was doing the complete opposite.

Despite my attempts to get as far away as possible, her influence still lived on inside me.

I guess I should live for her, now.