The people have gone stone mad! A conservatory, three bathrooms and no one inside in it, where will it end? Sure what about the size of Deanes’ House? Well everyone can’t be at it and that is the size of it! Only who gets to decide? She was the one who, in the dark, surreptitiously hacked down armfuls of beech branches and stuck them in the brown and pink Victorian ewers she’d rescued from Cotters’ farm, they blazed emerald one summer in our cold salvaged fireplaces, old was always good in her book. She was always looking back and now – me too, rooted, staring after her.

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