Relics of the past

What secrets does our house keep?
Credit: William Lam

Archaeologists recently found a fragment of Roman pottery in my home town, in the car park near our local Waitrose supermarket. My first thought was that the discovery would make a nice premise for a Latin text book: 

Metella and her slave Grumio visit the fish counter at Waitrose. Ever mindful of landfill, Metella brings her clay cooking pot to carry the fresh salmon home, but on the way back to their villa, naughty Grumio drops his mistress' pot and it shatters on the ground... Heu!

Ibiza unbound

Almost half a century ago, my grandmother came upon a notice in The Times newspaper advertising a villa for sale on the Spanish island of Ibiza. A few weeks later, she flew out to visit the house with my mother, who incidentally advised her not to buy it! Paying no heed to my mother's youthful caution, my grandmother, who had fallen in love with the villa despite the lack of electricity and telephone line, went ahead and purchased it. 

My grandmother's old villa near Port des Torrent

Or so the family legend goes. One way or another, history was made and my family spent almost every summer for the next forty years on the island of Ibiza. In 2006, my grandmother was forced to sell up because of health reasons and she passed away a few years later. This summer I went back to Ibiza for the first time since she died, to revisit this place that had provided a thread of continuity throughout my peripatetic childhood. My return to the island got me thinking about how people are shaped by the geography in which they grow up.

Back in Neverland

I was sorting through photos on the computer this week and came across a video clip of the children from about five years ago. Oh my! Just watching them giggling together and scampering around a sunlit meadow made my heart clench. I wanted to reach into the computer screen and pull those chubby little pootles out onto my lap. Those were the days when they were the beginning and end of my world. They took precedence over everything - my career, my ambition and sometimes even my sense of self.

Rose-tinted childhood

How have all those years shuffled by so quickly? My daughter starts secondary school in September. She is on the cusp of teenage-hood and yet she can still slip effortlessly into imaginary games with her younger brother. I watch them playing together and wonder if this is the last summer of innocence. At a recent new girls' day, one of the teachers explained how he too would have girls starting at the school. "I share your joy and your pain at watching them grow up," he told us.

I am so proud at how far my daughter has come. I am also genuinely excited about the opportunities that now lie within her grasp: the literature she will devour, the mysteries she will solve, the drama of finding herself and launching that identity into the world at large. It won't be long before she becomes an independent person with dreams and projects of her own. So why the pain? Why do I look back and mourn the child that she was?

Synthetic humans

Review: Channel 4 TV series, Humans

As the summer holidays get underway, I catch myself thinking wouldn't it be nice to have a synth in the house? In case you are not among the four million people hooked to Channel 4's latest Sunday-night drama, Humans, a synth is an aesthetically pleasing but slightly eery robot in human form that performs mundane and thankless tasks. I am looking for one to glide about the house making meals, tidying up after the kids and loading the washing machine. What's wrong with that? Well, quite a lot as it turns out.

The actor Gemma Chan who plays the synth Anita
Credit: Des Willie for Kudos

Set in a parallel present, Humans is part sci-fi thriller and part family drama with a clever script that constantly questions what it is to be human. This is 'theory of the mind' with a dash of adrenalin. While most synths are merely robots - albeit capable of inspiring affection in their human users - there is a small and secretive band of super-synths who have been modified: they have become conscious. In other words, they are capable of feeling and thinking like a human, while also operating as a complex machine. The boundaries between artificial and human intelligence are well and truly blurred.

Fragrant dreams

People watching: 
Roja Dove, Master perfumer

I was walking through a National Trust garden the other day when I stooped to smell a rose. The delicate, quintessentially  English scent transported me back to my grandparents' garden when I was a little girl. There I was cavorting under a weeping willow in a frilly frock with brown ribbons in my hair. Magic! 

Roja: "Choose your scent wisely"

Such is the power of scent. Frangipani does it for me too. Only this time I'm a teenager in Oman at dusk, full of tempestuous emotions. I long for my freedom and yet I am also frightened of what the world has to offer. For me, the sweetness of frangipani is fraught with danger and temptation.

As the master perfumer, Roja Dove, told a rapt audience last week at Henley's Phyllis Court club: "Unstopping a bottle of scent transports you to a different place. It's like releasing a genie from a bottle."

Bottling sunshine

It's hard to believe that the summer holidays are upon us once more. Where did the last term go? In another year, my daughter will have finished primary school - how did that happen? Hardly a day goes by when I don't lament (hand resting on my brow) how my children are growing up too fast.
 

Summer: a time for making memories

As a parent, hemmed in by school timetables, you tend to see the year in a very structured way. Inevitably, the end of the summer term becomes a red, flashing marker for the passing of time.

My children seem to change so fast that I occasionally grieve for the chubby, inarticulate people they once were. In some ways, every day spent is the loss of something intangible. This is compounded by the sense that time is speeding up as I get older (which is possibly a sign of my own mental deterioration rather than any quirk of physics). 

Let there be this

My grandmother, Jean Morton, died two years ago this week. She was an actress and a television presenter, and also inspired me to write my first novel, A Sister for Margot. This is how I choose to remember her.

Dear Nana,

 It has been two years since you left us. We said goodbye one morning in May, while you were sleeping with the blankness of death chalked on your face. Sitting by your bed, I leafed through old recipe books and read your clippings out loud, in case you were still listening. In that quiet room, we breathed the same air for the last time.

Guess what? Recently you've been getting younger in my imagination. (Hurrah! How marvellous, darling!) I picture us in Ibiza again on the terrace. You have a glass of rosado in one hand and you're wearing a patterned sundress, cinched in at the waist. Your blue eyes are twinkling merrily as you recount one of your favourite anecdotes. As ever, your mimicry and comic timing are spot-on.

But I have tears in my eyes because I am not really there with you. I can see you and hear you, but I can't touch you anymore. I can't put my arm around your shoulders or kiss your cheek, warm from the sun.