A short reflection on the death of my Mother in December 2008.

Returning to the place of one's distant childhood, especially if seldom visited, can bring a powerful sense of time's distorting impact on perception. The scale and status of things can seem so very different through adult eyes.

On this occasion, back in Weymouth for my mother's funeral, I was staying in the sea-facing room of a hotel on the Esplanade which, as a boy, seemed like a place of consummate grandeur. Now, it was just a convenient resting place from where to absorb the present and recall the past.

"Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end"

(from William Shakespeare, Sonnet 60)