ALL IS suspense and tension upstairs in bed; we are watching the final episode of The Last Tango in Halifax, series two, on Netflix. 

SIX-THIRTY pm and the girls are due to arrive home from college.

MY DAUGHTER is sitting in the conservatory looking over my mother’s shoulder. My mother, who has come to visit along with my sister, sits beside my daughter on the sofa, reading.

A FRIEND arrives in the kitchen, bearing a plate covered in tin foil. “Scones,” she says, “just out of the oven but they might need a bit more cooking.”

Having argued his case for road safety with great ease, economy of effort and conviction — like the lawyer that he is — and banned me from picking him up from Cork airport in my “mobile skip,” my brother-in-law arrives in a hire car.

HOME, 8pm, and we’re watching Masterchef. “Lucky judges,” I say, “never mind the pickled cauliflower — it would be worth having to taste them just for those shallots.”

HOME ALONE, and waiting for a call from my husband. 

Wednesday night, upstairs, and my husband is resurrecting his Spiderman Scuttle - something to do with muscle flexion, I seem to remember - which involves scampering sideways, like a crab, back and forth across our bouncy floor-boards so that the bed shakes.

MY mother’s gone radio silent; it’s Tuesday afternon and her Monday morning phone call that has punctuated my life as inevitably and reliably as the weekly shop, never arrived. 

SUNDAY, 5pm, and after a five-year break from painting, I’m resurrecting my old studio. It’s a long way from Picasso’s atelier on the Riviera but it will do, like it always did, the job.