“I’ll take a stallion, some Glenfiddich and fags, too”

AT home, Sunday afternoon. My old friend Sam pulls his car into the drive.

Stalling the engine, he sags over the steering wheel like a popped balloon.

“Sorry we’re late,” he says to me, his smile bleeding to death on his face, “busy day…”

From where I stand outside his window, right now he looks every bit of 49.

His mother on the other hand, does not; 74, she sits beside him in the passenger seat with immaculate posture, looking like Katherine Hepburn at her sprightly, middle-aged best.

“We’ve had such fun,” she says, unscrewing the lid of her whisky hip-flask and taking a sip, “we went for a wonderful canter on the beach… marvellous horse... chestnut mare… lovely temperament… ”

Fumbling around in her bag for fags, she turns to her son and says, “run inside, sweetie, and fetch me a light, would you?”

“Bring it out here,” she calls after him as he walks towards the house in a jaded lollop, “so I can have a little smoke.”

I climb in to the driver’s seat.

“You can smoke indoors,” I say.

“Wouldn’t dream of it, sweetie…”

“But I don’t mind…”

“Don’t fuss.”

Sam reappears with matches and lollops off again.

“So,” I say, turning to his mother, “how are you?”

“Marvellous,” she replies, lighting up, “although living next door to your least favourite son-in-law is a trial.”

Her son-in-law, whom I remember as an inoffensive, bookish man, “would try the patience of a saint”.

She lowers her voice, confiding a recent telephone conversation that she had with her son Sam.

“I suggested he try living next door to him,” she says cheerfully, “I told him, the next time he phones me, no one will pick up. I told him I’ll have done a runner — and I won’t have left a forwarding address.”

She inhales deeply on her fag.

“I told Sam I’ve done my purgatory,” she says, looking at me, eyebrows raised. “I can tell you right now, purgatory is a box that’s been ticked.”

She continues, “I told him, when I die, I’m going straight up without touching the sides...” she takes another drag on her fag, “straight up.”

“He can put that on my headstone,” she says briskly, “he can put ‘she was a wonderful mother, she had a clean driving licence all her life, she was an excellent driver, and she’s done her purgatory’.”

She settles herself into the seat, and puffs away on her fag in contented silence. Meanwhile my fancy takes flight.

My imagination conjures up a shop called “Pick your Own Dotage”. Inside it there are rows of plastic pick ’n’ mix boxes, with labels on their lids such as Bridge Club, Church-cleaning rota, Werther’s Originals, Flower-Arranging, Dogs and Antiques Roadshow.

In my mind’s eye, I see clusters of old ladies trembling over the pick ’n’ mix. And I see Sam’s mother — at 65 let’s say — striding straight past the pick ’n’ mix and up to the counter. There, she says, “there is nothing I want in the pick ’n’ mix, young man, so I’ll take a stallion please, and some Glenfiddich — and fags, too, while you’re about it. And then you can get me a mind as sharp as a tack and a tongue sharper than that, for I have eight children, 25 grand-children, so I need to keep my wits about me. And hurry up about it, young man.”

Then I imagine her on her way out, dotage sorted in a carrier bag, cutting a swathe through the ladies still trembling over the pick ’n’ mix.

She puffs away, filling me in — colourful and concise — on what has been happening in her life.

I look at her “just-after-a-canter complexion” and think: a woman cannot know how terrified of horses she is until she’s sat upon one, or what effect whisky has on her until she’s drunk too much of it. And I think what a shame that I’ve sat upon a horse and drunk too much whisky and am terrified of both. What a shame, I think, looking at Sam’s mum, for I would like to pick her dotage and put it in a carrier bag for my future self.

I would like it very, very much indeed.