"My mother’s opinions do seem susceptible to the cold"

CORK airport, 2.30pm, and, as expected, the rain has travelled for hundreds of miles against prevailing winds especially to decant itself on top of my mother when she disembarks the plane.

In the car, my mum phones my sister from her mobile, to inform her of her safe arrival.

“Well, I’m here in St Tropez,” she says, looking out of the window and up at the vengeful sky. “I’m in the car now and we’re heading home.

“Into the wild west,” she says, in her intrepid Arctic-explorer voice, “with one windscreen wiper.”

“You warm enough?” I ask, fiddling around with the heater.

“I haven’t been warm since the doctor put me on these blood-thinners,” she says. “I told him it wasn’t a stroke. I told him I just got out of bed too quickly. But he didn’t listen. And now I’m stuck on these blasted pills for the rest of my life and cold all the time. How are you, love?”

I tell my mother that I put my husband on serious house-warming duty before I left for Cork this morning, but she just says dubiously, “how’s he going to manage that on crutches?” and shivers.

At home, my mother looks at the woodburning stove in the conservatory, where there are three twigs turning to ash in the grate.

“Good God, you have to be stoic to live in the country,” she says, pulling a pair of thermal leggings out of her bag and putting them on. “I mean, I don’t know about you, but I can’t speak when I’m cold.”

An hour passes during which my husband and I set about the business of loading and stoking fires in the manner of Titanic engine crew, while my mother sits beside the stove and takes her tapestry out of her sewing bag. Threading a needle, she chats to my youngest.

As I pass backwards and forwards through the conservatory with cut logs and buckets of coal, it strikes me that my mother’s opinions do indeed seem susceptible to the cold; her intrepid Arctic-explorer voice now has a slightly frost-bitten edge to it. And her conversation lacks its usual defining characteristics; there is no point of view, very little command, not much dominion, and hardly any say-so.

Soon there is a toasty blaze in both rooms. I stick on the central heating for good measure, sit down in the conservatory and take off nearly all my clothes.

“You’re looking very trim,” she says to my husband, who’s taken off nearly all his clothes. “You can’t still be cycling like a dervish on crutches, surely? Though it wouldn’t surprise me.”

“No cycling yet,” he says. “Swimming 60 lengths a day now. Physio. For my leg.”

“Oof,” Mum shudders, “don’t talk to me about swimming.” And as the room temperature rises, I can hear the frostbite melting from her voice,

“What do you mean, Granny?” my daughter asks. “You go swimming every day.”

“I do, darling,” she says, warming up now, “though I don’t know if I’ll be going for much longer. To be perfectly honest, the men are beginning to put me off.”

“What men?”

“The old men at the hotel, where I swim,” she huffs, full of vim. “Honestly. What I have to put up with.

“I mean, when women get old and put on fat, it goes where it should,” she continues, “you know, a bit on the tummy and boobs and hips. And they wear nice swimming costumes that hold it all in place. But men! Their fat is all out front. Hanging like a great loaf of bread over their privates. Hideous. Why is that? Why is it all out front? I mean it’s not like they even have the excuse of having had babies.”

“That’s what happens when you stop cycling like a dervish,” my husband says.

“Well,” she says, “you should keep all that going then. All that demented exercise. When you’re off your crutches. I mean, God forbid.

“I mean,” she says looking around at us all, “imagine.”

While we all imagine my husband at 70, with a great loaf of bread hanging over his privates, my mother continues.

“And the extraordinary thing is, they all wear the wrong togs. Tiny togs. One of them got into the jacuzzi yesterday, when I was in it by myself — all nice and calm, just relaxing and minding my own business. He was most off-putting, sitting opposite me in his tiny togs, with his everythings hanging everywhere, for all to see.

“Someone should talk to the manager about it,” she continues. “Make them wear something a bit more seemly. In fact, I’ve a good mind to tell him myself.

“Gosh, it’s lovely and warm in here now,” she says, biting off a thread. “I feel quite back to myself.”