thinking about my grandmother, it's not an anniversary or anything she's just still dead, and her last years with very bad dementia. I remember looking at a simple painting of a man alone in a boat she did as an activity in the amazing home she spent her last years in.

it felt so lonely but it was painted very intensely like light was pouring out of the man. I suddenly remembered my grandda, who died around 40 years before my granny did. An legendarily stoic man who loved very few things. One was my granny. Another was fishing alone in a boat.

My father, very much the child of both of these people, told me "ah she'd no idea what she was drawing at that stage" but I find the man in the boat overwhelming still. Imagine being dead for 40 years but still alive, and alive as yourself, in the dying embers of someone's mind.

My granny raised people cartoonishly proud of being unsentimental. The picture is long thrown away. Probably right, it was hers. Anyway, my grandda died when my Da was 17. My Da has no real interest in fishing. My parents house is full of beautiful paintings of fishing boats.

I thought all this because I looked in at Lisa working on some complicated craft thing the other day. Her back at a desk is the silhouette she always brings to mind. The cat was asleep beside her and I instinctively thought "ah, and there's the boat" then had to go and sit down.