Angelic in her green dressing-gown, Gar looked as fragile as a powder-puff about to float away. Her soft hair was tied in a bun, silky under the dim light of her room. Someone had tuned her stereo into Radio 3 and she was nodding off to the strains of Strauss, her last cup of tea cold and cloudy before her on the table. I didn’t want to wake her – there was little point. Gar was going gaga, that was the awful truth. She was clamped in Alzheimer’s relentless jaws, and there was no snatching her back.

I held her hand as she slept, her wrinkly old hand that was so light these days, and gazed almost unseeing at the familiar photos on the wall: me as a toothy baby; me as a fat and naked toddler in a pink sunhat on the beach in Cornwall; me aged about five in my mother’s strong, freckled arms – skinny now, just a little curving belly of baby-fat left, our hair as brilliantly red as one another’s, my mother beaming with love and my dad just off to the side looking on proudly, very tall and thin, before his stoop began. Before the sadness started.

Susan popped her head round the door.

‘Fancy a cuppa, lovie?’

‘I’d rather have a whisky,’ I joked.

‘Vera’s got some sherry in her cupboard, I think.’ Susan did a double-take. ‘Ooh, you’ve had all your hair cut off. I didn’t notice with that beret on before. Very nice. You look a bit like Twiggy used to. All eyes.’ She wiped her red nose on a cotton handkerchief. ‘Only she was blonde, of course.’

‘Thank you.’ I rubbed my bare neck self-consciously. ‘I’m still not used to it. I just thought it was time for a change.’

‘A change is as good as a rest, that’s what they say.’ Susan nodded her approval. ‘I’ll get you that tea.’

While I waited, I had a hunt for the sherry.

Gar woke just before I left. ‘Did you have some porridge?’ she asked politely, and I knew she wasn’t sure who I was today, her blue eyes watery and confused – but she let me keep holding her hand, which was something. I stroked it gently and waffled on about this and that.

‘I’ll fetch that porridge, but don’t let it burn,’ my grandmother mumbled, and then nodded off again. I gave her a long hug, feeling her frame so frail beneath my arms, and headed back to Dad’s.

There was a half-hour wait at the cab office so I attempted a bus, but they were rare at the best of times and it was late on Sunday, so in the end I decided to walk across Blackheath. The physio had said I needed to keep moving as much as possible – but God, I was deathly slow at the moment.