HOMAGE TO CLEMENTINA

To London and back to see two of the children and potter around Highgate, hand in hand with enchanting little Omi. Then back to Belfast, to a forlorn and empty house and the ghost of our Clementina - a small, white-throated, black and amber shadow, glimpsed for a moment, then gone.

As always, it's books that help me through bad times: Penelope Fitzgerald's wonderful 'The Beginning of Spring', the quirky 'Lonely Life of a Peculiar Postman' by Canadian Denis Theriault (thank you, Kelly McCaughrain) and Deirdre Madden's 'Molly Fox's Birthday'. I'd only read one other novel of hers - 'Time Present and Time Past' - now I'm looking for all the rest.

Little Omi, not yet two, has a room full of books already, as do all his cousins - even 3 month-old baby Cian has a shelf. I can't bear to think of a childhood without books. I was lucky: my whole family wrote - father, mother, brother, sister - and we all read voraciously, and widely. Although I really don't think it matters what you read - I hate to hear anyone's taste in reading being mocked - so long as you have the habit, books will get you through a lot of life's disasters. And the one thing you can be certain of is that disasters will occur.

So. After a convivial evening with two good friends, in the middle of the night I sit up because I am suddenly coughing and can't breathe. This is a distressing, but not a disaster: I find my asthma inhalers, take a couple of puffs and put the kettle on for hot honey and lemon. Eventually I get back to sleep. In the morning I have an early doctor's appointment - routine but timely - so we drive down and Gloom goes in to say his wife has been through three airports in the last 10 days, none in an infected area, but she's suddenly coughing: should she come in or go home again? The receptionist sighs deeply and says she might as well come in. This is probably because 99.9 percent of all the patients currently waiting are hacking and wheezing, so one more won't make any difference.

Helping to edit

My doctor, to whom I am devoted (she is wonderfully phlegmatic: a combined case of Ebola and Leprosy might just give her cause to raise an eyebrow, but then again, possibly not) tells me I have a chest infection and sentences me to a week of antibiotics, steroids and rest. Fortunately I have, at the last count, the new Spring edition of Slightly Foxed and at least another 20-odd books, waiting to be read - including Simon Sebag Montefiore's 'Jerusalem', which is around 700 pages long. I'm reading that in stages, but every time I open it, I am swept away by this extraordinary biography of a city, and the beauty of the writing. And as soon as I've finished the medication, I'm going to finish off all the best wine in the house, just in case it turns out to be the coronavirus after all.

Listening to Mozart

Clementina's ashes were returned to us in a carved wooden box. We are now debating where to put the little casket: burying it in the garden doesn't seem right - she was far too strong a presence, a household goddess and my personal daemon, whose rightful place is here, somewhere inside the house, with us. I suspect a ghostly paw will eventually nudge us in the right direction. And she'll have another memorial, some day, because the morning after the night she died, I switched on my laptop to distract myself from the desolation that I felt, and there was a message from a writer friend concerning a Kickstart project needing backers - a proposed short film set in Belfast, about a love affair that begins with the Good Friday Agreement. I liked the premise, and thinking it would be the perfect way to honour Clementina's memory - she was, after all, a cat with artistic sensibilities: she enjoyed listening to Mozart and often helped edit my work by walking on the keyboard - I signed up.

I was surprised to get an immediate and grateful response, and when I wrote back to explain what had prompted my gesture, I was promised that when 'Another Day in '98' is made, the credits will include the name of Clementina. Our beautiful, adored, imperious cat may no longer gaze at us with her yellow eyes, or purr in my ear at the dead of night, but her name will be up there in lights. I'm pretty certain she would feel it was no more than her due.

FIDDLING WHILE THE PLANET BURNS (plus a note from Clementina)

Pay attention please. If you, or anyone known to you, rides a bicycle, I’m telling you now that I’m going to buy a large horn or hooter - something very noisy anyway - and the next sodding cyclist who doesn’t use a bell and nearly knocks me off my elderly feet as they zoom past will get blasted from behind. And if he or she whips round, skids and falls off, well too bad. It’s usually a he, mind you – and please don’t bother writing in to say that picking on men is a hate crime now: so should flattening pensioners be.

Anyway, I’ve heard enough this week about hurting feelings and giving offence. You can do this in so many ways now, it’s hard to keep up, but you might not realise that asking parents the sex of a baby can be tricky because in some circles it’s considered offensive to label children before they’ve made up their own minds what they are. I think I need a drink. It’s ok to criticise Middle-Aged Drinkers, by the way - not that I care: I’m not a middle-aged drinker, I’m an old one. And at the moment I’m sick, and extra grumpy because I’ve had to miss second son-in-law’s big match in Omagh, to which second daughter and first and second husbands have gone (together).

Books bought as Christmas presents which you might not get

Can you tell I’m reading Milkman? It’s extraordinary: hypnotic, forbidding, furious and funny. At times I can hardly bear to go on reading, but Anna Burns’s prose is like a current that drags you back down every time you come up for air. And this namelessness of the characters is very catching: maybe-boyfriend, second sister, first brother-in-law…I’ve calculated that Clementina is sixteenth-cat. It also makes a nice change from last week when I was reading ‘Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine’ and started sounding even more pedantic than usual.

Milkman is just one of the pile of books I’ve bought as Christmas presents for friends and family, not that they’re likely to get them. At least not until I’ve read them myself. But I’m full of other good ideas, which I’m happy to share. In my personal crusade to curb Christmas excess and save the planet, I’m trying (yet again) to set an example to my family by putting a strict limit on expenditure. It really doesn’t take much to produce a delightfully inexpensive stocking full of surprises carefully tailored to the needs of the recipient. (Eleanor Oliphant is popping up again…) Spendthrift-daughter, for instance, will be receiving a money-saving stocking: I’ve already contributed a darning kit and several old candle stubs, husband has come up with a toothpaste-squeezer, and second son-in-law has suggested a magnifying-glass so that she can read her bank statements properly. All to be tastefully wrapped in old newspaper.

Brown paper is another answer to Christmas wrapping – and a small step in the direction of trying to do whatever we can to use recyclable material. I think we all know in our hearts that we’re hurtling to destruction: this might be why we spend so much time these days worrying about perceived offences and trivial complaints. Why we turn up the volume on our headphones and rush from one mindless distraction to another, shopping, texting, tweeting, shutting out the news of wars and droughts and famines, of seas choked with plastic. Fiddling while the planet burns. So expect your Christmas book wrapped in brown paper, and maybe don’t expect to get it until June.

(A Note From Clementina 

You may be surprised to read this but anyone who has seen the pictures of me playing Scrabble will know I’m no ordinary cat. Anyway, I’d just like to point out that a) I have been referred to as ‘sixteenth cat’ – I mean, what happened to all the others?! I feel seriously insecure - and b) all this stuff about inexpensive Christmas presents: I just happen to have seen the list she’s made for Professor Gloom. Gin, perfume, more books, chocolates…It’s enough to make a cat laugh. )