I have just been listening to one of the playlists I made on my ipod. It's called Death. I understand most people would view this as very morbid. I think it more melancholy. They're not anguished and throbbing with pain; they're not looking at everything from a lets-play-the-glad-game perspective - they're just melancholy. I just have to be in a thoughtful mood, maybe at a time when I'm slighty missing Mum. They all remind me of her or of my mood or of something about her death that stood out.

This is the list:
Forever Young, by Youth Group
The Scientist, by Coldplay
I Hope I Never, by Split Enz
Dimming of the Day, by The Corrs
One Step Closer, by U2
Anniversary Song, by Eva Cassidy
Running to Standstill, by U2
One For My Baby, by Robbie Williams
Wild Horses, by Natasha Bedingfield

Maybe if you know some of those you'll get a feeling what I mean when I say it's melancholy and not morbid.

I was listening to one in particular, the one called Dimming of the Day. The line that stands out to me the most in this one... 'I need you at the dimming of the day'. It's mainly the mood of the song that got this song its place on the playlist but that line always makes me miss Mum. I suppose it's one of my favourite recurrent memories - at our old house on Cashmere Rd, in winter, around 5 o'clock, or 5:30, just as it's getting darker and the streetlights are coming on and the sunset is disappearing, but the curtains are still open in the kitchen, which is like this glowing lit-up warm haven. Something's cooking in the oven and you can smell it all through that part of the house. Mum is sitting in the lounge next door on her green fake La-Z-Boy, leg rest up, reading glasses on, flicking through a Georgette Heyer book, wearing a navy cardigan and trackpants. Everything's warm and I'm wearing my school uniform still (I've just got home after walking down the street from the bus stop) and perhaps I'm lying on the couch by the window, my favourite place, looking up at the beech tree and the patterns its leaves make. I might be telling her about my day at school, or we might not be talking at all. I might be talking and talking and she'll listen patiently for a while before telling me politely but firmly that she wants to read her book now. Then the buzzer goes and she gets the casserole out of the oven and starts dishing it out and after the meal I'll say thank you and she'll say it's so nice that I say thank you for meals, it makes it so much better cooking for me. Then we'll read the Bible in the lounge and pray and I'll try to get out of doing the dishes. We might be allowed three bumps of chocolate each after we do the dishes.

I'm not even at home much anymore around this time of night. But we're not at Cashmere Road and Mum's not here and it's like there's this huge hole in the early evening. The dimming of the day.