I made myself an Indian meal tonight. Okay, so I cheated a little and used a jar of butter chicken sauce! But! I did make chapattis, all by myself. It is so long since I have had chapattis, as Mum used to make them whenever she cooked us Indian food (she lived in India for about seven years), and I love them so much. I've only made them once before, so eating my chapattis with my (and Pataks') butter chicken was a proud and happy moment. (If you know me at all intimately, you will know that good food is one of the supreme pleasures of my life!) But as well as being proud and happy, there was something slightly bittersweet about it too. It wasn't so much that they weren't made by Mum or that Mum can no longer cook me Indian food, it was more that I couldn't go and show them to Mum and have her tell me how well I'd done.

I just miss her so much!!!! This weekend is especially bad because Dad has just left to go overseas for a month and I didn't realise how much I've been depending on Dad this year, and without both Mum and Dad, I'm just finding it really, really, really hard. I would never have thought that grief would be such an up-and-down reading. I would have expected a nice smooth decline on the charts, but at times in the last few weeks I've found it just as hard as I did back when we first lost her.

I never realised that I would find it so hard to express this, either. Right now I'm feeling stink, so I can go and spill my guts to the spirit of the internet. But 99% of the time, when I'm with the people who could help me or who I could talk to, I'm absolutely fine and there's nothing to talk about. I have this dream of just collapsing on people's shoulders in tears but when I am with most people I am the most stolid, unemotional, prosaic person around - I literally don't want to talk about it then. I also find it hard to tell people that my mother's dead. There are people I know really or slightly well, through Music, or university, or whatever, who have no idea what's happened over the last year. I mean, how exactly are you supposed to share that? Just plopping it into a conversation definitely doesn't make for cheerful banter. You also feel like you're fishing for attention, and in a way, you are.