Shine on handwritten script design

The kettle has been on the hob since Tuesday because I keep forgetting it is there, and the lamp in the back room has gone yellow with the smoke from the chip shop across the road. Your father would have had something to say about both. He always did about the lamp. I have not been able to bring myself to replace it, so I sit under it with the letters you left in the drawer, the ones addressed to the lighthouse keeper's widow who never answered, and I read them out loud to the cat until she gets up and walks off.

The man from the council came round about the sea wall. He stood in the rain on the step with his clipboard and told me the wall would hold another ten years if nobody leaned on it. I told him I had been leaning on it since 1968 and it had not complained once. He wrote something down and did not smile, which I took as a kindness, because I knew he was trying not to laugh.

I found your pink pen in the bottom of the bread bin yesterday. The cap was chewed. I wrote the thing you always wrote on the back of my hand before the big days, the thing I used to pretend I found silly. I did it in the mirror with my glasses on, slow and wobbly, so it would look like you had done it.

Shine on, love. I did, in the end. Mostly because you asked me to, and the lamp is still yellow, and the gulls are still shouting over the harbour like they have an appointment.

Yours, with the kettle on, Mum