I said good bye to my family home last week. I always thought I’d meet the people who bought the house, but it just didn’t happen. Time passed and the decision went unmade. Would they want to meet us? Become part of our story? And then it was simply too late to ask.

And so we left the bottle of wine and the card and our sad hearts on the mantelpiece and closed the door for the last time.

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A gay couple, that’s all we know.

We didn’t meet them, but that didn’t stop us inventing a really flamboyant back story.  One that would have delighted my mother.  Exquisite taste, a passion for fine wine, classical music and art, prone to flounging about in velvet dressing gowns holding enamel cigarette holders and puff puffing away as they tittle and tattle about the awkward cadences of Mussorgsky.

I can see them now, lounging about in the piano room, gesticulating wildly as they carelessly spill gin and tonic onto the authentic persian rug.  Happy, amused, carefree.

Of course they could be Dale Winton’s brash younger cousins for all I know.

But I like to believe all these things, because they comfort me.

Except for the goings on in the bedroom. My mum enjoyed the company of homosexuals but I know she didn’t like to think too much about the bum sex.

I hope she’s covering her eyes.