Testament

The Dandelion Clock is a testament to my mother.

The Dandelion's puffball can tell you the time, but it is a fickle instrument. Time is dependent on how hard you puff and how quickly the seedlings fly away. The one thing that is constant, is that in the end, all the seedlings are gone. Dents de lion and pissenlit - it's all the same in dementia.

Born on the South Wales/ English border to a mother who died only a few hours later, Mum has lived her life, not especially happily, but with dogged determination. Devoted to my father who walked out when I was 15, my mother lived off Marmite and Ryvita and brought up my brother, me and our dog. Now in her 80s and suffering from dementia, her prodigious memory, that has the unfortunate ability to recall the slightest slight, is slipping away.

We four, two rats and a cat, are coping pretty well and life is still not without joy. We are blessed with the good-nature and love of two small boys who have two slightly wonky grandmothers, a loving but irascible father and me, their globe-trotting mother who knew very early on that Jesus wanted her for a Sunbeam.