Rain In The City & Ronnie O'Sullivan

The Big Apple is more like The Big Puddle. Rain is lashing down. The city is humid and full of the drip of umbrellas.

On the flight over, I read through Alan Bennett's "Candlewick Way of Death", a detached but not so detached account of his mother's slow slide into dementia and death. Evidently AB's mother was in a kindly nursing home in Weston-on-Sea, but how true the slow starvation by default; the ill-matched hand-on clothes and the stifling still air. And how sad the bodies that are turned away from the curl of the sea - the bodies, who once had their own names (Lilian, Mr Bennett, I took note.). Who once sat happily on every sands-by-the-sea, with the rug and the windbreak and the thermos flask and a round of sandwiches.

Mum is particularly taken with a badge of one of her Mother's Day cards that I sent her years ago. "World's Best Mum". It's fluffy and pink with a flashing light - and she wears it as proudly as she wore my grandmother's amethyst brooch.

A little known fact. H2 tells me that Mum has played in a snooker match against Ronnie O'Sullivan. Apparently Mum caught the bus to Sheffield and The Crucible. What is not clear, is whether her debut as a professional snooker player was before or after she went to tea with David Beckham at Manchester United. The SSBs are agog - not sure whether to believe Grandma or not.

Lovely meal last night with friends. We were evidently noisy though because guests at another table sent a stuffy little note saying that they were "trying to converse". I know it's annoying (and rude) when gales of laughter from another table keep sweeping the room - but it's such a luxury to be able to be off duty. (We might have been a convention of Tourette's sufferers. )

Not a single cab to be had so we rickshaw back in the deluge. My trousers are so wet, it looks like I am wearing sprayed on clothes.