I started off life as just a person. Then I became a wife. Then a divorcee. After that, I found I was a mother… then a grandmother. And now, finally, I am a mother-in-law as well.

Yes, you may think it’s a funny way round to do things, but there you go, and it’s extremely nice at last to be able to feel completely justified in saying things like ‘Have you thought of putting them to bed at 6.30?’, as well as ‘Well, I know it’s not my place to interfere…’ and all the other remarks that justify a daughter-in-law in taking an axe to your head. I remember once when my then mother-in-law kindly washed out my tea towels and draped them to dry over the backs of my kitchen chairs – I had to be forcibly restrained from murdering her, so subversively critical did I find the kindly gesture.

Anyway, you can’t be a mother-in-law without a wedding, and this one – during which we all played ‘Here Comes the Bride’ on kazoos – was possibly the nicest and most moving I have ever been to. Not surprising, really, since it involved my only son and his tip-top partner. But I have to say that, on the whole, I now far prefer funerals to formal weddings.

Why? I always think of people on these occasions as like a group of marbles on the floor. Have a wedding, and dozens more marbles are introduced and everyone gets pushed further and further out; have a funeral and, when one marble is removed from the gathering, the others all move in to close the gap. Funerals are full of compassion, forgiveness, comfort and kindness. Weddings are often places of fear and irritation, as strange people with sometimes opposing views confront each other.

Then there are the feuds and rows – the groom’s father’s new wife is barred from the ceremony, or some such nonsense. Why don’t people stay friends with their exes? Okay, you can feel enraged by them at first, but it seems such a waste to chuck all that love and fun that you must have experienced at some point down the drain. It’s like throwing away a chicken carcass without making it into soup. Or digging and manuring an entire garden and then, just because of some stupid misunderstanding, refusing to plant anything in it.

Perhaps this make-do-and-mend attitude to relationships is something to do with my being a war-time baby? Or perhaps it’s just because I’m half Scottish and am too mean to part with anything, even exes.

Last month I went to Ireland to attend a memorial for Michael Collins. After, a friend and I went off and climbed an extremely steep hill, me gasping post-operatively and he egging me on to the top because of the ‘wonderful views’. It was only when I actually got up there, totally exhausted, that I remembered what I remember so often at the top of a hill, and then forget: all views look very much the same. Loads of sky, a few lakes, mountains, tiny cars like ants and people pointing to far-away and saying ‘That’s where we drove from and that’s where we’re staying…’ And you can’t see a thing.

i’ve just been asked to speak on an Oldie Cruise next year. While trying to find out who my fellow speakers were, I was reminded of a story told me a while ago by a young man who’d been asked on a press trip. Everyone he knew who was going was twice his age, but he hopefully enquired of the one unknown female on the list. ‘Oh, you’ll love her,’ said the PR. ‘She’s absolutely terrific. Such fun.’ My friend’s hopes rose. ‘And,’ she added, ‘she’s really spry.’
In the end, he made Other Plans.