People Die, But Money Never Does.

Grief-stricken. Stricken Is Right; It Is As Though You Had Been Felled. Knocked To The Ground; Pitched Out Of Life And Into Something Else.

I Have Long Been Interested In Landscape History, And When Younger And More Robust I Used To Do Much Tramping Of The English Landscape In Search Of Ancient Field Systems, Drove Roads, Indications Of Prehistoric Settlement. Towns And Cities, Too, Which Always Retain The Ghost Of Their Earlier Incarnations Beneath Today's Concrete And Glass.

I Have Had To Empty Two Family Homes During The Last Few Years - First, The House That Had Been My Grandmothers Since 1923, And Then My Own Country Home, Which We Had Lived In For Over Twenty Years.

The Days Of Our Lives Vanish Utterly, More Insubstantial Than If They Had Been Invented. Fiction Can Seem More Enduring Than Reality.

There's A Preoccupation With Memory And The Operation Of Memory And A Rather Rapacious Interest In History.