Sometimes I think that God is very far away. I recall that the Protestant martyr Anne Askew said, quoting Christ, that He saw every sparrow fall. I don’t believe her. I am a Catholic who rarely attends Mass, but I am praying with a desperate urgency in the hope that some of my burdens will be relieved, if only in my mind. He did say‚ after all, “thou shalt not be overcome”, but at the moment my troubles come not in big battalions but in nuclear strikes. My mother, who is 96, fades. She has dementia and is refusing medical treatment. She is skin and bone. I lost my father a long time ago, and though my mother has been lost already, I shall have to mourn her twice. Becoming an orphan frightens me. Whatever our biological age, none of us can ever be a grown-up person, clothed in the sack and ash of wisdom alone, free of all terrors, guilt and loneliness. Even Voltaire lived with that child inside him; fearful and angry. That child is very much inside me and I will carry her to my grave.