One of the nicer moments I had with my mum before her recent lapse into severe anxious depression happened in the summer of 2025.

We were at Manchester Airport’s Runway Park, one of my son’s favourite places. There is a real retired British Airways Concorde in a hangar there, and he got to see up close the mighty point and the smooth, seamless majesticity (is that a word?) of it.

My mum was only just starting the slippery descent into depression and I was missing all the signs. I felt the foreboding feeling radiating from her and cloaking me in its clammy presence, but I ignored it, I shook it off, I tried to point things out to her that would please her.

There was a moment where my two children were running wild in a field after we had finished our picnic lunch, and my mum and I sat watching them. We watched my boy reach the far end of the field, and I said to my mum, “watch, watch him now. He is going to stick his arm out in front of him like a point and run as fast as he can, just like a Concorde.”

He did do that. Zooming towards us, pointing, with his little sister rolling her arm like a windmill as she ran because she was still in the ‘helicopter’ mode that her brother had previously been in before the Concorde took its place in the ‘current obsession’ part of his mind.

My mum laughed.

Oh she laughed aloud. I hadn’t heard her laugh loudly like that for weeks. I didn’t realise this until now, nearly a year later, watching her suffer in some deep dark place in her mind.

When he reached us she put her arms around the little Concorde and said how she loved him.

That, I think, was the last nice moment we had together.

Before her descent into deep deep depression.

Take care of your mums, folks. Life is a dreary and drab place when they are not there.