I ended Kaleidoscope at the very beginning, at the place the story began, with a party at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. A rather grand old place to launch my quiet little book, but the only choice I could have made, if you know the story.  Peeling back time and layers of memory, somehow Caroline knew where she was, and why.  She sparkled. The party felt like a celebration of my mother’s life, and an expression of all the love and connection I had seen when I first stuck those photographs up on my blank wall. 

Months later, Aunty P is gone, and the contorting rooms of my mother’s house grow ever more uncanny; there are strangers in the mirrors and crowds behind the walls.  Lightbulbs flicker as we sing the favourite old songs. Hello Pat, we say. Flash batteries drain fast in the attic cold. Box moths have destroyed the garden, though the tree that grows in my father’s ashes remains intact. 

Usually, my mother knows me by my voice and by my camera, but that is not a given any more.  (“Are your parents still alive?”) I take fewer pictures - if I have a spare hand, it needs to be holding hers, not operating a camera. Mostly, we just sing. She knows all the words, can name a tune from the opening chord. There is little interest in anything else. The world is small now, but music keeps the walls from coming in.

This is an ongoing collection of my scraps of images; unresolved - but how can it be otherwise?