My mother's birthday, continued

Listening to the witty play Kafka's Dick by Alan Bennett on the iPod to keep myself awake, I sat in the bus that made its way via Bristol and Newport to Cardiff. Faith and Mel met me at the station. They drove me and the presents and a birthday cake to Mum's house, full of birthday cards and flowers. Her birthday had been celebrated in Wells too, at the weekend, at the 25th anniversary of the Somerset Chamber Choir whose inception she and my father had inspired.

A combination of no sleep and a surfeit of caffeine made me too groggy to function as a normal human being until the evening when I perked up over a wonderful meal upstairs at the Gwaelod y Garth pub.

The "barbecue summer" predicted by the Met Office had been a wash out, said the newscasters on the BBC next day, when it rained and rained. The Welsh National Eistedfodd was going to take place in fields of mud, so "bring your wellies," they said.

My mother and I played duets by Mozart that day,Werke für Klavier zu vier Händen, learning K123, which he'd composed at the age of 16, K497 and K521. In the evening we watched a dramatisation of the story of penicillin—Breaking the Mould—about the Nobel prize-winner Prof. Howard Florey, who was Australian. Sir Alexander Fleming took the credit for the miracle of penicillin, which was not altogether fair, it seems. In this version of the story, Florey, played by Dennis Lawson) and his colleagues Normal Heatley and Ernst Chain were the heroes. Our own Alexander (2-and-a-half) rang to "show" his great-grandma the card he'd made her—over the phone.

On Thursday the weather cleared up and Faith and I took Mum along the coast of the Vale of Glamorgan to a pretty little place called Llantwit Major and its rocky beach.