Ammamma’s dementia has progressed. That’s all the doctors tell us after her latest admission. Even though she fell from standing and hit her head, medically she’s fine, no water infections, no broken bones, no bleeds. Psychologically however, she has never been worse. She’s been no more than ten feet from me for the majority of my life, but in all those twenty years, I have never heard her talk so much about her old life in Jaffna, even though she hasn’t even seen Sri Lanka in decades.

A few times a year, a wild bird is blown thousands of miles from its native land. Nobody can really say how this might happen – it might have been caught in a storm, it might even hitched a ride on a passing ship – but what Gaia was absolutely certain about was that every time this happened, a previously invisible group of British birders would leap out of the undergrowth, grab their extremely expensive gear and cycle/drive/charter a plane down to try and catch a glimpse of the vagrant in question.