One of the fondest memories I have of my mother still remains one of her most endearing quirks – her habit of talking out loud to herself.

She’s been doing it for as long as I remember and I’ve grown up listening to her go on from the kitchen or bedroom or wherever she happens to be - a babbling brook, a pleasant background sound in the house. Whether it’s appreciating the taste of a new dish or grumbling about the amount of work she had to do that day, in good times or bad, she would go on. In the early days, when I asked her who she was talking to, she would flush up and say, “Well to the cats of course, they understand me perfectly … look at the way they are looking at me.” And the cats, as if amused by my mother’s prattle, would curl up in a corner and slant a lazy ear in her direction or sit near her feet and look up with fervent reverence as if following every syllable of a stirring sermon (which attitude they took depended very closely on how near it was to dinnertime). But later she even gave up the pretence of the cat audience.

She didn’t do this much when there were visitors in the house or guests staying over. This makes me think the habit grew out of the longing to hear a human voice during the long stretches of loneliness she had as a stay-at-home housewife while her family were off at work or school for a large part of the day.