Anyone suffering Downton Abbey withdrawal symptoms will find an instant tonic.

When you're young your mother shields you from the world because she thinks you're too young to understand, and when she's old you shield her because she's too old to understand - or to have any more understanding inflicted upon her. The curve of life goes: want to know, know, don't want to know.

You learned that if you're tired enough, you can sleep sitting up. That the unendurable is perfectly endurable if you just take it a minute at a time, and when the alternative is no more minutes ever.

Death itself is too big to take in, she already sees that; the loss comes at you instead in an infinite number of small installments that can never be paid off.

I forget the derivation of Boxing Day, but the feeling of wanting to invite your loved ones outside one at a time and punch them in the face, does that come into it somewhere?

Children are the proof we've been here . . . they're where we go to when we die. They're the best thing and the most impossible thing, but there's nothing else . . . Life is a riddle and they are the answer. If there's any answer, it has to be them.

In death, we are not defined by what we did or who we were but by what we meant to others. How well we loved and were loved in return.