My mother - a part of her life I didn't know existed.

I had the most unexpected conversation with my mother on Saturday – it is suddenly as if she is not the person I thought I knew – although not in a nasty way.

I suppose that because I’ve known her all my life, I tend to forget that I haven’t known her all her life – and that she might have done things of which I was unaware.

I must have had conversations with her so many times in the past, when we have discussed how far-travelled so many of the older generation of Manx people are, not just those who emigrated, but those you meet here, too. There was the elderly lady who had travelled across Canada by train in the early 1920s, or my great aunt who circumnavigated the globe four or five times after the age of 60.

Yet never has my mother mentioned travelling herself. When she went on holiday to Germany with my sister and brother-in-law 25 years ago she applied for her ‘first and only’ passport. She said so!

Then, today, when her arthritis and gout were making walking difficult, she was saying she really didn’t mind that she didn’t get far from home these days; the only thing she wishes she had done was go back to Kenya to see how it had changed.

( Kenya? Pardon? )

I still find it weird that she did that, and yet it had never cropped up before in conversation! I asked my sister on Sunday if she knew, and she said "Kenya? Pardon?"....