Linden Kemkaran

Last week, the tiny Caribbean island of Tobago was left reeling after a British tourist staying there was attacked by a shark. Sixty-four-year-old Peter Smith from Hertfordshire was left with serious injuries to his left arm and leg, puncture wounds to his abdomen and injuries to his right hand after the attack. He is currently being treated at the island’s Scarborough General Hospital, where he is in a stable condition. The shark which bit him, believed to be a ten-foot long bull shark, has not yet been spotted or caught. Hotel staff, tour guides and boat owners will now be asking themselves if they could have done anything more to help prevent this terrible incident. The beach where the tragedy struck is in Courland Bay on the south-western edge of the island.

I was nearly 40 when I discovered that I had an older brother. My lifelong family position as the eldest of four evaporated in a flash one Sunday afternoon in 2008 when my mother called us all together at her house, saying she had something she needed to tell us. She opened a box file and with trembling fingers pulled out a black and white photo of a baby. It turned out that my mum, who died suddenly and unexpectedly of Covid in February of this year, had been one of a number of unmarried women — there could be as many as 250,000 — forced to give up their babies for adoption between the 1950s and 1970s.

Last week, my mum died. In just a few short minutes, she went from being a living, breathing human, to a mere number on the list of daily Covid stats. She’d been on a ventilator in ITU for three weeks, unconscious and fighting for her life. But then, on Thursday, her organs failed, and the machines were switched off. Her name was Mary and she was 74. My overriding feeling is one of immense grief, obviously. No matter how old you are, nothing ever prepares you for losing your mum. But I also feel sadness that she had not been able to properly live her life for the past nine months, and then she died anyway. She got the call up for her vaccination just last week. It’s the kind of irony that would once have made us both laugh out loud.

Just how hard is it to get through Mothering Sunday when you don't feel unconditional love and gratitude towards your own mother? Every year I am reminded of a friend who finds it one of the most difficult days of the year. My friend, let's call her B, breaks out in a cold sweat when the Mother's Day cards start filling the display stands in the shops. 'I hate it', she told me, 'the hypocrisy, the guilt trip, all of it. I literally feel huge anxiety when I have to choose a card to send.' B's difficult relationship with her mother started when she had children of her own. Until then she'd spent a lifetime being a parent to her own mother, a complex woman who'd endured a terrible childhood and an abusive marriage.

Anthony Ekundayo Lennon, the white director who has identified as black, is on the receiving end of a backlash from black and ethnic minority actors. They are aggrieved that Lennon has taken a black person’s place on an Arts Council England-funded programme. The Independent’s Paula Akpan lambasted Lennon, “you don’t get to pick and discard which signifiers of blackness you’re going to wear. Choosing when to don a cape of blackness is a luxury that black people do not have”. Yet substitute the word ‘black’ for ‘woman’, and you suddenly see why it was possible that Lennon felt he could simply become whatever it was he felt inside.

Looking around at my immediate group of female friends I notice a marked difference between the seven or so of us who are married with kids, and the three who have left their husbands and are going it alone. Guess which group appears to be more content? Yes, it’s the divorcees. I have been a long term, close up observer of the lives that my newly single friends carve out for themselves and I have to say, I’m envious. The Sunday Times finds that 53 per cent of women report that they are “much happier” post-divorce. This does not surprise me.

I was lucky (or unlucky, depending on your sensibilities) to be in a prime spot for Saturday’s royal wedding. Wearing my BBC producer hat, I worked on the huge outside broadcast on the Long Walk in Windsor. Thursday and Friday was all bunting, dogs sporting union jack collars and the Household Cavalry rehearsing. I interviewed people who’d come to camp out, weaving my way through the increasingly packed streets, observing, gathering material and soaking up the atmosphere. It seemed very much like any other big ceremonial occasion. But on Saturday, something changed. Colour. People of colour to be precise, at first just one or two, but as the clock ticked towards midday, everywhere I turned in the area behind the BBC and ITV purpose-built studios, I saw black and brown faces.