Her grasping materialism aside, I admired some thing about her, primarily her sense of style, her panache. I did try time and again to be comfortable in her presence, to have her accept me, if I can put it that way, but nothing seemed to work. Perhaps it was my pretense at intellectualism that put her off, my knowledgeability of things that were of no interest whatever to her, if the topics I would broach went beyond fashion.

It used to irk me beyond words when she seemed to treat me as though I were invisible; I would speak to her, ask her a question and there would be no response whatever. It was indeed as though I was not present; at least for her. Her contempt for me was echoed in her contempt for her brother, my husband. We were obviously, she and I, not meant to be confidantes, let alone friends.

She was, in character and personality, quite like her father. And like him, she died of the effects of smoking, alcohol (though she was not an alcoholic) and garbage food. Garbage, used dismissively, is a word my husband, when we were young, used a lot, and that word drove her crazy. Heaven knows why, since her own vocabulary was limited. I assume it was because while she was confident in the world of popular culture, we were comfortable in the world of creative thought.

Strangely enough, we once had a discussion/argument over family ties. She insisted that 'blood is stronger than water', while we held that familial ties can be strong but there are other filaments of binding that must be present before family members value one another; shared values, perceptions and habits. We became estranged with time and no longer saw one another, much less talked to each other.

With that distance came, needless to say, a total blank about the others' trajectory through life, aided by a geographical distance to add to the emotional one. The family that was bound together by the irresistible bonds of blood, we have now learned, no longer is; those bonds were irretrievably broken by dissonances of personality, ideology, religion and quite simply, interference.

When she had interfered once too often in a matter relating to one of her grandchildren where her son threatened to cut off contact with the children if she persisted, he did just that. And now he lives, as comfortably as one can, with the reality of that estrangement, made permanent by the fact his mother died prematurely of a heart attack three weeks after contact ceased.

Does that signify a kind of malicious triumph?