Welcome to the Premium Health Service Online 24 hour advice centre.  Age? 60. Gender? Female. Symptoms? Sadness. How long have you been experiencing symptoms? A while now. Please describe your symptoms in as much detail as you can to enable one of our team to advise you.

It feels like I’m being squeezed agonisingly from both sides but in the middle, I have no feeling at all. My beautiful daughter, she has presence and elegance. I wonder when I was her age, was there anyone who thought that of me? Did I own the territory like she does?  Or did I fail to find a foothold there too? And am I awake or sleeping at night when I sense the years slipping away again like a slow mud slide with nowhere to grip. My daughter is a fine mother, poised, twinkling with laughter, a whirlwind of business trips and play dates. My own mother, the grandmother of my children, still the grandmother figure, with the sweet white curls. I’m caught in a place between, somewhere I cannot recognise the co-ordinates of, growing older, certainly, not certain what I’m aging into, slipping past those moments I imagined I’d staked a claim to in childbirth, like a window pane on an oiled runner, gliding vacantly past more solid fixtures, a watery reflection captured in the transparency of the glass and powerless to stop.

The pressure you are feeling in your sides and the sensation of sadness may be symptoms of heart attack. Please click here to speak to one of our nurses who will assess your situation urgently.

Oh, I see what you mean, but don’t worry. I’ve had a few glasses of sherry and it’s somewhere between midnight and dawn. That’s all, I’m sure. I love my daughter absolutely, am fiercely proud of her. I don’t have strong feelings for my mother though, and that makes me feel guilty. Maybe when you’re my age, you can still play back scenes with your mother, but the feelings have gone to greyscale. Don’t mind me. It’s lashing with rain outside, I hope you can go home to your family soon. It’s being thrown against the windows, and the slates on the roof are being buffeted and lifted and shifted by the wind raging up the valley. Have you noticed how this year the trees have groaned at the ferocity of the attacks as though their limbs are racked with arthritic pain? I think it’s been worse, it unnerves me. I don’t sleep so well these nights. It brings back the unease of hearing the depths of the Atlantic slamming like an articulated dump truck into the vertical rock of an island, breathed in lull expanding to a roar, the inevitability of the sideways shove of the ocean  bulk, like your body winded as you hit the ground and wild horse hooves scatter. We give the storms names now, angry Abigail, and wait for them to lash out at us, huddling in. When I was young, we didn’t know they were coming.

It’s quieter now, I’ll try to sleep again. Thank you for being out there. I hope you get home safely tonight.