It’s a beautiful morning, the sun is shining and the North Sea actually looks appealing. I slept well in my lovely bed and venture downstairs to clear up the remains of last night. The boys appear one by one and I am determined to get us all in the sea for a swim. Fortunately it’s not the battle I anticipated as everyone is up for it, and Mum joins us for the short walk across scrubland to the promenade.

We find a spot next to a groyne where Mum can perch while we brace ourselves for cold water therapy. It’s funny, nobody called it cold water swimming when I was a child, jumping the waves on Filey Bay every year on our annual family holiday. It was just swimming. Now it has a new label and is supposedly trendy, but for me, it’s just what you do when you’re next to a body of water. You get in and make the most of it.

The beach is not sandy, a mixture of rocks, pebbles and thousands of broken shells. It’s tough going if you don’t have beach shoes, and the boys adopt a funny limping raised knee kind of walk, to reach the water’s edge. I’m not one to muck about, I’m swimming as soon as it is deep enough. Oli and Toby join me, but Alex remains upright, the sea water now lapping at his shoulders. I say he is doing the right thing, acclimatising slowly. He disagrees and says what he is actually doing is dying. It’s great – I love that my boys have my adventurous streak and will usually do things they don’t necessarily want to. Our family motto on holiday has, for a long time, been “get involved”.

As it turns out, Alex wasn’t dying and soon we’re back on the beach instantly warmer wrapped up in our towels and feeling amazing. Mum has enjoyed watching us from a distance. She’s still a bit subdued following Monday night, although I expect her to pick up a bit when we venture next door to the pub for lunch. We wander back to the house to shower and get ready for lunch.

Mum doesn’t eat much, and either eats or drinks, never both. She also usually needs a day to recover from a trip to the pub, so it was no surprise that all she wanted to drink yesterday was a cup of tea. I’m fully expecting her to be back on form and start giggling when handed the menu at lunch. Giggling is usually her way of suggesting she as set her sights on something other than food. So I’m slightly taken aback when we sit down to lunch outside the Zetland Arms and she proclaims she’d like to eat lunch. No, she confirms, she doesn’t want a drink, but what is there on the menu that she can have? Mum struggles sometimes with swallowing and I secretly wonder if there is another cancer present which we don’t know about, but Mum is vague when pressed about test results. She’d had breast cancer for 5 years before she told me, and definitely wasn’t going to have the recommended mastectomy until she changed her mind at the eleventh hour and agreed to the operation. Then followed bowel cancer – she actually delayed her operation as it clashed with a proposed trip to see me in Suffolk (see The Last Hurrah), travelling back on the Monday and having the operation on the Tuesday.

Who knows what her recent cat scans and MRI’s have revealed that she isn’t about to share with us.

Anyway, I choose pie and chips for her, and the rest of us enjoy a beer with our meal. It’s not a heavy session, we’re all back at the house chilling out in the sunshine by 3pm and I ask Mum is she is going to join us at Wetherspoons in the evening.

No, she says, shaking her head, she doesn’t want to go to the pub. I put this down to the few bites of lunch she had, no doubt still settling in her tummy. As there are now just four of us and no Mum to look after, I think that it might be quite nice not to drive, but have a beer or two instead. I don’t tend to drink when out with Mum as one of us has to be responsible. So I ring a local firm and book a taxi for myself and the boys. As the quiz starts at 7.30pm and the boys want some food first, I book it for 6.50pm.

We’re just about ready to leave when I realise I haven’t got Mum anything to eat. Would she like anything? Should I put the telly on so she can watch something? Will she be ok while we’re out?

Mum shrugs huffily and says she isn’t stopping in on her own.

Wait, what? I say? I’m confused. Apparently, she now feels better than she did earlier – which roughly translates as 91 year old FOMO – and she’ll probably go round the pub on her own. It’s an unmade road, with large potholes and no street lighting. I wouldn’t let Mum walk round there on her own during the day let alone at night (although to be fair, she lives on a very similar road up in Bradford).

If she is now feeling like she could go to the pub then why didn’t she say and she could have come with us to Spoons, I ask. She shrugs again, and says ok, she’ll come in the taxi with us. I explain that it’s not as simple as that, the taxi won’t take 5 passengers, but never mind, I’ll just drive. It’s now too late to cancel the taxi, so the boys go on ahead and have left by the time I get Mum outside heading towards my Mini. It’s at precisely this point that Mum pauses, turns and looks in the direction of the pub next door and says that she thinks she’ll just have one there instead.

This is Mum at her most exasperating. My blood pressure is rising, but I manage to keep cool and tell her to get in the car. No, I say, I can’t leave her and join the boys in the taxi because they have already left. I now have to drive whether she comes with me or not. We have a totally unneccesary discussion about the colour of the taxi (dark blue) and that fact that she never saw it for a minute and had no idea the boys had already left, but finally she relents and gets in the car with a sigh.

On arriving at Wetherspoons, Ramsgate, it is humungous. It’s housed in the Victoria Pavillion right on the beach, and the original signage still adorns the front of the building. Mum is sceptical. Is this the right place? On venturing inside, I say yes, this is undoubtedly a Wetherspoons. I spot both a sign and a menu which confirm it. Mum remains unconvinced. She approaches a waiter, carrying several plates. Stopping him in his tracks, she asks him if this is WETHERSPOONS. Yes, he says, it is.

And again, for most people this would be sufficient. But Mum has more to say on the subject. Why doesn’t it say Wetherspoons outside? Why does it say (she turns to me and asks me what it said) Royal Victoria something or other? The waiter very politely and patiently explains that it the name of the building, it’s grade II listed and there is indeed a Wetherspoons sign on the other side. The poor man is about to lose his grip on the numerous empty plates (and I imagine his sanity) so I thank him and shuffle Mum along.

We find the boys and settle down. Mum would like a drink, and has fortunately remembered the reason why we first suggested Wetherspoons – the £10 gift card sent to her on her birthday. She goes to the bar with Toby and purchases her first pint with plastic. Of course, she is only going to have the one, she tells us when she returns. Nobody believes her for a minute, but we all nod approvingly. We record a little video to Trace, my lovely friend who sent her the gift card, thanking her and cheers’ing the pint and slowly, Mum regains her drinking pants.

After a bit of food it’s time for the quiz. We all love a quiz, apart from Mum, it transpires. She feels left out, and (I think) much preferred the beginning of the evening when all four of us were chatting to her. Our attention is elsewhere, concentrating on each question, pondering the answers. We’re only a couple of questions in and she begins to complain loudly that she can’t hear. This continues all the way through the quiz, all 6 rounds of it, her complaining loudly after each and every question.

Frankly it’s tedious and we all want her to shut up. By that I mean the whole of Wetherspoons, not just us. Alex, who is wonderfully patient, moves his chair to sit closely next to her so he can relay each question to her as it is read out. I understand that she wants to feel a part of things but can’t help feeling that this is just attention seeking toddler-like behaviour. Even with the questions relayed slowly to her, she maintains a look of exhausted bewilderment. She keeps her brain active with the puzzle page from “her paper” (The Mail on Saturday), and were this sudoku, she’d smash it. As it is, she can’t think which King of England was reputed to have burnt the cakes.

Unsurprisingly, we lose the quiz but we are ok with that. We all drink up and prepare to leave. All apart from Mum, who disappears to the bar (under the guise of needing the loo) and returns with a new pint, her fifth. She is triumphant whilst simultaneously trying to appear nonchalant. She is fooling nobody.

Finally, we get her to drink up and steer her outside, into the mini and I drive us back home. It’s time for Love Island on catch up, which I enjoy watching with the boys. We can’t hear the telly, because Mum is wandering around, muttering that she wants another drink. We go through the usual circus, and I tell her that she’s had plenty. I worry about the hard tiled floor, the fact that the downstairs loo outside her downstairs bedroom isn’t ensuite and in fact doesn’t have a loo seat (the previous guests broke it and a replacement has had to be ordered from Germany). I picture her wedged in the toilet bowl, unable to pull herself out after a 3am wee and say no, she most certainly is not having another drink.

There follows a very unpleasant exchange and I end up telling her to go to bed the way you would dismiss a wasp bothering you at a hot August BBQ.

We start to rewatch Love Island and I fall promptly asleep.

Day 3 over