Yesterday there was a wild west wind and the leaves streamed out of the trees like spectators out of a big game. Now the trees are nearly bare.

Last night we were told Nelson Mandela was dead.

I overheard Maureen talking  with Heather Atterbury about him earlier today.

“There was a female quality about Mandela”, Heather said, “the way he set out to understand and win over his captors, learning Afrikaans, learning about rugby,  about their families and their children,  soft but insistent, no vanity, no need for them to recognise who he was or enter his world…”

“And he loved clothes, he really knew how to dress…Those shirts!”, said Maureen, with a chuckle. “ And he loved gardening, too. Winnie was the angry one. She wanted revenge…”

Maureen was showing her work to Heather.  Maureen is thinking about giving up clerking at the court and just switching over to emergency cover.

Heather has created an image of a protea with Mandela’s face inside it and the dates of his birth and death in a ring around it and posted it on Facebook.

I remember sitting with Mikey and watching Mandela leaving prison in 1990 and looking at the faces of the guards and wondering what they were thinking.

Henry McCulloch said: “He was a great man, but I am not sure it’s a viable country.”