She found her visitor sitting by the window in the front room. Early twenties, obviously self-confident, sophisticated. Hair blonde and waist length, eyes bright blue, body slightly athletic, clothes designer. "My God but you do look beautiful," Gertie smiled.

The smile was returned from an almost mirror image of herself as she had been at that age, except for the trimmings, "Oh, I'm okay but I don't have a chance with the likes of you in the room."

"How did you find me?"

"You're kidding! I lifted the latest magazine," Jean laughed, "and there was you in your secret retreat on Skye, Christ, some secret. Are you all right now?"

"Just the shock of it," Gertie confessed.

"I've read all of your books."

Gertie said nothing but took her daughter by the hand and led her into the bedroom that had no wallpaper, only the four walls covered in photographs of her daughter secretly taken over the years.

"Jesus," was all Jean could manage. "Is that me on the campus in Glasgow Uni.?"

"On the day you started."

"I bet you even know my grades."

"I have fans and spies everywhere. Why did you choose to study politics, of all things?"

"You would have preferred me to go into Fine Arts?"

"Christ no, anything but Fine Arts, there's bugger all fine about the arts, trust me. Dorothy Parker said, 'If some over-eager young creature should come to you and tell you that they're thinking about becoming a writer then the second best thing that you can do for them is to hand them a copy of Elements of Style but the very best thing you can do for them is to go find a gun and shoot them dead while they're still happy.' Get into politics and rob everybody blind."

"Yes, Mother, as I said, I've read your books."

This was comforting Glasgow banter, with each participant proving to the other that they were perfectly capable of giving and taking in a savage world.

"Yea, well, politics and me got off to a bad start. I expected too much of them, I thought they could actually change the world but the world showed me different. It's not the world that is at fault, it's the fact that it's populated by people."

"Well, I don't believe that, have you heard that a guy called Donald Trump is running for the White House?"

"Of course I have but he is more than a wee bit of a joke, surely it will never happen."

"No, but we have to make sure. A few of the selection committee stuck him in there as a wee bit of a joke, knowing full well that he wouldn't just look but act ridiculous."

"Why?"

"Mother, they're politicians, the more ridiculous that he looks the better their own candidate looks, politicians do it all of the time. Besides, they have so much dirt on this Trump clown they can bury him deep in the blink of an eye. For instance, he's said openly that 'I want to tell my children that their mother is a whore who would shag any rich guy and all that this stranger has to do was to grab me by the fanny and I'll be his sex-slave.' He wants women to replace the sex- slaves they had on the plantations, silent females who have no voice. Can you imagine it, in America of all places, the land of the free? He wants to rip up the Constitution and recreate the county in his own image. I'll fight with my dying breath for my children's rights and for the freedom of women not only to have a voice but to have equality in all things. This man doesn't yet realise that he has wakened a sleeping Medusa. I'm going to be a force to be reckoned with, I am the wife of a US Senator that Bamstik is getting nowhere near the White House."

"You worry too much, no one the likes of that will ever get anywhere near the White House. That sort of thinking is for the likes of Nazi Germany. Trust me, I might have been a baby at the time but I was there."