Last week Mum saw a golden squirrel in the garden. She said it looked beautiful, gambolling around on the lawn. She says she called me to come and see but I didn’t hear her. A pity, because I would have liked to have seen this fabulous creature. I did wonder if she had been seeing things but there are often squirrels in the garden. I thought perhaps it had been a genetic mutation and reserved my judgement. ‘If it’s living around here,’ I said, ‘I expect we’ll see it again.’

The next day she cried out, ‘There’s a donkey in the garden!’ This time I was there to see that the garden was empty, but I knew there was no donkey. Of course there wasn’t! However mum saw it walk through the fence on one side, across the garden and through the fence on the other side.

Later she said ‘it wasn’t a donkey but a Shetland pony, golden with black, brown and white markings. It was lovely.’ That evening there happened to be a Shetland pony on TV. Mum told me ‘that one is the same as the creature I saw in the garden, except the one I saw had more markings.’ She described the markings to me quite clearly. This is someone who has no short term memory, but she can clearly see this horse in her mind’s eye.

Hallucinations can be a symptom of urine infections and mum is just recovering from one. When the District Nurse came she remarked on how much brighter mum seemed. I agreed but I had to mention that mum had seen two golden creatures in the garden. The nurse ran some more tests but so far everything seems clear. And in a way I’m pleased because seeing these two creatures has made mum feel quite blissful. It’s as if she’s had an epiphany.

When she speaks of the two sightings her face glows. ‘They were lovely. The little horse, it came from there, it went there, it was beautiful.’ I said, ‘Mum you do know it wasn’t real, don’t you?’ ‘What do you mean? It’s real to me; I can see it in my mind.’ ‘Okay, what I mean is – you do know there wasn’t really a pony in the garden?’

Mum assures me that she does know, but it’s quite clear that, on some level, she feels that it was real. In fact these hallucinations/ waking dreams/ visions/ whatever/ seem to have been the best things that have happened to her for a long time. They have made her feel quite blessed.