My mother’s birthday is today. She would have been 68! She died 12 years ago, and I miss and love her to this day. This is my favourite photograph of her as an 18yr old doing her B.Sc. She refused to kill the rats after desexing them. She stole ‘Gertrude’ from the lab. The lab technicians were looking for it for a long time … the secret never got out.

My mother and her Gertrude

 2005, this is my mother and I a few months before she died (she was terminally ill with metastatic breast cancer).

 2016, me in front of my mother’s mother’s Welsh dresser in Wales, UK.

 2016, this is my great, great grandmother (I think the original owner of the Welsh dresser – quite a similarity with my beloved mother). The Welsh dresser is passed down through the daughter’s line. Though we don’t know where the gene for breast cancer was passed down (thinking through my maternal grandfather’s line – who we don’t know).