Recently I have had an opportunity to become a ‘critic’. It is an interesting new writing genre and an artform I admire, but it is not a role I would have ordinarily volunteered for.

Rather, I felt that duty called, and I had to respond. The work I felt obliged to critique was actually an important document: my mother’s death certificate.

Some might accuse me of being disadvantaged by having an emotional attachment to the subject, but here it goes.

I was gobsmacked when I read that my mother’s immediate cause of death was listed as failure to thrive as a consequence of coronary heart disease due to advanced age.