Here I am on Twelfth Night with nothing but benevolence to look back on

For the past two and a half years my brother John has been living next door to me in the Northamptonshire countryside. We have both been most of the time alone in our separate houses, 25 yards apart, and, whenever I’ve been there, I have shared at least one meal a day with him. It was a very cosy and mutually supportive set-up. Then, on New Year’s Eve, he suddenly died.

His death wasn’t exactly premature — he was 87 and increasingly debilitated by Parkinson’s disease — but it came as a shock nevertheless. On the two last evenings of his life he had come over to my house to have supper and watch his daughter Anna star with Miranda Richardson in the three-part television adaptation of E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia. He had been on good form, commenting favourably on Anna’s performance as the pretentious and competitive Lucia, and willfully refusing to identify Miranda Richardson however often (which was very) she appeared on the screen.

But he never saw the final episode of Mapp and Lucia. After some mince pies and brandy butter he shuffled back home on my arm across the gravel, said goodnight and locked himself inside. Next morning, at about 10 a.m., his carer, Zoe, arrived and I let her in. She found him dead on his bed. He had presumably had a heart attack. An ambulance arrived with astonishing speed, but the paramedics could not revive him. An air ambulance, which landed in the garden shortly afterwards in case he should require airlifting to hospital, took off again, unneeded. On this occasion, at least, it was impossible to fault the NHS.

In fact, during this festive season, I had found it impossible to fault anyone for anything.