First published together in 1944, Eliot’s Quartets are some of the most famous and well-regarded twentieth century poems to deal with the nature of time.

But they held an equal and related significance for me and my mother - an only child and a single parent - as a thread that linked our lives with colourful stories. Our one slim copy of these poems contained my mum’s biro-ed lessons in the use of grammar and punctuation (for me, age 7) on the frontispiece; the scribbled marginalia of her literary analysis and, poignantly, the notes she later wrote in Welsh for her own mother’s epitaph*. This was also the volume that I’d famously picked up age 6 and precociously read out loud from, deceived by its slimness into thinking it was a book for children. All this on the faded armchair where I was so often read to, or slipping down the side of, lulled to sleep by my mother’s sonorous voice on another endless telephone call. One volume, three generations of women, one cat (called Eliot), a telephone and a lot of talking out loud….

These poems formed the basis for this exchange between mother and daughter, exploring, through text about time, the distance between who we are now and who we were then, and how we transcend or distort it through the un/reliable lens of technology and memory.