This afternoon my mother, Mona, comes back from Leeds after having spent a week up there in our home town sitting Shiva (mourning) for her younger brother, Ronnie, may his dear soul rest in peace, who has died aged 85 years. At 88 years, Mona is still going strong, surrounded by a loving family and lively group of friends, with a hectic social and intellectual life. She is devastated at the loss of Ronnie, but knew that she has in reality been mourning for the loss of him for a good few years as senility gradually claimed his mind. In Eternal Sparrow I have included a poem written whilst Mona herself was fighting for life a couple of years ago in the Whittington Hospital. The poem is sparse, stark, because I could hardly breathe myself at the time. Her doctors were asking me to decide whether to switch off her life support system, and I had decided not to agree to that. Luckily that was the right decision but, at the time, I didn't know whether I was making it for selfish reasons. I wasn't prepared to take responsibility for my mother's death, and wanted her to stay even if she emerged from her three week coma (following emergency six hour surgery) with brain damage.

Her present love of life and thrill of every new day is a constant relief to me, as you can imagine. I am profoundly grateful to all those spiritual healers in my Soul Therapy circle who joined with her medical team and me in helping to save her life.

Kathryn, my co-Director at The Soul Therapy Centre, and I have been talking about the manuscript we are preparing for our next book. It is based around a telepathic conversation with animals, which was an incredibly moving experience. Both Kathryn and I were taught to telepath with animals by the amazingly gifted American animal communicator, Amelia Kinkade, the acknowledged leader in the field, whose work worldwide with animals and their rights is impressive to say the least. We are thinking that we should expand our company's remit to include the training in awareness of the spirituality of other animals, not just humans. We don't know if society at large is ready for it, but we certainly are prepared to take that step. Kathryn has for the last couple of years run workshops in animal communication and telepathy, which have been well received and well attended, but we are agreed that we now need someone to take on this area of work who is prepared to invest the quality and length of time and energy needed. Neither Kathryn nor I feel we are able to devote the time and effort needed to do justice to this important domain of spiritual and psychic understanding.