When previously I thought it looked right or that there are many worse things to be troubled by in this troubling world that it seems not quite right to be troubled by this one thing rather than by other things, things like, the human condition, the demise of the dark chocolate Toblerone, or how Neil Innes could copy Beatles songs without copying Beatles songs, and by the way, it’s becoming troubling in itself, when will this sentence ever end?

Does o’clock look wrong to you? Google tells me it’s not wrong but what does Google know that some tech sister or bro hasn’t told Google or trained Google to know? And is four Googles a Google too much? And do I mean the use of the word or an ask of the search engine? Leave it ambiguous. Sure? Trust me. Right-o.

Among the prompts the o’clock search brings up is “o’clock and half past worksheets”. This makes me smile an inward smile like someone with children who’ve grown up in what seems to be the time it takes to make a cup of tea and locate the remote control. Which, since you ask, is under one of the cushions, you know, the ones the cat doesn’t like.

At this point in the piece I can’t help but wonder why I’m mostly stuck in the present tense and writing about soft furnishings, why I’m not writing about what I set out to write about (that what being my great grandmother who’s buried in Easter Road cemetery) and why the clouds outside my window look like the clouds in the opening credits of The Simpsons.

On an imaginary blackboard I take an imaginary piece of chalk and imaginary me writes ‘Grammar is not a time of waste’ over and over. Repeatedly. I prefer over and over. You’ll exceed the word count. Fair enough. This is when the thought enters my mind that I may be a minor character in a Muriel Spark novel and cursed – or blessed, you choose – with no agency to speak of. Of which to speak. No agency of which to speak.

But I dismiss the idea because 1) I can’t hear the great novelist tapping at her typewriter keys in a nearby room, doubtless one a far cry from Kensington and 2) somehow the idea isn’t nearly as disturbing as when I read whichever of her novels it is in which she plays that splendidly meta and Sparkian trick.

I could Google it but guess I’ve exceeded my Google quota for today, an arbitrary number I’ve yet to declare, perhaps more than four, but will do by the end of this sentence and it is with great self-importance that I can inform the world wide web, whatever happened to that, and the information superhighway, ah yes I remember when it was all WC Fields around here, haven’t you used that line before, it does sound troublingly familiar, like a comfy pair of flippers, slippers surely, or a dog that barks in the night, a previous century my dear Holmes, and that quota is 17.

17? It has a nice feel to it, I reckon you could cuddle up to 17. That sounds wrong. You’re right. Usually am. Make it 71.

My great gran? I don’t know if she was great because she died seven years before I was born but I have a sense she was. Probably formidable too but not in the way that folk describe women as formidable meaning they say stuff and won’t wheesht and go and hang the washing up. Matriarch may be better.

She was married to a man served with a restraining order following an incident involving a pistol as reported in an Irish newspaper in the 1890s. He was a groundskeeper in Torridon, also a poet, conjuring up quite the romantic image for those who like that sort of thing, but an Australian relative having shown us that newspaper cutting changes the whole, I know you’re going to say it, changes the whole, you are aren’t you, changes the whole narrative.

You said it! But it does for the story now is not about a man. The story now is about a woman, a formidable woman, the wife of a presumably serially abusive husband, the mother of 12 children, a matriarch, who outlives my not so great grandfather by 48 years after he’s struck by lightning – which sounds very Sparkian – and gets her kids, the youngest of them being my mum’s mum, back to Portsoy from Applecross two years before a morning in Sarajevo when Gavrilo Princip shoots the Archduke and precipitates the world’s first industrial scale war. What time?

Google tells me it was about 11 o’clock.