It’s not played much these days and I hadn’t heard it in decades. It was this one (Everything I Own by Bread):

Why did it have such an effect on me? Well, I may have described myself as a child of the 80s in other blogs, but my earliest years were in the 1970s, and this was very much music of that decade. My mother had the album The Sound of Bread, on vinyl of course, and when I was a baby, through to the age of about six (I was always pretty little) she would pick me up and dance to it, with me in her arms. It wasn’t just Bread, of course – I remember Don McLean’s American Pie was also played a lot – but that’s not the point.

She’d pick me up, hug me, and we’d dance, and maybe even sing a little. It was just me and my mother, in the living room, bopping away. Nobody else mattered. And I knew that I did.

And while we’re on the subject of my mother, for this blog is mainly about her, you’ll have realised, it’s not just cheesy seventies music that makes me think of those early years.

There’s a smell too.

It’s the aroma of onions frying in paprika, which is how so many  of the meals my mum cooked for us used to start (she’s from Hungary, you see). Even a waft of that scent takes me right back to those days playing Top Trumps with my big brother in the living room, knowing that dinner was on its way. And it still makes me smile.

The irony of all this is that, despite me writing this post specially for it, we don’t really do Mother’s Day in our family. But is this is really the main point of my blog. Why celebrate her on a specific date when she’s there, in my mind, all the time?

And that’s our challenge, as charities, I believe. How do we get to the point where we are loved not just once a year, in response to a Christmas mailing, say? How can we be central enough to the lives and emotions of our closest supporters, so that the tiniest things will make them think of us, and hold us close?