Perhaps there’s a German word – for there’s no English one – for that alloy of liberation with melancholy that comes with having faced up to something sad. I have made my will. A draft for my English will lies on the desk beside me, and early this week I flew to Catalonia to make the Spanish will that my brisk and capable Bakewell solicitor said I’d need.

I’m in excellent health for a man of 73 and, God willing, may have many years left; but there’s no gainsaying it – these things need to be sorted out in an atmosphere of calm when there’s time to get it right. It’s what my father did, without a fuss, and Dad is my inspiration in these matters. ‘No favouritism,’ he said, ‘and strict mathematical equality as to the portions.’ As for how to achieve this, ‘pay a professional’.

So I kept a mental picture of my father by me as, travelling without my partner – which has come to feel disconcerting – I boarded an easyJet flight from Gatwick to Barcelona on Sunday afternoon, the return booked for Tuesday, and was met at the airport around sundown with a cheery hug by my much younger sister, Belinda, and her Catalan husband. A splendid meal at the restaurant in the hotel we’ve built in our mountain fastness, l’Avenc, was followed by an early night. Gloomy thoughts were kept at bay.

But just before seven on Monday morning, a shaft of orange light through my bedroom shutters awoke me. Where was I? Who (for a half second) was I? Why this? I opened the shutter. The most glorious red dawn was flooding up from the Mediterranean, 50  miles away. In the great valley above whose thousand-foot cliffs l’Avenc sits, tiny wisps of cloud clung to hills and trees. Soon the sun would be warming the yellow stone of which this 16th-century fortified mansion is built. But I shuddered – I don’t know why.

I wrote a book, Castle in Spain, about l’Avenc. A quarter of a century ago I discovered the old house, sitting abandoned and close to ruin, its roof about to cave in. It was I who wandered the rotten staircasesand broken oak floors, who marvelled at the carved bishop’s head with a water spout for his mouth by a stone sink, the stone filigree decorations around the windows, the arrow-slits designed for a probably pretentious prosperous owner, and in the medieval part of the buildings the broken arch, reinforced after a 14th-century earthquake. It was I who conceived the grand plan for buying the property (for almost nothing) and (for sums that have put grey hairs on all our heads) restoring it as a triumvirate: my sister, her husband Quim and I. The project has since become their life. Now I, the absentee, was returning to settle what would happen when the trio became a duo.

Down in the once-walled little Roman city of Vic next morning, we visited first our solicitors. A plan had been drawn up for the pact successori. We needed to agree it, then take it down the road to the notary, where I would sign, and my sister would sign on behalf of her husband, and of their children, the legatees.

In decor, lawyers’ offices breathe much the same mood across the planet. Gravity,money and a certain self-regard speak through marble, glass and wood panelling. Both our lawyer and the notary spoke good English, and the thing was accomplished within an hour. I came away with a slim white folder that spells it all out, pockmarked with our initials; and down the marble steps we went to the city’s imposing square for coffee in the morning sun. In law l’Avenc remained partly mine, but in that hour something of ownership, of possession, had slipped away.

It’s nearly an hour’s drive on a winding road from the plana de Vic up through the woods and fields and flat-topped little mountains of the Collsacabra to the clifftops on which l’Avenc sits. Trees, mostly oak, were leafless and grey, patches of snow were melting fast, and in late winter the earth looked exhausted, dry. I took a long walk down the narrow tarmac road that we’d finally persuaded the Tavertet local municipality to pave – it was a cart-track when I first found the house – and gazed across the valley at the Montseny mountains, still snowy, glazed and shining, that separate our valley and its lakes from Barcelona on the other side.

That afternoon walk took me along the clifftops once again, after all these years. Tiny green spikes of dwarf daffodils were yet to break surface: daffodils that were in flower in the spring of 1996 when I first saw l’Avenc. I saw it all then with new eyes. Later it became part of my life. And here I was in February 2023, contemplating the end of life. In the evening I dined with my other younger sister, Deborah, a loving soul who has stood hopelessly for election as candidate for an animal-lovers’ party, and who lives to defeat bullfighting and neuter stray tomcats in her town. Her work will never be completed.

It was late when I slept but I set my alarm for 6.30 on Tuesday, and a cup of tea and a final climb with Belinda to see the sunrise from a high rock above l’Avenc. It was still quite dark when we set out: a steep ascent of some 600 feet, but we stumbled determinedly across broken ground ploughed up by wild boar and emerged on to Roca Llarga. From an altitude of 4,000 feet we watched, shivering, as a sliver of pink pricked the bank of cloud shrouding the Mediterranean. And the sun rose, reddening the sky.

Some find the dusk dispiriting, fearing the loss of light; but night holds no terrors for me and I love the enfolding dark. It is dawn that can depress my spirits. I feel unequal to the oncoming day. I know no sadder piece of music than Mussorgsky’s ‘Dawn On the Moscow River’. Dawn, and the renewal of life. That is the hardest time.