Songfacts®:

• This track is about a dying woman who is given hope by her doctors ("Well, not to worry it's not what I supposed") while her son is told the truth ("your mother will not last the week"). The band's keyboardist Mike Barson wrote the song based on his own experience with his ailing mother's doctors.
  
  He explained in Daniel Rachel's book The Art of Noise: Conversations with Great Songwriters: "That happened to my mum. I was pretty pissed off with doctors and the National Health. This doctor pulled me and my brother into a room and said, 'Your mum's not going to make it.' Then he went to my mum, 'Ooh, hello Mrs. Barson, it's going to be fine,' whilst he's saying to us she's going to kick it. It was completely wrong. She had something else in the end. Talking about death was a taboo then. I wrote the song quite a bit later, once my mum got the green light. I didn't have a plan to write on that subject, it just came."