Mother, like the sun rising

Mother is getting better.

Mother: perfectly poised, always beautifully dressed, full of intelligence, dignity and inner resources. Party animal. Traveller (China, India, Budapest for music festivals or something, France, Spain, northern Norway, USA for half our family, Shetland at every opportunity when I lived there). Give her a ticket, don’t see her for dust.

Bewitches everyone who meets her.

Mother knows which month it is, and which day of the week, and quite often the date.

Mother, exasperated, is telling the continuity announcer to go and get his lunch. He’s talking too fast.

What a relief. Last week got pretty bad. Anyone watching someone they love losing the plot is going to be scared. She came out of hospital (blood pressure thing) to my place, with an undiagnosed lung infection, until I got my doctor round because she was sleeping 95% of the time, was disorientated, thought she was still in hospital, couldn’t find her call–bell, thought I was a nurse, didn’t know day from night. Didn’t understand why she couldn’t take her night pills mid–afternoon. Thought it was the middle of the night when the sun was shining. Grudgingly agreed with me when I pointed to it. “I’ll believe you. Thousands wouldn’t.” Even being registered partially sighted doesn’t cover that one. Couldn’t remember the doctor being there, later that day, or the next etc. She’s definitely, slowly, been losing her grasp over the last few years, but that week was a real shock.

A course of antibiotics later and plenty of TLC, things look much sunnier. She’s back in charge. Have involved Social Services people quite a lot over the months, and she has carers at her place. We ponder out loud on whether she should be in her place at all, meaning she is alone at times, but she’s a determined lady and that’s how she got this far. As long as she stays with me nearly all the time. As long as she is hardly allowed to be alone, which to her means Can't get any peace. How did I get to be 96? she asks me. "Sheer bloody persistence." She bursts out laughing.

It still takes her a few minutes to remember which 5 grandchildren (and 6 great–grandchildren) belong to which parents. And she still forgets she’s 96. Nobody else does – she’s amazing.

And she’s fascinated by blogging. 

Those personal ads

Not that I’d know where to find them, other than a big newspaper for a hoot on Valentine’s Day, but mine would be the one with “Has own drain rods.”

Doesn’t everybody have a set ? Think I’m not supposed to be with a man, not living with one anyway.
Have been steadily kitting out my life with everything I could need, and have ever needed, and have actually used, including the rods (septic tank, living in Shetland). Which I left behind with my ex last year in Inverness, and could have used last week. For the blocked drain, obviously. And it's another septic tank. Since I usually live out in the sticks, if not on the edge of a cliff any more, should have seen that one coming. 

And then flue-brush + drain rods = cleaned the chimney. Dead easy. Think the flue-brush got left behind too. Does this mean there’s a man in the offing ? Am I trying to tell myself something I just haven’t grasped yet ?  (May 2010)

Nobody on horizon yet, September 2010. I’m NOT LOOKING. Caring for a 96 year old mother, a neurotic cat and somebody else’s chickens while trying to start a small business is quite enough for now.

I need a boyfriend like a hole in the head.

Conversations with Mother (1)

Mother: What’s 1914 from 2010?

Me: 96 (getting good at this)

Can’t be.

Yes it is. You are 96.

I’m sure I’m 94.

We do this every day. That’s why my mental arithmetic is absolutely tiptop at the moment.

Sometimes I think she’s just fishing for compliments. Then she says something else and I know it’s all terribly real.

Camping on hard ground

The very first hard ground? It could have been in the Peak District, as a child. But I was resilient and didn’t have bones then, obviously. Could have been in the Lakes, school trip. No, that was YHA and raining a lot, and we were all trying to smoke Consulate.

No, it had to be New Mexico, January 2001, at umpteen thousand feet on the Colorado Plateau and we were definitely mad. Three weeks of travelling and unravelling from Denver up through Colorado, turn left into Utah, down into Arizona (snow in the desert and stars above – stunningly beautiful) and across into NM, staying all the way in Holiday Inns and Best Westerns and what have you, and head for Chaco Canyon, site of ancient peoples and fascinating empty villages. And kivas, and places where the energy was definitely doing something else.    (Don’t ask – I still don’t know! but something was going on.)

To reach Chaco from the north, you head down what they call a washboard ‘road’ – because you are (even in the back of a very smart Cadillac with good suspension) being bumped down this rutted road so exactly like a washboard and so precisely designed to rattle every molecule in your body that you can’t believe it’s not on purpose.

And you arrive, thank god, at Chaco Canyon.

You check in at the building where you are allocated a campsite. You find yours and every one has its own big sandpit (where the tent goes) and its bonfire pit for cooking with steel racks over it, and its tarmac parking place, all very civilised. Near the loos, naturally. You open the boot and a flock of big pigeon things fly straight into it and march around over your packing. You take a second look. They are chaffinches. HUGE chaffinches. American chaffinches. Same colour, same basic arrangement, same silly male head feathers. And they want food. They might as well have guns, they’re so up front.

So E & J get their tent up. Big tent, lots of padding, done it all before. Akin to bedouin tent, soft furnishings, central heating (did I make that up?). Owners of Cadillac. Then me and W get ours sorted next door – small tent, but I HAVE MY FOAM THINGY (see four–pawed endorphin maker). Then the snow starts. Big snow. We decide the only sensible place to cook dinner is in the ladies’ loo block, where there is a gas fire permanently on. (There’s also a gas fire in the gents’ but not much room to gad about.) And we have Space Food – noodles packets (various, take your pick of just–about–nice to awful to inedible) made with boiling water, then biscuits, tea etc and go to bed.

Two hours later I am still awake and frozen stiff. Literally. Fully dressed, three sweaters, woolly tights under trousers, extra socks and all. A trip to the loo to thaw is out of the question. It is blowing a proper blizzard alright. Minus 25ºF = minus 31ºC. A cuddle would be nice but suggestion is met with grunt. Another suggestion, hours later, that my sleeping bag doesn’t seem to be very warm and might we possibly swop, or could he spare a blanket or his overcoat, doesn’t even merit a grunt. He is deeply, utterly, asleep. Why didn't I go to sleep in the loo? I have no idea. Too hypothermic and insensible, probably.

It’s only later that I discover what a half–season sleeping bag actually means. It’s for a summer night in Menorca.   Wally.

Grotty carpets and pink plastic bottles

Watching tv.  Advert comes on showing a grotty carpet (looked fine to me) and a lady and her toddler. Lady is remembering how carpet looked when new. Talks aloud about this. Another woman approaches from back of room, holding pink plastic bottle of wonder-formula guaranteed to retrieve ‘new carpet’ look.

Why doesn’t mother-lady say “Where the f*** did you come from ? How the hell did you get in? I have a small child in the house. My front and back doors are locked !!!! I’m calling the police RIGHT NOW.”

And not to mention the tv crew with a lens pretty much up her nose.

 

Four–pawed endorphin maker

Chocolate cat is lying flat out under the piano duet stool next to the radiator, on the bespoke camping–on–hard–ground 5” thick foam thing I made and covered with dark blue fleece sporting little red flowers. He is snoring his head off. Sometimes he whimpers in a slow crescendo of panic, louder and more scared. I have to wake him and remind him It’s OK sweetheart, it’s only a nightmare. You’re safe with me now. No more nasty people. 

He had a terrible childhood. It was a year before he stopped flinching every time I reached to stroke him. Even now he will misunderstand occasionally when I put my hand out, and wallop me. And with five razors on each paw, that’s some wallop, usually a stripey dripping red one. (I’ve got better at seeing it coming: the ear–flattening, the dilated pupil, the sudden halt in purring.) Usually happens when I'm half asleep sitting on the loo and not paying attention.

I first spotted him from the kitchen window (up in Scotland at the time) grabbing a crust of bread and tearing off down the garden with it. That is a starving cat, I thought. Someone suggested I put a postcard in the local shop window at the time. No, I said. Bad idea. Very bad idea. I do not want some nutter in this village who’s nasty to cats coming round here and demanding him back, with menaces. That cat ran away for a reason, or was dumped. Either way, he’s stopping with me. Not my first stray, you’ve guessed.

So I called him Chocolate, as in 85% cocoa solids, as in looks black until you see the sun on his rich, incredibly thick, shiny–as–mink silky coat (Burmese I believe) then the gorgeous brown glows at you. It’s almost a phenomenon of transparency, the black and the brown. You can’t see which is which. It’s all both. Burmese owners call it sable. And like chocolate, he induces a healthy dollop of endorphins.  Long may he live. Apparently they do, Burmese cats. He’s already got scattered hairs and beard turning grey, quite the elderly gentleman.

Have happy dreams, Chocolate.

Toe in the water

Well, well, well.

Here we are at last. Hello everybody.

Me, Chocolate cat, “Just–passing–through” pheasants, rabbit, little brown mouse (patio) and my mother (96), all fully present in cyberspace. Well Mother is usually fully present but not entirely reliable. Got a bit of catching up to do, and plenty of learning curve up ahead.

Emailed my brother yesterday about something, and “PS I'm about to start a blog. Oh dear. Oh yes. As if there wasn't enough to do. Need it out of my head and it's only my diary and stuff. Promise not to waffle on, though.”

And I make the same promise to you. (Except I seem to have broken it, right then and there.)

Oh and one more promise - if you find a typo or a rotten spelling, you have my permission to wallop me over the head with it. 

Am so tempted to drop one in just to see if anybody's awake.

And about me ?

Under construction.

Bear with me.

Am evolving.

Get a wiggle on, then.