After the Fall

They came back from the hospital and the care home devastated, frightened and confused. Ten weeks later the old man is dead and his wife is in a care home. She looked around the lounge at the other residents and said, "I don't think I'll go to the funeral. I'd have to lock up, and what would I do with all these people?" Then she cried, partly for her husband, but also because being able to cope had always been the most important thing to her, and she knew it was never going to be that way again.

Google Earth

Google Earth? I changed my car three years ago, but on Google Earth the old one is still parked outside my house. And it shows a parking lot where my son's college now is, even though he's been there for over three years. Lets call it Google History.

The Fall

She fell in the night, trying to get to the lavatory. To her credit, she remembered the button round her neck and used it ten or fifteen times, and the police came to the door in the early hours, but if she could hear them she could not move, and when they heard her alive they went away again rather than break down the door. She was lying in a pool of excrement and urine, trying to wake her man, who's hearing aids were switched off by his bedside. Mid morning a carer, with much effort, entered and found this frail 96year old man trying vainly to lift his wife to her feet.
So the bossy psychiatric nurse finally has her way, and the elderly lady is going to a home for several weeks for a psychiatric assessment, from people who became psychiatrists because they didn't really understand how people work, or for that matter, themselves. And they will come back with an assessment based on lists of question and answers, that will tell us exactly what we, and the amazing carers who wipe elderly bottoms for £8 an hour, knew all along. And the elderly gentleman has been taken to a care home, because he cannot function without her.
So to rest from the battle to meet their needs and leave them in other hands? They don't have their hearing aids. The house is locked, but they always had the heating set at 30 celsius, 24hours a day. They don't have wash bags, and hospitals don't wash patients clothing and they are 150 miles away and have no changes. The milk and papers and meals on wheels are cancelled.
And my lovely disabled son is coming home on Sunday, so I've given up giving a stuff for a few weeks, and the NHS and social services will just have to cope, and Mum and Dad too.

Hawk

Our bedraggled, half-feathered blackbird singing from the ash tree this evening looks all in, although his singing is fine. The sparrow hawk came again two days ago and left a circle of feathers, not a wood pigeon's this time, but a blackbird's. I think it was his mate.

Sorry Blackbird, but thanks for the song.

Looking out

She tells me again about a visit from her granddaughters, how they did cartwheels and handstands in the garden and gathered flowers for her, and how happy it made her. But she cannot remember that I was there, standing next to her at the window.

How?

On Thursday I visited a small complex of rented flats in north London, where people of every colour and race live together; families, single mums, kids, different religions, different origins. They live together on first name terms, know each other, help each other, joke together, and go off to do their regular jobs and earn their livings.

Makes one wonder how wars ever start.

Snake

We found a young grass snake writhing up Bridge Steet today. It was hardly bigger than a pencil, but beautiful rich green with a yellow collar. I put it on the river bank among long grass, and hopefully its terror subsided. It must have hatched from an egg that was laid very much earlier in the year than grass snakes were supposed to lay before we humans noticed global warming.