Water Rail

Looked out of the back door to see a Water Rail walk up and tap three times on the glass, flutter a bit, and then walk off down the garden again. I never really expected that I would ever see a Water Rail.

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.

Puffin

Found an old print with no negative, dragged out the ancient scanner which weighs nearly as much as a fridge (remember those connectors with dozens of little prongs that we had before USB and Firewire?) and an even older laptop with the software in it. Not a bad result though!

The chair (awaking)

She woke in her chair and rang; "Why am I so tired?" "Do you sleep at night?" "Yes, except when the man comes to ask if I'm alright."

The chair (the yield)

So the chair, from behind and under its cushions, yielded about sixty knives forks and spoons, 2 toothbrushes, 1 tea bag (loose), 1 box of tea bags, 1 jar of coffee, 1 slab of chocolate, one box of chocolates, 8 pens, 1 cheque book, 3 socks, 3 tea towels, 2 pairs trousers, 3 shirts, 2 fitted bedsheets (folded) and 1 place mat.
It's occupant, who had for lack of space moved to another chair, was able to move back into residence, the elderly gentleman was able to have a cup of coffee at last, and it became possible to eat the salmon and asparagus that I'd cooked for lunch and to pay the gardener who comes once a week.

In the garden a spinach plant that had long gone to seed blew over, and the gardener put it for compost and dug over the plot. The elderly lady made so many calls demanding the 'stolen' spinach back, that the gardeners family and her own eventually had to unplug their phones for the evening. Without memory, sense sadly goes too.

Loire or chair?

The trip to France was too good to be true, so it's off to Budleigh Salterton to retrieve tea bags and tins of fruit from behind the cushions of 'the chair'; then there will be room for it's occupant to sit and doze without sliding to the floor.

Loire

"Have you contacted the writer about the assignment in the Loire Valley?" the e-mail said. "No, please tell me her phone number, please, please. Je le ferai volontiers." Twelve minutes have passed and still no reply. What's the assignment? Will I overnight in a beautiful Chateau and sample their wines. Will I fly; will I TGV? Cyberspace is a desolate and empty void for me this late in the evening (translation - they've left the office). In the morning will it all turn out to be true?

Toad

A toad was waiting to be let out through the french doors this morning. Don't ask! I don't know.

The chair

The elderly lady is very pleased her delivery from Tesco Online has changed to Sainsbury's. She thinks it's more upmarket and she likes the orange bags; "We used to have one in Gerrards Cross when I was a girl," she says. She doesn't know that Tesco is suing three Thai journalists for criticising it's expansion in that beautiful land, and will probably bankrupt them and have them in jail if it wins. She doesn't know that a group of leading British authors described Tescos action as "Deeply chilling". She doesn't even know that she is boycotting Tescos, but she is; or at least I am, and it's me that orders the food.

The chair (dream)

The elderly lady's won the battle, and no carers are going upstairs to clean (her sons can do that). But she slept in her chair today and had a dream that all the carers came at once and sat around the table for a conference, and it tired her so much that she rang to say she didn't want any more conferences at the house, and could I stop them please?

Hawk

Wood Pigeons perch in the ash tree, bombarding the paving stones beneath 'til they're splattered with slime of different colours, depending what the fat birds ate. A Sparrowhawk took one out yesterday, double its own weight, and carefully plucked every feather and left them in a neat circle on the ground.
Bon appétit, Sparrowhawk; come back soon.

The chair

The elderly lady's well spoken, but shouting "Bugger off!" in the background as the carer talks on the phone. He's come to clean, but she believes she still cleans her own house. I reassure him. In the afternoon she rings, "I'm so ashamed; I've been asleep all day in the chair and done nothing. I had terrible dreams and nightmares; a man kept coming to the house with his own hoover and tried to clean."

The chair 01

An elderly lady, struggling to make sense of the little that remains of her life and her mind, slid to the floor in her sleep this morning and had to be lifted by carers. She had so much stored behind the cushions of her chair that there was no longer room for her elderly bottom. There were tea bags, cutlery, chocolate bars, her husbands clothes, tinned fruit; all the things that she feared would be stolen. She's my Mother.