Protesting

5th January 2012 Thursday

Too cold for salad so I chop and slice lunch - old veggies in the fridge, new veggies from the wind swept market this morning - leeks and carrots, ginger and garlic, mushrooms and savoy cabbage - pile them all into a pan and pour over boiling Marigold Bouillion. We end up with a crunchy Chinese soup - flavoured with soy sauce, toasted sesame oil and piquant red chillis growing in a pot on the kitchen window sill. I still can’t get warm but talking about our coming trip to South Africa with my sister stokes my childhood memories - white, burning hot beaches, salt spray and rowing boats.

My stomach always lurches when I turn into the drive of my father’s residential home. How will he be this afternoon? My sister says he has been sleepy and confused the last few days. When I open his door he is awake in the chair, the TV on. He is still in his dressing gown and pyjama top but not bottoms - his legs covered in his new Christmas purple fleece blanket. He asks me to turn the TV off. I tell him about our trip to London and our walk in Hyde Park and how people used to make speeches on soap boxes to anyone who would listen. I remind him that he was a student protestor in the mass rally in Trafalgar Square in the 1930s.

‘What was I protesting about?’ he asks.

I want to say, ‘everything’. All his life he protested and tried to change what he thought was wrong. In the 1930s it was against weapons. This morning it was about getting dressed. Still battling - but the stakes aren’t high enough now. And he can’t remember who’s in charge anyway. I suspect he has a feeling it isn’t him.