Ninety Two Today

7th November 2011 Monday

I wake up with a streaming cold.

I talk art with my hairdresser as she snips away at my head with her scissors.

I try on a pair of brown leather ankle boots. They remind me too much of Chelsea boots men wore in the sixties so I leave them in the shop.

We eat last Saturday’s fish curry for lunch with my husband’s green tomato and chilli chutney. At least he eats it - too pungent for me.

My sister and I meet in the car park of the new home my father is going into. The manager is warm and soothing. We choose one of the two rooms available and discuss where to put his recliner chair and TV. You can see sheep in a field from the window.

At the hospital my father is lying on the bed in a crooked way. He has been fitted with a catheter and he says he’s afraid to move in case the tube comes out. We call a nurse who reassures him. His visitor doesn’t stay too long and he opens our presents including a soft fleecy dressing gown in blue stripes. Throw the other one away, he says. He blows out the two candles on his birthday cake and doesn’t seem to mind that it’s raw in the middle. But I do.

Back home my husband makes cheese on toast for his supper and peels a whole bulb of garlic for me to chop up and throw in with the tomato quarters I’m planning to roast. I’m afraid my cooking is lazy at the moment - not doing anything new - going for what I’ve made a thousand times before. So I don't have to think. I put the sticky ginger birthday cake in the oven under the tomatoes and bake it for another hour.

Last night I slept in the spare room because my husband was snoring. I’ll probably sleep there again tonight because I’ll be snoring - my nose all blocked up. But at least I won’t be worrying about my father in wet sheets.

Hug Quota

6th November 2011 Sunday

For a little while yesterday my father had all of us around his bed - three daughters and a grandson. He opened some cards and presents from his other grandchildren.

As we were leaving he said,

What I miss most in hospital is hugs.

Tonight my husband and I are driving back from an art exhibition which didn’t inspire or uplift me in any way, and just before we turn into our road I say,

I wish I could go and give my father a hug.

Well I’ll take you, says my husband.

But in the end I decide against it. I remember my sister is with him and I’m so grateful she is.

I wonder how long a hug can last though. A dear friend told me that we need at least five hugs a day. My father hasn’t had his quota then. But I’ve had wonderful hugs all day from lots of gorgeous women and my lovely husband. So I will have to save up extra big hugs for my father tomorrow on his 92nd birthday.

Pile Up

4th November 2011 Friday

It rains all morning. Before breakfast I hoover the floors, make up the spare bed for my big sister coming to stay from Luton, and bake my father’s birthday cake. It’s his favourite - my own recipe for a Sticky Ginger Cake with three kinds of ginger in it - ground, fresh and crystallized. I replace the grated apple in it with carrot though - I think the apple makes it too gooey. My husband sits at the table and glues his broken lizards.

In the car driving to our first couples counselling appointment my husband says our tax situation is worse than he thought. He’s negociating with the accountant but it sounds mind bogglingly complicated.That old tight anxiety about money twists my gut.

The two counsellors are lovely - we talk more than they do. At the end of the session they ask what do we want to focus on. They leave the room to talk about us so we can talk about us too. I say I want to explore our loss of intimacy. My husband agrees. The councellors agree. But I feel inexplicably angry and depressed.

We visit my father in hospital. I want to talk about his situation but he wants to talk about how much noise the chairs make when they scrape on the floor. My husband takes a swig of my father’s Dandelion and Burdock juice. It doesn’t matter at all but it annoys me beyond measure. We leave him playing scrabble with one of the other patients. And I put in a call to the doctor.

In Sainsbury’s we bump into my husband’s colleague who took over a lot of his clients when he left the company. The colleague says how much my husband is missed. And what interesting people his clients are. And he’s making a lot of money. I feel my husband’s pain like a black waterfall coursing through him. He buys six bottles of wine.

At 9.30 I pick up my big sister from the station. She helps me park the car in a tight space as the back windscreen is misted up. But then I can’t close the passenger window. It’s jammed open. The lovely RAC man comes and can’t mend it - needs a new motor - but he jams it shut. He says there has been a terrible pile up on the M5 - people killed. I know my sister and her husband are driving back from Bristol. My big sister calls her on the mobile - they are stuck in the tail back. Safe.

The RAC man say he’s heading over there now. I’m thinking about those people whose lives will never be the same again. Selfishly I’m glad it wasn’t our turn tonight. Broken cars can be mended.

Seductive Cookware

3rd November 2011 - Thursday

I am invited to a cookery demonstration tonight. It turns out to be more about what you cook the food in, what gadgets you use to prepare it, than the recipes. The stoneware casserole dishes, the spatulas, the melon ballers, the chopping machines, the saucepans and the knives. It’s all high quality - seductive cookware. I can see why you’d want to buy it. Or even better host a party and get some of it free. It taps into my love of kitchen shops - on a par with my love of browsing in bookshops, and the stationery department of Smiths. And Waitrose.

But I also know that you can do most things in a kitchen with a chopping board and a knife. Of which I already have several. And I know that if I made a baked Camembert with a filling of chopped pecans, green chillis and apricot jam ( which was the demonstration recipe tonight) it would taste just as horrible cooked on a stone plate as cooked on one of my old baking trays.

Mind you, there was a glass batter bowl/jug with a handy lid which I thought would be very useful. I might just order one of those - or several of different sizes. And a percentage will go to the charity Age Concern. And I did win a raffle prize of a cheese knife which could be a gift for someone who eats a lot of cheese......I think my husband had cheese on toast for supper tonight - that delicious savoury smell was hanging around the kitchen when I came home - making me hungry.

Pyjama Saga

2nd November 2011 Wednesday

Feeling guilty about not spending much time with my husband - my father consuming all my spare head space. Last night I said ‘let’s go for a walk tomorrow’, but this morning I succumb to my sore throat and stay in bed with the pussy curled against my back till nearly lunch time. My husband says he doesn’t mind - he’s working on his clay creatures - glueing broken limbs and toes.

When I arrive at the hospital my father is asleep so I creep away and sit in the car, the rain pounding on the roof, the windscreen steaming up. I could go to Tescos but I don’t want to lose my parking space. He’s surprised to see me even though he’s not really confused any more. But the peeing thing is bad. The pads aren’t working. The lovely nurse has to change him and the sheets twice while I’m there. I drive back to his room and pick up more pyjamas and later drive away with a big bag of wet clothes, leaving him in the hands of another lovely nurse helping him off the bed.

I load the washing machine and as soon as the spin cycle is over I shove all the damp pyjamas into a plastic bag and we drive to the cinema to meet my sister and her husband. After the film I hand the bag over to her. She’ll get them dry tonight and take them in to the hospital tomorrow. And so the pyjama saga begins.

I’m so grateful for this little hospital and the doctor and the nurses and the NHS. But I’m not holding out much hope for a solution to this flowing pee. Which I didn’t think I’d be writing about in a blog. I hope my father doesn’t mind. He's always been so encouraging about my writing.

Safe Hands

1st November 2011 Tuesday

Tonight my father is in a hospital bed. It’s a cottage hospital - small and friendly. His own doctor will visit him - do blood tests, adjust his medication, relieve the peeing situation. Just for three days. When my sister and I leave him this afternoon he is trying to learn the names of all the nurses who are looking after him.

Later, after a toasted sandwiches in a draughty cafe, we walk along the sea front at Sidmouth with our sweet niece, the sun blinding us, the sea a churning red clay cauldron. I’m holding on to the feeling of lightness, relief that my father is not alone - in safe hands. But of course he always has been - it’s just that I forgot they don’t need to be mine.

Too Much Peeing

31st October 2011 Monday

8.30 am I’m doing the morning shift at my father’s - but I can see there is too much peeing going on. In the bed, in the chair cushions, on the bathroom floor, in his socks. He says he’s had a shower but I don’t think he has. I phone the surgery, get an appointment with his doctor - a miracle. My sister phones social services and the respite care home. I have a quick cup of coffee with my niece in the Boston Tea Party - she has come to visit us before flying off to Beirut to be with her husband.

11.40 am The doctor says he wants to admit my father to Honiton hospital tomorrow or the next day - ‘to see what’s going on, sort out his waterworks, re-assess his medication’. He says the confusion isn’t due to a urinary infection - more likely a little infarct in the brain - that’s why the antibiotics aren’t working. I want the district nurse to come and sort out the peeing situation. The doctor says he’ll organise it and call me.

1.30 pm In the warmth of The River Cottage Canteen in Axminster, while the rain drizzles down outside, my niece and I order pumpkin soup and a roasted tomato brushetta. The soup is cold and tasteless - except for a smidgen of garlic oil on the surface. But her parsnip and ginger cake is moist and tender and my fridge cake is gooey and chocolatey. I keep my mobile on - waiting for the doctor’s call. Which doesn’t come.

5 pm. I ring the surgery - talk to the district nurse. She says she can come and see my father tomorrow about the peeing but can’t say when. No news re hospital admittance.

6.30 pm We all sit down to a supper mostly from the freezer - a butternut squash and mushroom pie with Gruyere cheese, my husband’s fresh tomato sauce and his pink fir apple potatoes - followed by a lemon curd ice cream and the giant pomegranate my sister brought back from Istanbul which leaks clear scarlet juice when I cut it open - like bleeding rubies.

Tonight I’m thinking about my father - hoping he’s asleep - hoping his sheets are still dry.