From Writing.
This week I’ve been listening a lot to Charlotte Cornfield’s 2023 album, Could Have Done Anything. I can’t remember how I came across it, or why it was recently, but it’s been just right the right pace for this week.
In my head I say “Charlotte Cornfield” as Steven Toast would say it.
§ Back in Essex this week for Dad’s funeral. Over the past few weeks it’s been hard to think past this event. I’d been pretty stressed about the organisational and social aspects of it.
The organisational aspects, despite the fact we didn’t have to organise much ourselves. The funeral directors and the humanist celebrant had the funeral itself well in hand. And the nice folk at the local Labour Party hall had sorted out the reception for us. Aside from a handful of other details, ably handled by my sister, there wasn’t much to do.
And then the social aspects, which were the usual fears of being somewhat responsible for an event: How many people would turn up? Who wouldn’t come at the last minute? Would people have a good time? Would I say or do something stupid?
I’m sure that, way back, I didn’t mind organising social events. But at some point my silly stress over the no-shows and the worries about things not going right gradually put me off organising anything at all, which is a shame.
Of course, it was mostly fine. I expected to feel more emotional than I did, perhaps because of all those logistical and social worries. It was a nice ceremony, it was nice to see various people from Dad’s life, and some nice memories were shared. And it’s a relief to get to the other side, into the future, the new normal.
§ Thank you for all of the lovely comments, messages and emails after my big summary of six-months a few weeks back. I really appreciated every one.
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 | Cats |
I barely went there but, still, nostalgia for the times.
]]> | New road surface | |
 | Newish bridge |
From Writing.
One of the big current admin tasks is informing organisations that my Dad has passed away. I started on the utilities this week, calling BT to let them know, and to have the name on the account changed to my Mum’s name. (They do have an online form but it’s ambiguous in places.)
That seemed to go OK. But then it was apparent the broadband at the house had stopped working. I called the phone number: “The number you have dialed has not been recognised.”
Yes, the fuckwit I’d spoken to had, instead of changing the name, closed the account.
I called back and there was no way to re-open the account.
The only option was to open a brand new landline and broadband account, which can take up to 14 days to start working. And there was no guarantee the phone would have the same phone number.
The phone number my parents have had for 58 years.
I can’t remember when I was last that angry. I’m still furious now, although the vibrations have subsided and I don’t want to cause quite so much physical damage.
I have spoken to a couple of genuinely nice and caring people at BT (or EE as they seem to be now) but they can do nothing. It’s very much “the computer says no”. There’s not even anything they can try. How is this even (im)possible.
In theory the new landline and broadband should be up and running in a few days with, hopefully, the old number being put back after that.
If not, I have spent way too much time plotting the various campaigns of annoyance and protest that I would escalate to.
So very very very angry. Also so very impotent.
Never ever use BT. Or EE I guess.
§ On the upside, Nationwide endeared themselves to me, with a field on their online form for the date of the funeral. Why? So that if they need to call, they won’t do it on that day.
§ I finished reading Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard this week and really liked it. I read some of her short stories a while back and they didn’t grab me but, having read quite a few acclaimed short story collections, I think that’s the fault of short stories in general.
There are so many good turns of phrase. I’m not good at analysing why I like how something is written. Her text often often has something ominous about it, which reminds me of Nicholas Mosley and James Salter (who I wrote about here). I wondered if this is something more common to British writers who grew up during and after World War II: a sense of conflict, engagement, the potential of things to get worse before they get better. Here’s part of a description of a well-to-do family dinner (page 17):
The girls’ curved necks were intolerably exposed as they spooned their custard: you could practically feel the axe. Upright Mrs. Thrale could never be felled in the same way, at least not now. The young man and the girls remarked among themselves on the delayed season—“the late summer,” as if it were already dead. They were like travellers managing an unfamiliar tongue, speaking in infinitives. Everything had the threat and promise of meaning. Later on, there would be more and more memories, less and less memorable. It would take a bombshell, later, to clear the mental space for such a scene as this.
Experience was banked up around the room, a huge wave about to break.
As with Mosely, there’s a way with similes (I think, not metaphors?) that I envy. Such as this, too, from page 136:
Caro sat at her office desk remembering Paul Ivory’s play and how, for an instant at the end of the final act, the audience had remained silent after its ordeal. Here and there in the theatre a click or tick, a slight crackle such as one hears at potteries among baked wares cooling from the furnace. And then the fracturing applause.
I’m not familiar with the sound of ceramics cooling but that still works so well. And then the fracturing!
§ We started season two of Shrinking (Apple TV+), the first season of which I apparently enjoyed. I could hardly bear to finish one episode. It was too oddly slick. Every person and object and set was immaculate and lit the same. The pacing seemed relentlessly the same. There were many lines with the cadence of snappy one-liners that weren’t funny. The relationships between this insular group of characters now seem bizarre. An Apple Keynote of a show. So odd in many ways.
On the plus side, I had practically given up two-thirds of the way through season one of Ludwig (BBC) – it was OK, just a bit middle-ground – but by comparison it seemed innovative, interesting and slightly funnier. So we finished that. If you love David Mitchell being David Mitchell, with an added dose (but never enough) of Anna Maxwell Martin, you will love this much David Mitchell being David Mitchell. One very strange, and quite tedious thing though: how teal-and-brown/orange all the sets and costumes are. Can we please move on from this?
§ The keen feed readers among you might have seen this post appear briefly a couple of days ago. For once I wrote most of this a couple of days early, but then forgot to change the publish time to Sunday.
Anyway, it’s now a very wet Sunday after a very wet and windy night and our plans to visit Abergavenny for the night have been scuppered by floods. We spent the morning reloading graphs of local river levels, flood maps (different for England and Wales for little useful reason), searching for webcams of roads, and watching Facebook videos of local villages under surprising amounts of water.
And now, minutes before finally publishing this, we’ve discovered our water’s been turned off due to emergency works at a nearby borehole. What an adventure.
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From Writing.
Back home this week, to my other life, and settling back into those habits and routines.
§ As a distraction from other thoughts I’ve started tinkering with the Kirby CMS. I’ve been wondering how to simplify my personal website and Kirby seems to hit a sweet spot: it’s PHP so could run on good old shared hosting; it stores everything as flat files so doesn’t even need a database; and it has a decent admin front-end (unlike static site generators). At version 4 it seems pretty mature and has a small but helpful community.
So I’ve enjoyed learning something new for the first time in ages, getting very stuck with basic things, learning new shapes and ways of doing stuff. I wrote a script to export my 1800 or so blog posts to files and, running on my laptop, Kirby works well, as far as I’ve got.
I might end up not using it, but that’s fine. Some interesting, personal, low-stakes coding is the best kind.
§ I’m enjoying the sudden influx of collaborators refugees from Twitter/X to Bluesky. My feed there is now busier than my Mastodon feed and, if I mute some of the politics posters, it’s a fun place.
I definitely agree with Cory’s take on Bluesky, that it’s yet another (currently) locked-in, VC-funded social network, and we shouldn’t be jumping into yet another one of those. Why do we keep doing this to ourselves?
I would love Mastodon, or similar, to be the most successful network but unless it changes I can’t see it. For one thing, there are too many little hurdles for normal people to jump over. So I’m reluctant to go all in on Bluesky but at least, sigh, I guess it’s an improvement.
Occasionally I pop on to X to see who’s still posting and it baffles me. We all make compromises with this stuff – I use WhatsApp and Instagram and, rarely, Facebook despite the awfulness of Meta, and I occasionally buy something on Amazon when there’s no other option, despite the terribleness of it and Bezos. But it’s surprising to see the otherwise reasonable people who are posting on X still. At this point I guess there’s nothing Musk could do that could wean these people off their dwindling followers. It’s an odd look.
§ We watched season three of Industry this week which was really good. It’s nonsense, and doesn’t withstand comparing most of it to reality, or wondering why the characters explain so much to each other in ways they wouldn’t, or thinking about what the morality and lessons of the whole thing are… but if you just go along for the ride it’s good fun. I’m surprised there’s going to be a fourth season because it felt wrapped-up, and already drifting further away from the financial industry at its heart.
§ I finished reading Adam Greenfield’s Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire which was good.
I don’t read many contemporary non-fiction books and most of those I have read over the past decade have been quite disappointing, in a “this could have been an article” kind of way. There’s also a tendency to write a lot of first-person stuff which maybe authors and publishers like because it feels personal and gives it “character” or something? But that always feels “light” and non-serious to me, again more like a magazine article than a non-fiction book about a serious subject.
Anyway, Adam’s book doesn’t suffer that – the only brief bit of first-person experience supports his discussion of how people can get together to help their communities in a time of crisis, and be ready to do so.
I’m not sure I’ll actually do anything as a result of reading it though. Obviously, collective action requires working together with people in your community and… I’m not much of a joiner or a talking-to-strangers-er. Especially recently. My Dad, involved in local politics for decades, said of it, “you have to enjoy meetings,” which he did. I organised my working life around as few meetings and as little in-person interaction as possible, so.
But despite that the book was good, and got me thinking and wanting to read more in a similar vein.
§ I know there were one or two other things I was going to write, but I didn’t make a note of them – “Of course I’ll remember!” – so that’s all.
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From Writing.
Still in Essex all this week. Waiting punctuated with bursts of admin.
The government’s Tell Us Once service is a nice thing – a single place to tell various government departments and the local council that someone has died. I’ve yet to see any results, but I assume it does actually work. Although I did have to report a bug with the validation of its address input fields.
§ While in Essex I’ve continued to go swimming three times a week, enjoying being only 20 minutes walk from a nice public pool. I’ve been increasing how far I swim and now manage 2,000 metres in under an hour, with a quick breather every few lengths. I think I’ve improved my technique too, picking up tips from various TikToks, like Effortless Swimming (also on YouTube). I’d love to be able to get my average speed down to under two minutes per 100m, just because it’s a nice round number of a target, but my speed is persistently a bit over.
§ I had an afternoon in London during the week. Last time I went I spent far too long west of Regent Street but managed to balance it out this trip, spending more time in East London. I met DW for lunch and, overall, walked 19km / 12 miles.
I was hoping to buy a new smart white shirt, with arms the correct length, which is not an easy task for gangly me. This did mean heading to posh West London briefly. I skipped the most expensive ready-to-wear options like Budd (£225 upwards) and Turnbull & Asser (£295 upwards), and so started at Drake’s (£195) where the nice but slightly-too-casual shirt was obviously way too short.
Then on to Hilditch & Key (£195) where the chap said they wouldn’t have any with sleeves long enough, measuring my arms to confirm. Then Harvie & Hudson (£110), whose man commiserated with me – he was tall and thin himself – because he could instantly tell they’d have nothing to fit. He suggested Charles Tyrwhitt (£70) which is a big enough chain that they can make a wider variety of sizes and so had a shirt that fit OK.
I have mixed feelings about buying posh smart clothes. I’m not posh and smart, and the shops, their products and window displays do not in themselves make me feel at home. No matter how much you might appreciate nice clothes which – if you can afford that price level – might be handmade in the UK, it all reeks of rich Tory men.
The service is always interesting though. Hilditch & Key and Harvie & Hudson were impeccably polite, although I still felt out of place in the surroundings.
Drake’s, a bit more casual and so a bit more “me”, was friendly and made me feel welcome and at home (although he should have been able to tell in advance that their shirt would be way too short).
Even better, in my experience, is the Anderson & Sheppard Haberdashery where I once bought some lovely, and correspondingly expensive, Italian flannel trousers. Some of the clothes are, again, too Tory but the staff were just the right balance of friendly and polite that I didn’t feel out of place.
Despite the variations all these fancy places remind me what service in shops can be like when the staff are, I assume, not minimum wage employees only there for as long as they need to be. Charles Tyrwhitt, which was busy and the staff rushed, was heading more in that direction. But then you could pick up four shirts for £150 there (if you needed that many).
§ I finished watching the fourth and final season of Atlanta this week, which continued to be interesting and mostly good.
And I’ve now finished re-watching the third and fourth seasons of Parks & Recreation, still fun, although I’ve also remembered what an absolute nightmare of a co-worker Leslie is. Is she the baddy?
§ On Sunday I left Essex and headed to London where I met Mary off a late-night plane at Heathrow, back from her three week trip to Nepal. Heading home.
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 | Pippa |
"Issue 009/November: Interlude. In which I tell you about Karl, a good little guy" Lovely, sad writing.
]]>From Writing.
About six months ago I stopped writing weeknotes because I didn’t know what I could or wanted to write about what was happening. My dad had four spells in hospital, and moved to a care home, and then a nursing home, and passed away recently.
During this time I kept notes about what was happening, and this is them, polished into some shape.
§ I spend too much of my time online, reading blogs, Mastodon, Bluesky, Instagram, Slacks, Discords, watching TikTok, etc. etc. and for better or worse it’s a big part of my life or, at least, the life of my brain if not my body.
I was surprised, back when all this began, with how quickly that all dropped away and became completely unimportant. That parallel virtual world disappeared as I sat in A&E, or in a ward, or at home worrying what the next day would bring. Despite having a lot of time to fill I had no interest in filling it with all that.
Over coming weeks I gradually dipped back in, one thing at a time, until I was back at it as much as before. Probably more, given all the time away from home and lack of desire or need to get stuck into anything more substantial, like work.
§ As with any disaster, you can know logically that something like this might happen but it still doesn’t prepare you for how much your world completely changes all of a sudden. Priorities are entirely different, plans are canceled, the future is uncertain, worries are constant. Your life is all of a sudden very different.
And that different very quickly becomes normal. This is just how life is now.
§ I’ve spent more time in the Essex town where I grew up over the past few months than in any period since I last lived here. It’s been the first time I’ve found myself thinking, “I can see why people would choose to live here.” Obviously, I was keen to get away from the small town way back then: “There’s only one good thing about a small town / You know that you want to get out.” It’s still not high on my list of places to live but I can finally see the appeal. Big enough to have essential shops and a few cafes and coffee shops, small enough to feel friendly and personable. A leisure centre, schools, a nice traffic-free riverside walk right through the town, only 45 minutes from London.
Every time I come back here I wonder if I’ll bump into someone I haven’t seen since school, because some must still live here. Then I wonder if I’d recognise them even if I did, 35+ years after I last saw them as teenagers.
While I might have obliviously walked past plenty of them it’s not impossible: one Sunday, walking past a cafe, I recognised DT eating brunch with his daughter and he recognised me. Lovely to say hello after so long. He didn’t offer to give me back the C90 of ZX Spectrum games he’d “borrowed” off me though.
§ It’s impossible to summarise all the things my sister and I have had to do over the past several months, with one parent in and out of hospital, and moving to a residential home, and the other at home. It’s been a lot. There are always things to keep on top of, to chase, to worry about, to do. I think we’ve done a good job on the whole but we’ve never felt like we’re doing everything possible. You always feel you should be doing more, should be caring more, no matter how much you do or how much you care.
I’m very, very fortunate that my sister and I have thought similarly about things, and been able to work together through all this, and that Mary has been so supportive too. We’ve been able to mostly take it in turns to be in Essex, coordinating everything through WhatsApp, a shared calendar, and many shared Notes.
It would be so, so much more difficult if siblings disagreed about what to do, or were very differently (dis)organised.
§ I need to emphasise the making of notes. Make notes every day, right from the start. You might think you’ll remember what that nurse just told you, but when you’ve been told half-a-dozen things by different people later the same day, it will have gone. And when you want to look back on when something happened a couple of weeks ago, good luck unless you’ve kept track of everything that happened.
§ Having to tell someone I love that they might never be going back to the home they’ve lived in for decades is one of the most stressful, worrying, upsetting things that I – we – have had to do. It wasn’t nearly as bad as I feared but afterwards I still felt like I’d somehow failed them.
§ In hospital it’s surprisingly hard to get an update about how a patient is doing.
If you call the ward you might never get an answer. If you’re there in person – we generally were – you need to at least find a nurse who can read the patient’s chart for you or, ideally, track down the consultant for a quick face-to-face update. This is sometimes impossible, even if you’re there after they’ve done rounds, and aren’t at lunch, and haven’t left for the day. Finding out how a patient is doing feels like something that should be much simpler.
And hospital staff are very, very good at avoiding eye contact. Loitering in the corridor of a ward hoping to find a passing nurse to ask for an update is almost impossible. I can’t blame them – they have plenty to do without asking random lost-looking strangers if they need help – but it’s quite a skill.
§ It’s amazing how fragmented the various parts of the NHS are. Dad’s GP was generally unaware whether he was in or out of hospital. Referrals get made to different hospital departments or entirely different places and, even for us “young” folk, it’s hard to keep track of which tests, results, and assessments are outstanding.
§ Like most British people I do not like saying bad things about the NHS. It is, obviously, amazing in so many ways and full of people doing their very best. But my faith has taken a battering.
You might be discharged from hospital with the one thing fixed but in other ways be in much worse shape than before with, it seems, no one really concerned. Discharge papers might be incorrect, or late, or even a different patient’s. You might be discharged with problems so obvious that only days later paramedics shake their heads that you were sent home. Promises of occupational therapy – to offset days then weeks spent in bed – might never be fulfilled. Bedside alarms might go unanswered for ages, even if you’re trying to get help for someone else who’s fallen out of bed. Spaces in homes or half-way recovery places are rare and you might be stuck in hospital for days or more waiting for one. Even then it might be far enough away that it’s next-to-impossible for relatives to visit.
§ There is no good time to get Covid for the first time and my first time was not a good time. It felt like I was in the very middle of all this drama – at my parents’, after Dad’s first two hospital stays – but in reality it was only a month in. You innocent little Phil. Thankfully I only had a couple of days feeling pretty rough and my parents – presumably protected by vaccines months earlier – suffered less.
It’s really difficult, in 2024, to get a sense of what post-Covid behaviour is normal or correct. Having not had it when the rules were clear and strict, I was keen to do the right thing but figuring out what that was was tricky. Lots of web pages are over two years old and detail restrictions that are no longer in place. The NHS’s current guidance is brief and open to interpretation.
§ At the start of all this I really tried not to talk to carers, nurses, doctors, etc. about my dad in the third person when he was right there: “He seemed fine until yesterday…” But at some point it just became normal.
But there are limits. Some people – such as a young carer on one of the early hospital stays – talk about old people, right in front of them, in such an infantilising third-person manner: “Awww bless, isn’t he sweet.”
Or there’s the way that some carers patronisingly address an 85-year-old as “Young man”. I feel like such an old grump thinking, “Have some respect!” But really.
§ There have been many times when I’ve wondered how I can be a fully-grown adult, 53-years-old, and have no idea what the right decision is. I became desperate for the few people who seemed sensible, qualified, and experienced, who could suggest what the best next step was.
I felt so soft. What an easy life I’ve had! People have struggled for much longer through much tougher situations than this but there were many periods when I was constantly mentally exhausted from the worry, uncertainty, indecision, with no end in sight.
It felt like, with all the time I spent at my parents’, thinking about their needs, that who I was began to disappear. People who are caring for loved ones full-time, for years, must really struggle to maintain an identity of their own.
I don’t socialise much with people at the best of times but I had little desire to do so during all this because I had no other thoughts, no response to “Hi, how are you?” other than “Good thanks but my Dad’s been unwell and is in a care home and and…”
§ I’d given very little thought to residential homes until the past few months.
In the UK there are two kinds: care homes and nursing homes. The latter is for people who need more medical care and they have at least one nurse present round the clock. The former only have carers, with district nurses popping in a couple of times a day to help with things like insulin shots. Sometimes it’s obvious which kind of home someone needs. Other times, especially if conditions are rapidly changing, it’s painfully hard to know what the right choice is.
Looking round homes, trying to choose one for someone else, is, I imagine, a bit like trying to choose a school for your kids. You get shown round by someone trying to sell it to you, and what they’re like greatly affects your overall impression. You wonder if you’ve caught the place at a particularly good or bad moment. You read the regulator’s most recent review of the place, summarised on a sign outside by a single quoted large-print word (“GOOD”). You read random strangers’ reviews and try to work out if they’re useful or not. You weigh up the cost, the travel time, the facilities, the food, the staff, the residents, the activities, the rooms, the general vibes. And it’s still impossible to know what it will actually be like day-to-day, week-by-week.
Are you looking at the right ones? Have you been around enough of them? What if you miss the one that would be ideal?
How much do you think it costs to stay in a care/nursing home? I would have had no idea. We looked at a variety and they ranged from £6,000 to £8,000 per month. If you have less than about £23,000 in savings then the local council should pay some of the fees for you. Until then, you’re paying all of it.
You’ll have to get assessments done of the resident’s care needs and financial situation which – like every single other thing – could take far longer than expected. If you’re lucky enough that you can afford to self-fund you can sign up with a home, have them assess you, and if they say “yes”, wait for a room to come up. Otherwise you may have to wait for the social care system to creak into alignment first. We were fortunate with money and timing, not having to wait long for a space either time.
§ When I return home, after being in Essex for a couple of weeks or so, the first couple of days feel like being on holiday. No longer being concerned for anyone else’s welfare (no, I don’t have kids). Then I start feeling guilty for doing nothing, and feeling anxious about what’s happening across the country. When Dad was in a home I constantly felt guilty about him being there, and not in his own home, even though it was definitely the least-bad option.
§ In one of my Dad’s more lucid periods he mentioned how glad he was that they’d sorted out their lasting powers of attorney (LPA) several years ago. Having the ability to make health decisions, and financial decisions, on my parents’ behalf made things much less complicated than they would otherwise have been.
It’s still not quick and simple. On the financial front every bank and utility has its own requirements for proving you’re able to exercise power of attorney over an account and even with an LPA in place it’ll usually take days or weeks before you can actually do anything. I dread to think what a pain it would be without any LPAs.
If you’re getting on a bit (or even if you’re not, really) then get LPAs in place! I should do mine, just in case. And if you have elderly relatives you’ll eventually be responsible for, do everything you can to encourage them, before it’s too late.
§ I have a pretty simple life but having to figure out someone else’s has made me think about the complexity of mine.
Finances for example – the fewer bank and investment accounts the better. Keep things as simple as possible, both for your own day-to-day ease now, but also for anyone who has to take it over, and for yourself when you get older and you find previously-simple things much more complex.
And websites. Oh, websites. When I’m 85 I do not want to have to be using things like the command line or git to maintain any websites. Or dealing with bugs, or incompatible updates, or hacks, or full disks. Maybe I shouldn’t have any websites. In which case, when does that happen?
§ On Dad’s third hospital visit, the second time I’d accompanied him to A&E, I felt surprisingly calm. The surroundings were more familiar and I knew there was nothing I could do to affect anything. Being there, paying attention, is the best that I could do and I was doing it. Leave it to the professionals.
The flip-side is sometimes feeling helpless and anxious. Someone you love is in a terrible way and you can do nothing for them.
§ When you’re visiting a hospital every day you get to know, superficially, other patients in the same room and their visitors.
There’s a shared sympathy and solidarity with the visitors. You’re all doing what you can (not much), all worrying, all putting your trust in the staff, all frequently feeling let down. When other visitors are anxious or angry at broken promises, or shoddy care, or further delays, I felt for them but was also thankful that, this time, it wasn’t me.
I enjoyed saying hello to some of the more awake patients in neighbouring beds and wonder how they are now. Cheery Ken. Pete, opposite, desperate to get home, always keen to tell you what he’d observed about Dad’s care. New Pete, more confused but also chatty, following on in the same bay.
One day cheery Ken told his visitors about a little guy he’d seen boxing in the ward. His relatives were doubtful and laughed it off, until I pointed out the new guy, in the bed opposite, who had arrived with his hands wrapped in big, round white “gloves” – presumably to prevent him pulling out cannulas etc. – whose son had warned staff could get aggressive… Maybe there had been some overnight “boxing” after all.
§ It surprised me how quiet hospitals are at weekends. I assumed that – illnesses and injuries being what they are – everything ran continually, seven days-a-week. But no, most doctors are off at the weekends and wards run with a minimum of staff. Ailments must remain in a holding pattern for two days and three nights until things start up again on Monday.
It does make wards much quieter and calmer, which is nice, but it’s also frustrating. Little progress will be made. If you weren’t discharged on Friday, it won’t be happening until at least Monday.
§ It was surprising to find quite a few staff, mainly men, who had no bedside manner at all. I know, many of these are tough, thankless jobs, but, eesh, the way some guys, especially young guys, dealt with 80-something men stuck in bed, was hard to watch.
§ I had forgotten – reading old notes and putting these words together after the end – what a relief it was at one point to see Dad as his normal self. After ten days or so of struggling in a hospital, to have a normal conversation, to see him smile again.
§ I imagine most people with living parents have thought a little about them passing away, about their home and their belongings left ownerless.
But I hadn’t prepared myself for the odd feeling of being at my parents’ house and knowing my Dad, still up and about but in a residential home, would never see any of it again. It’s a different sadness. All this stuff, decades of cared-for belongings, trapped here.
And I felt awful that he wasn’t there, sitting in an armchair reading. I felt like it was our fault, that we were preventing him being in his rightful place.
What’s all this for, all this home-making and familiar surroundings and favourite belongings, if you can be pulled away from it all, so suddenly, for the remainder of your life?
§ I’m not a big crier. Or, maybe, I’ve just been fortunate that I haven’t had too many occasions that have caused me to cry. But I’ve cried a lot this year.
Sometimes it’s big, sad events that predictably cause tears. Other times it’s unexpected little things – me waving “thanks” to a car stopped at a zebra crossing, and the driver waving back. Or:
A photo I didn’t take: In M&S, a small girl, 4 or 5ish, standing before a shop dummy of a boy, exactly her height, wearing shorts and a little denim jacket. She looked at its grey, faceless head, then put a little hand on each of its cheeks and gave it a careful kiss.
Then I think I’ve got over some aspect of all this, having cried about it, and felt fine. I’m done with that sadness. And then out of nowhere, back it comes.
And I found myself wondering, “Will this make me a better actor?” And felt bad for wondering it. Unlike some people in classes I didn’t get too hung up on whether I could cry or not, but it was still a struggle, something to aim for. Have I broken through some emotional barrier that would make it easier to recreate these feelings? We may never know.
§ Constantly making decisions for someone else is very tiring, no matter whether they’re big – which residential home to choose for them – or small – what size trousers to buy. (I imagine all parents saying, “Duh, yeah.”)
§ There are some residents in residential homes who are fairly mobile and can get around, maybe with a walking frame, without too much problem. And others who can’t do that at all and – if they get out of bed – always need assistance.
But there are people in between who can get around, but not well, who are liable to fall if not closely assisted, who can be a problem for homes. You can’t watch residents all the time, you can’t force them to stay seated or lying down. I got the sense homes aren’t keen to have people in this in-between state because the situation is bound to end up with a fall, which isn’t good for anyone.
§ I try not to think too much about what things will be like for us in our 80s or, maybe, 90s, should we get that far, given we have no children to do all this stuff for us.
I’d strongly, strongly encourage anyone to ensure they’re living in an accessible, practical house or flat before they need it. If you’re going to have to move before you can no longer use stairs, for example, do it while you can still cope with the financial, organisational, and emotional stress of moving home. Don’t wait until it gets too difficult. Move and downsize before you need to, if you’re fortunate enough to be able to.
§ The absurdity of sitting on a train, discussing end-of-life plans, and which life-or-death checkboxes to tick on a form, over WhatsApp messages.
§ I imagine that in 30 years time, in a hospital ward of 80-somethings, plenty of them will be wearing headphones. Today’s 80-somethings don’t seem to wear them but given their ubiquity with middle-aged-and-younger people now, I assume this behaviour will continue with the cohort as we age.
Which will be great. For one thing it’ll provide a break from the noises of the hospital. For another it’ll mean everyone else doesn’t have to listen to whatever you’re listening to or watching.
By 2054 maybe VR headsets will be common everywhere, but perhaps today’s 50-somethings will never quite get on board with this stuff when it arrives properly. So someone will see us all in our hospital beds and think, “It’s such a shame they only use headphones, it’d be much better if they used VR like younger people, to shut everything out.”
§ One patient watched daytime TV, loud, all day. Even when his wife was visiting. Having to listen to Homes Under The Hammer or whatever constantly would drive me mad, no matter what my other ailments. I arrived at the hospital one day to see him being wheeled out to a transport to take him elsewhere. I got up to the ward and his now-vacant bed still had its TV blaring out whatever was on that afternoon. Fuck that guy.
§ These TV screens, at each bed, cycle through various things to entice you to pay for media. One of them is a screen of book covers advertising audiobooks. One of the books advertised to patients is Reasons to Stay Alive.
§ One difficulty with hospital is that if you’re admitted for a specific thing, that’s the focus. No one there knows what you were like before you came in, so if there’s anything else wrong – e.g. with your cognition or speech – they’re not concerned with it. They don’t see it as a new, potentially fixable problem. They just want to solve the one headline issue, plus anything obvious that can be measured in blood tests etc.
§ The first day Dad was alert but didn’t recognise me.
The day I said goodbye and thought it might be the last time.
It wasn’t, quite.
§ In the days after he’d gone I felt unexpectedly calm.
A whole direction for my attention and thoughts and worries had vanished. There was no more planning when to make each day’s visit to the hospital or the home. No more bracing myself for what I’d find. No more having to find someone at the hospital to ask for an update. No more wondering what the coming days, weeks, months and even years would mean for him.
I had an urge to be busy, to sort things out, but even now, over a week later, there’s a limit to what I can do. A new system, introduced in September, means that after a death you wait for a medical examiner to call you to ask if you have any concerns about the person’s care beforehand. Then you wait for the coroner to do their work. Then you can make an appointment to get a death certificate. With that you can get on with a lot of things. We’re not there yet.
I was expecting to feel more upset all the time. Partly, I think, it hasn’t sunk in yet. Maybe it will when I get home. As before, months ago, tears start suddenly, unexpectedly. I can feel all business like, able to get on with tasks at hand, like a phone call: “Hello Derek. I have sad news I’m afraid. A couple of days ago Dad … [sudden sobbing].”
It doesn’t seem real that thoughts like, “I should show this to Dad,” or, “I should tell Dad about that,” or, “Dad would like this,” are pointless now. Conversations that can’t be resumed. “Remember when I mentioned…?” “You know you said…? Well I just read this…”
After a couple of days I realised that hours would go by without me having thought of him. How could I do that?
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From Writing.
Still in Essex, making some arrangements but also treading water while we wait for things to happen. It doesn’t help when one organisation has an incorrect phone number for you and it gets passed along to others that need to get in touch with you to move processes along.
§ I went to the supermarket and when I went to pay I couldn’t find the debit card I was going to use. Puzzling. If it’s not in my wallet there’s nowhere else it could be. I don’t lose things!
I paid using my phone and went back to the house. The card wasn’t in any of the few places it could conceivably be, even though it couldn’t be in them because it could only be in my wallet.
There were no odd charges on the account, so it didn’t seem like someone else had got hold of it.
I looked back through the transactions to when I last had it, trying to remember which places I had used either the card or the phone. It seemed like my last use of the card was the previous time I went to the supermarket.
That time I wasn’t buying much so I’d used the self-checkout and remembered succeeding in doing everything smoothly – everything scanned first time, I didn’t mis-hit any on-screen buttons (when you’re tall the touch-targets seem slightly off), I’d paid smoothl… oh! That was the time it needed me to put my card in instead of tapping. In my very cool swiftness I must have left the card in the machine!
Back to the supermarket and to the woman selling cigarettes and vapes and scratch cards and doing customer service. Had they found an abandoned card a couple of days ago? She looked on the computer at lists of lost property, asking for details. If they did have it, it might have been destroyed by now.
But no! They had it. She called on her headset for someone to go to the cash office to retrieve it.
I waited while female staff arrived with trolleys carrying Deliveroo bags and men arrived to carry them away.
And then a woman arrived holding out my card. Like magic! As simple as that! Something went a bit wrong and righted itself! No disaster. Amazing.
§ I went to the cinema to see Anora (Sean Baker, 2024) and it was really good. It seems increasingly rare to find a movie on relatively-general release that I want to see. More than two hours long but, unusually, it didn’t drag and I could have watched more.
Despite all that, is any film worth paying £20.40 to see in a small cinema? Twenty quid! In Everyman Chelmsford’s sixth and tiniest screen! And I had to sit through 28 minutes of adverts and trailers! They should be paying me!
I know, it’s a special “big screen experience” but really: for that price, choose two months’ worth of streaming as many movies as you like at home, or a couple of hours and a load of adverts in a cinema? Increasingly hard to justify unfortunately.
§ That’s all. I’m crossing fingers for America and for all of us.
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I ignore new CSS for years so this summary might actually be useful to me. In a year or two. (via Adactio)
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