So Easter Day has dawned at long last. I must say that dawn did not come too soon because Meg and I did not have a very good night, what with one thing or another. Meg was somewhat restless during the night and this prevented a sound night’s sleep so eventually I resorted to a portable mattress which I put down beside the bed which gave me some sleep during the night. But I got up right on the crack of 6.00am and set to work altering the various clocks downstairs. This task was accomplished surprisingly easily even though we do have quite a lot of timing devices of one sort or another. Last night, when the carer came early at 6.30, we had a rather unhappy experience where we had completely different ways of doing things and although I have managing on my own largely for the past six months that I was not doing things in the prescribed way and some of what I was doing was tantamount to abuse. It is not appropriate to go into further details at this stage except that I did send off a couple of emails, one to the Admiral nurses and the other to more specialised nurses to check that I was doing things in the correct way with the correct gear. What is so frustrating is that an Admiral nurse, an occupational therapist, a mental health nurse specialising in dementia and one of the ReAblement assessors had all seen Meg constantly in the last month in the last month but last night’s carer insisted that she knew better than any of them. She was insistent that we needed more equipment, an extra helper and God knows what besides including even a hospital bed which in my view might create more problems than it solves. So I was not a happy bunny for the remainder of the evening or the night. Having said all of that, no carers turned up this morning because by agreement with last night’s carer, the call to get up at 11.10 or some other outlandish hour was rejected so I did everything on my own – plus ça change!
As I was putting the clocks advanced by an hour this morning, my chocolate fast was at an end so I indulged in some Maltezers which my daughter-in-law had brought along to ease Meg’s stay in hospital. I also indulged in some Cadburys dark chocolate with Jamaica rum and raisons which was absolutely delicious. I was just getting downstairs when our Eucharistic minister called around as she normally does on Sundays even including today, being Easter Sunday. She was explaining to me that as the organist, she has to concentrate so hard on getting the various bits of unconventional music correct for the two hour evening service on Eater Saturday that all liturgical significance to her passes her by. But we had some more interesting news. There is a visiting priest who is the brother of one of the leading lights in our local church and he occasionally does visiting stints. The same priest had actually performed a very apposite blessing on Meg’s medal given to her when we were in Mexico by the family who cared for our son during his year long stay. The same priest said that he would devote a whole service to Meg to pray for her health in these difficult times and this was a gesture to warm the heart. Once we had breakfasted, Meg and I thought we would have just a little spin in the car to get an Easter Sunday newspaper. The first shop that we tried had sold out and the local supermarket which sells newspapers was closed. However, the garage attached to the supermarket had copies of the ‘Sunday Times‘ so we were pleased to get this and to return home. This weekend I had bought a joint of beef for our principal weekend meal. Upon exploring the freezer, I discovered several things that had evidently been bought with our Christmas meal in mind, such as a packet of roasted root vegetables with a thyme dressing, some roast potatoes in goose fat and Yorkshire puddings. So this lot got cooked up which was quite easy as the oven was already on and we had the most enormous Easter Sunday lunch. I have to say that our Christmas Day meal turned out to be a disaster for various reasons but this meal was absolutely excellent and we enjoyed it very much indeed, with plenty of leftovers to have more of the same tomorrow. After lunch I was delighted that Meg had a reasonable rest of about three quarters of an hour whilst I indulged myself in a leisurely read of the newspaper, a pleasure often denied me these days.
We had invited our University of Birmingham friend around for tea in the afternoon and he turned up promptly to be treated by chocolate biscuits and a ginger cake courtesy of Waitrose. As well as other matters, my friend and I needed to discuss lawnmowers, Late last autumn, he had brought around the lawnmower belonging to his recently acquired lady-friend and my friend and I just about got the lawnmower, which had previously seemed dead, brought back to life again. So we agreed that we would keep this lawnmower in our garage and this Spring (which is now!) he and I would work together as we did before to get the lawnmower activated again its winter sojourn. After we have done this successfully in the next day or so the mower can be returned to its rightful owner and the population of mowers in our garage will be reduced by one.