Today started off as one of those days when the sky appears gloomy, the sun then breaks through the clouds with the promise of a much brighter day and then it becomes overcast again. So it has proved to be most of the morning, actually. Our couple of cheery care assistants turned up, absolutely on cue this morning and I was pleased to see them both but they are now both having a couple of days off over the weekend. After we had breakfasted on a mixture of toast and instant porridge oats, the phone rang and it was an OT arranging to come along to give Meg an assessment in about an hour’s time. Actually a pair of them turned up after only about half an hour and one of them had come to the house before and remembered all the details of Meg and our Music Lounge. Before they came, I let Meg have a little wander on her walker and this proved to be quite useful as the OTs could assess her mobility using the walker. They then observed how I managed to get Meg to a standing position and into/out of her chair. At the same time, they tested Meg’s upper body strength with a little range of tests. The upshot of all of this was that the OTs, who I think were sensibility personified, were quite satisfied with the practical arrangements that we have for Meg’s mobility, support and general living arrangements. This they were going to put on file and thought that any additional equipment was not actually indicated at this stage and might create more problems than it solved. They agreed completely with the strategy I have adopted of using the transit chair at the beginning and end of the day or other occasions when Meg might feel somewhat wobbly but the rest of the time applauded my efforts at keeping Meg relatively mobile with the use of walkers and frames. They were just on the point of leaving when our University of Birmingham friend phoned up and were intrigued and amused by our conversation which included our observations that we all wanted to go out to play (as if we were young children) and we knew that Waitrose had a good supply of play pens for us. We made contact with our University of Birmingham friend with whom we chatted until we were joined by another of our Tuesday gathering who we missed last Tuesday.

Just after we had pulled into our drive, our son and daughter-in-law turned up and we were evidently pleased to see them after an absence of a week. They had actually come along to do a badly needed gardening job which was to trim back the hedging around our BioDisk installation in the front of the house. When we first moved into the house some seventeen years ago now, this was a bit of an eyesore but within about a year I had prepared to put in some hedging plants. I know that at the time, I took a lot of trouble with the soil preparation but this has actually paid dividends as the resulting hedge is about 6 feet in height and not far short of that in width as well. So it does a magnificent job in shielding our BioDisk and almost turning it into a garden feature but the downside is that the privet hedging needs to be pruned once and twice a year. As the years have gone by and this hedge has got both taller and thicker, then its maintenance has got correspondingly more arduous. Needless to say, I am truly grateful to my son and daughter-in-law performing this task for us as it has become somewhat more difficult as the years have rolled by. The weather forecast is indicating that it may be warmer tomorrow but also wet and windy. I am hopeful that I can manage to get at least the front lawn properly mown tomorrow as we certainly on a weekly schedule from this point of time onwards.

And now a story that journalists and photo-journalists absolutely love and one that politicians of any note are keen to avoid. Rishi Sunak was visiting the Oval to meet participants of Surrey County Cricket Club’s Ace Schools Programme – it provides free training for state school pupils aged nine to 13. In the videoclip, Rishi Sunak is being seen being bowled out middle stump by a schoolboy – the still of this photo will surely go viral and is an absolute gift to the Labour Party. All that is needed is to blow up the still to a poster and then slap a simple message on it such as ‘Out!’ or ‘Bowled Out’ and it will surely capture the zeitgeist of the moment i.e. the popular mood. Certain video clips become iconic and the one in most recent memory was Theresa May at, I think, the Conservative Party conference where the ‘stick on’ letters on a display behind her kept dropping off by one. It just seemed to symbolise a governing party in the process of dissolution and the point was gleefully seized upon by journalists of all political persuasions.

It seems that we may be at an ‘inflection point’ in the Israel/Gaza conflict. After the killing of the seven aid workers, three of them UK nationals the Americans have indicated to the Israelis that they have had enough. They are saying to the Israelis that American support is continent upon new secure supply routes being opened up instantly and, almost immediately, it seems that the Israeli war cabinet have complied and new routes opened up at once. I think that I have read recently that President Reagan stopped the bombing of Hesbollah in Lebanon in a conflict at some time in the past by indicating to the Israelis that no more weapons would be supplied until they complied. Meanwhile, we are in a situation where it appears that the official legal advice given to the UK government that if we continue to supply arms in the face of a potential genocide then the UK is probably in breach of its international obligations. This advice has not been made public (I wonder why?) but it is pretty clear what the advice probably is, supported by a recent call by hundreds of legal professionals in recent days.

Today I had just about got myself up and showered when the doorbell rang and it was two friendly carers who had turned up 15 minutes early – not that I minded. My nickname for the male carer is ‘Mr Teazy-Weazy’ after the famous hairdresser of, I think, the early 1960’s. After everything else is done, I am more than happy to let him work his magic on Meg’s hair and I think that we are going to have the same pair tomorrow which is a bonus. After we had breakfasted, we received a phone call from a nurse who was part of the ReAblement team and she was going to call around in about 15 minutes to do the kind of routine monitoring that is part of the hospital routine (blood pressure, oxygen saturation, temperature) and this all turned out to be normal. After the nurse had left, Meg and I knew that we had to get our act together to get our weekly shopping done. We went to our local smaller Aldi at which I usually shop and know where absolutely everything is. This week, having got Meg seated in her wheelchair, I then managed to clip the special trolley that is available for the use of wheelchair users and found out how it clips onto the vertical leg supports and we then started our trip around the supermarket. This all went pretty well except that the trolley for wheelchair users only has half the capacity of a normal shopping trolley and therefore for a weekly shop, it is necessary to pile things high and to take a great deal of care arranging one’s purchases. Both of the local Aldi stores have invested in ‘scan your own’ shopping terminals but these I do not like when I have enough on my plate manipulating wives in wheelchairs, shopping trolleys piled full of shopping and I am desperately trying to get things packed away once scanned. But I must say that things went pretty well and one elderly lady promised to take one of my bags which was piled high and precariously but I managed without her help. Then I popped around to the garage attached to the supermarket where they have newspapers in racks outside and managed to secure one of the last two remaining copies of ‘The Times‘ When we did arrive home, Miggles our adopted cat wanted to make an entrance but was evidently spooked by the wheelchair just inside the front door and was unsure whether to go round it or under it. Eventually, on the second attempt I got the cat into the outer kitchen where he/she knows to sit patiently for me whilst I got Meg into her chair and the shopping inside the house. Like most things these days, everything is logistics or so it seems.

Lunch today was going to be one of those thrown together meals which always turns out to be a little on the large side, But I started off with a couple of onions and two small sweet peppers which were fried together with a couple of tomatoes, some petit pois and a few mushrooms.I added some fragments of beef left over from the weekend and then made the whole into what I have been told is a sort of Arabic curry once I have put in some sultanas, a couple of small diced applies and a dessertspoonful of Demerara sugar. To this I add a small cup full of onion gravy and some brown fruity sauce and let it simmer for a few minutes. Then Meg’s get dished up on sone cauliflower rice substitute whilst I keep my carbohydrate count down with a couple of broken cream crackers. After lunch, I encourage Meg to have a sleep or a deep doze but for one reason or another, I just could not get Meg to settle. She had a rather agitated afternoon until later on I was able to give her some medication. We also started watching ‘La Traviata’ the opera by Verdi which considering the heroine spends much of the opera regretting parts of her past life was perhaps not the most suitable given the events of the afternoon. But there was some glorious singing as well as emotion filled moments which Meg and I really did enjoy. These days we tend to watch an opera over two days rather than in one concentrated session so after the second Act, we paused the transmission and will resume again tomorrow.

Last night, I had sent details of this blog so that Meg’s second cousins (daughters of a cousin?) could catch up on news and I enquired about their mother, Meg’s actual cousin on the maternal side, who I know has been rather poorly. But we received some unpleasant news in the middle of the night because Meg’s cousin is suffering from dementia, a broken pelvis and has to endure two really serious infections. In short, she is only conscious 5% of the time so we are contemplating if and when the families ought to meet for a joint meal. I conveyed the news in its entirety to Meg but I am not sure whether the full import of the news is fully appreciated by Meg. So I am in contact with the two sisters and we are trying to arrange a meal at one or other of their houses next Wednesday unless we get overtaken by events, of course. It is an inevitable consequence of our stage in the life cycle that most of our news about family and friends seems to be about their frailties or worse but we have to be philosophical and make the best of each day as it comes. Although today has not been a particularly good day, I am always conscious pf the fact that ‘tomorrow is another day’

Today was one of those days which I traditionally describe as ‘chewy’ where nothing seems to go quite right. But it started off brightly enough when two carers turned up promptly at 8.30, one of whom I knew from the day before and other was a male carer who knew the ins and outs of everything as he had to care for his invalid mother for years before her eventual demise. He was delightful and, as he had been a hairdresser in a previous life, I let him get on with doing his best on Meg’s hair after we had finished everything else. Last night we had a delightful carer with whom I got on like a house on fire and am relieved that she will be on duty again tonight. Today is the day when our domestic help calls around and it is always good to see her and she helps to jolly Meg along when Meg is feeling a bit low which she is sometimes in the morning. As soon as we had breakfasted, we made our way to the Methodist Centre which is our usual haunt on a Wednesday morning but the entire cafe was in darkness as it was a non-opening week this week, no doubt as a hangover from the Easter holiday. So we thought that we would then make a trip to a ‘Home and Gardens’store which we were assured would have in stock some items of which we had run short. Needless to say, I could not find what friends had assured me that they stocked so I bought something which was probably inappropriate and then decided to visit our local Aldi store which was not too far distant. When I got there, the items that I wanted were completely out of stock so this too was a bit of a miss. In frustration, Meg and I decided that we would go straight home and have our coffee at home. This having been done, we were not too far off lunchtime so we finished off the beef from our weekend roast and ate it with baked potato and primo cabbage.

In today’s ‘Times‘ there was an article written by a lady who declares herself to be 77 years old and the article was entitled ‘Where are the knobs?’ The whole article was bemoaning the fact that the knobs and dials with which we used to control appliances had not been overtaken with smartphones complete with swipes, QR codes, apps and the like – none of which seem to work in the way that you thought. Even on my apple iPhone you are meant to swipe upwards to get a menu that gives you access to a volume control but this (for me) is an incredibly hit-and-miss affair which sometimes works but more often does not. I also have a problem hitting the right keys if only one of my fingers, probably made a bit wider with the onset of some osteoarthritis covers three characters at once when I am trying to type. How the younger generation manipulates quasi keyboards with both their thumbs is totally beyond me. Having said that, there is a bit of a fight back going on. I notice that in the latest generation of Honda car that I have, the adverse reaction of car drivers having to manipulate a slide or touch screen to control the volume of the audio in their car has led the Honda engineers to introduce some selective knurled knobs to control volumes and all of the reviews that I read of the motoring correspondents was that this was surely a move in the right direction and manufacturers were now listening to the likes and dislikes of their customers.

There is a big political story on Sky News today. A mega new YouGov poll has forecast Labour would win more than 400 seats if the general election were held tomorrow. The Conservative Party would crash to just 155 seats, meaning 210 sitting MPs would lose their jobs – among them multiple cabinet ministers. Now I do not expect that this will actually happen in a month of Sundays as the Tories can always rely upon a tranche of voters who will not give their opinions to pollsters, who are generally a-political but who always seem to come out and secretly support the Tories when it comes to the crunch. Having said that, we have the local elections in a month’s time and this is predicted to go very badly for the governing party. When lots of councillors lose their seats, the local party also loses the people who go round knocking on doors, stuffing envelopes and delivering leaflets as the defeated candidates are often disheartened and perhaps even disillusioned. There is some talk that the Tories are starting to think hard about they are going to do in opposition and are even toying with the idea of a ‘Liz Truss Mark 2’ style candidate. One development that may happen is that so many MPs will lose their seats that the wishes of the Parliamentary party may rest on the shoulders of a greatly diminished number. So, the argument runs, why not organise a putsch against Rishi Sunak now given we still have quite a large number of MPs. It is said that Penny Mordaunt as leader, if installed today, would cut the projected majority of any likely Labour government by one half. So we are in a very febrile state of politics at the moment and probably the majority of Tories are resigned to some kind of landslide given the depth of their unpopularity at the moment. It takes a landslide to get rid of a landslide so if we do get a Labour government within a few months time then they may well be in power for the best part of ten years. But I seem to recall an old fashioned examination questions that ran along the lines of ‘The Socialists are in office but the Conservatives are in power. Discuss’ I do remember when I studied the French political system in my second year at University a favourite question was ‘The French voter has his heart on the left but his pocket on the right’ which was a not dissimilar sentiment.

We had a fair night last night but the weather was bright and clear when we woke up this morning and of course it is Tuesday to which we always look forward. I got Meg up, washed, dressed and breakfasted completely on my own this morning and then two cheerful ReAblement care personnel turned up at 9.30 this morning. I explained to them in detail how and why if Meg woke up at 6.30 she needed to be toileted, washed and dressed immediately and she could not be left for a further three hours. The two care assistants were very understanding and put in a special request to their coordinator/scheduler that we really did a first call at about 7.30-8.00pm and they were hopeful that something could be done. After they had left, we started to think about our normal Tuesday morning Waitrose visit and we got there practically on the dot of 10.30 and made contact with one of our usual friends but not the other. We spent the hour discussing some contemporary politics, the vicissitudes of carers as well as some fell-walking stories from our past. As we were leaving, we treated ourselves to a tub of ice-cream now that the weather is getting slowly warmer and we fancy a bit for our evening repast. We dined on fishcakes and microwaved vegetables and then as I try and do straight away, I encourage Meg to have a post-prandial doze.

I got a welcome telephone call from our University of Birmingham friend because we had a loose arrangement that we might collaborate over lawn mowers this afternoon. Last Autumn my friend and I resurrected a basically sound Honda lawn mower which needed a but of TLC (Tender Loving care) and a bit of knowhow to get it working again. This we did in the autumn and we then decided to ‘winterise’ it by draining off the fuel and the old oil. As our collaborative efforts had been so successful we had an understanding that the mower should stay in our garage and then we would use our collaborative efforts to get it functioning again in the Spring. With freshly drawn and stabilised fuel and a new complement of the correct motor oil, my friend and I got it going again. I was attempting to cut our back lawn which was not done the other day so I was popping in at 10 minute intervals to oversee my friend trying his own mower at the front whilst I was making progress at the back. My own mower seemed to be cutting so well and effortlessly that I successfully lowered it a notch (to No 4 of the five positions, No 3 being our ‘normal’ cut) and succeeded in getting the lawns cut whilst Meg was either dozing or in a sleepy mode. So after all of this was completed and the mower put away for another week, Meg and I treated ourselves to a post-prandial cup of tea and some dark chocolate by way of celebrations for two tasks successfully accomplished.

Every so often a government proposes a course of action that seems so ‘barking mad’ that you wonder what minds are at work within government – perhaps is what Sir Humphrey in ‘Yes, Prime Minister’ would call a ‘brave’ decision. The latest proposal which came from the mind of Suella Braverman to take people who are living their lives on the street, sometimes in tents and to sanction them if they are making an excessive smell. The idea is to deter sleeping on the streets which Suella Braverman is terming a ‘lifestyle choice’ and proposing either to fine individuals or to imprison them. On the supposition that no one living on the streets had a credit card or the odd valuable painting to sell to generate funds, then non payment of the fine would resultant in imprisonment. The idea is so crass that even the Education minister who appeared on Sky News this morning refused to support the idea from her own ex-Home Secretary that people be fined for having an excessive smell and it looks as though up to 40 Tory MPs will refuse to vote for the idea – one suspects that the idea is so crass, it will be withdrawn before MPs are asked to vote upon it. But it seems a good way if you are 20 points behind in the opinion polls to drop another 5 percentage points. This of course combined with the recent comment by Jeremy Hunt that £100,000 a year is not a very high salary these days only serves to underline the disconnect between what might be termed the ordinary people and those presently charged with governing us.

Another story worthy of comment is what happened in the Boat Race run last Saturday and won by the Cambridge crew. It transpired that I think three of the Oxford crew had been suffering from vomiting on the morning of the race, probably afflicted with e-coli which emanates from the contaminated Thames on which, of course, they would have practising on for weeks. The authorities even warned the crews that the traditional practice of throwing the winning cox into the Thames should be abandoned this year (although I think the Cambridge cox had collapsed in any case). The whole point of privatisation of the water industry several years ago was to provide the funds (by the efficient private sector) so that the requisite investment could be made. But we have seen an investors strike whereby the principal investors are refusing to fund Thames Water unless prices rises are charged to the customers i.e. the customers have to pay for improvement whilst preserving their dividends. What a mess!

Today when we awoke it was evidently the first of the month and I raced around making sure that all of our various appliances were being charged up before I update our planning board and then brought Meg her early morning cup of tea. Having got Meg up and myself showered, we were just at the point where the carers were due to turn up which they did promptly at 8.30am. They were two jolly ladies who we fairly quickly got Meg turned around and then brought downstairs on the lift and installed in her favourite armchair. Whilst chatting with them, they informed me that they could be deployed anywhere in the county (of Worcestershire) so the logistic of getting care coordinated at any semblance of the allocated time slot must be a nightmare. After we had breakfasted, although the day was a little gloomy, we knew that Waitrose was probably going to be open so we decided to give it a go. Seeing the motorised wheelchair outside the front door, we surmised that our regular friend might be there and indeed she was, soon to be joined by one of her other friends so the four of us spent more than a happy hour together in each other’s company. When out time was up, Meg and I scooted around the store to buy bits and bobs and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Waitrose’s own porridge oats in a simple plastic bag only cost half the price of its market leader equivalents so we snaffled this up readily. On our way home, I decided to impulse to drop in on our close Italian friend who lives down the road. Very fortunately, she was in but just recovering from a bad bout of sciatica. As Meg was in the car, and to keep us all warm and comfortable, I invited our friend into the back of the car and so we could all a little chat in public. We have not seen our Italian friend for a week or so now, so we were delighted to be in contact again and ensured that we had a good ‘WhatsApp‘ contact so that we could arrange to have tea together. Our friend promised to bake us some fresh scones which we can with jam and cream when she calls round so this may well be a treat in store for next weekend all being well. I was explaining to our friend how I transported Meg from place to place in what I am calling our transit chair so we are all quite happy under these circumstances to meet in our house rather than elsewhere. I was just on the point of getting Meg through the door when a physiotherapist from the ReAblement team rang wondering about the equipment that the carer who called the other night had thought was essential. We had quite an extended chat and the physio and I eventually agreed that it was better for the physio to call here and see Meg in her own home and then work out what additional equipment was indicated rather than bring the equipment and then do the assessment. I honestly believe that it best to fit the equipment to Meg’s needs rather than making Meg to conform to the equipment so I think it is more sensible for us to do things this way round rather than to comply with the wishes of one particular carer (who we will now see for a couple of days, thankfully!) who tends to think equipment first. For lunch, we finished off the quasi-Christmas meal that we had yesterday, complemented with some primo cabbage but once again, made into a very tasty meal for us.

On the front page of today’s ‘Times‘ there was a really arresting story which broke through into the attention of the daily news programmed. The headline was ‘Long waits in A&E kill 250 people every week’ Of course, some of this rather sensationalist short hand reporting which makes it sound as though people are turning up to A&E and then dying in vast numbers which is of course not the case. But what is happening is that people who might have died shortly are having their deaths accelerated (i.e. brought forward in time) to when they would have died otherwise. The true basis of the figures is as follows. In 2023, there were 1.534 million emergency patients who waited 12 hours or more and of these 1 million were waiting to be admitted.According to the ‘Emergency Medicine Journal’ there was one excess death for every 72 patients who spent 8-12 hours in A&E. The risk of death grew after a wait of 5 hours and grew worse with longer waiting times. The College of Emergency Medicine estimated that there were 268 excess deaths a week were likely to have occurred last year. Even the concept of ‘waiting time’ has to be decoded because both Meg and I have experienced long waiting times in our hospital experiences. What actually happens is that one joins a queue, generally in a hospital corridor, and one leaves the queue to have things like X-rays, MRI scans, blood tests and the like. Eventually one rejoins the queue and one slowly progresses through the system until eventually the blessed relief of a hospital bed beckons some time in the future. It is true that one can experience a ‘wait’ of 12 hours or more but the wait is actually a process when one waits, then enters a queue, progresses along the queue and then exits the queue i.e. is admitted to a ward. I am not sure that I know the exact definition of how a ‘waiting time’ is absolutely calculated but is certainly true that one’s condition can worsen quite rapidly (e.g, septicaemia take hold) whilst progressing in the queue which evidently has to be monitored carefully by those in charge of the system. I would not want their job for, as they say, ‘all of the tea in China’

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.

Today really starts off with the events of yesterday evening. A carer called round to help me to get Meg to bed but she did seem to have much a clue but watched as I did most of the bedtimes routines myself. Nonetheless, I am grateful for help from whatever quarter. After Meg was abed, I had a FaceTime call with one of my ex-University of Winchester colleagues as we have got into the habit of weekly chats on a Friday evening. But I suspected that I heard sounds from upstairs so I terminated our FaceTime session abruptly and shot upstairs, only to find Meg had successfully negotiated and evaded the devices I place around the bed to prevent her falling out of bed or even getting out of bed and rendering herself liable to fall. I found Meg upright and clinging onto the frame of our en-suite bathroom door so after making sure that she was comfortable I got her back into bed and came to bed myself within about ten minutes to prevent further peregrinations. To prevent this happening in the future, as soon as I was conscious this morning, I got onto Amazon and ordered a baby alarm which I hope will do the trick. Even in the 1960’s, it was possible to buy baby alarms and we bought one to monitor our son but it was never tested to the full because he never work up in the early evening. This product should arrive today and, if it works as intended, then Meg should be able to call out for me if she needs me whilst she remains in bed and this means that I do not need to keep running up and down stairs to check on her. But we both a good night’s sleep and then we got up and waited for the carers to call at 8.20. After half an hour, Meg was still practically undressed in the bathroom so I completed getting her washed and dressed and we made our way via the stair lift into our Music Lounge for breakfast. As we had been a bit delayed waiting for carers who did not arrive, we made our way to Waitrose and were soon joined by four of our friends, including our University of Birmingham friend who had a shrewd idea where to find us. The five of us spent a very jolly hour or even more in each other’s company and in Meg’s case. she enjoyed a double version of a chocolate cake the portions of which had already been heavily discounted in the first place but one of the Waitrose staff working in the cafeteria let Meg have the last double portion of cake as she had just come out of hospital. In the middle of the conversations, my mobile rang and it was the NHS ReAblement team ringing at about 11.10 presumably to get Meg out of bed and wondering if we were all right as we were evidently not at home. After our sojourn, getting into the car proved not to be easy because Meg proved to be especially wobbly and the wheelchair on a slope was running away with us. The upshot of this was that Meg and I both ended up on the floor. About four people rushed to help us and Meg and I were quite quickly got to our feet. The young woman who rushed to help us put her baby into the hands of her partner, helped Meg into the car and then pressed a bunch of daffodils that she had just bought for herself into Meg’s hands. As it was a fine day, I thought it was a good idea to make some preparations for our first mowing of the season. We returned home to pick up a petrol container and then we headed for Halfords. It must be a sign of the times but Halfords was both deserted and also easy to park outside. So I popped in and got a litre of the oil used for garden 4-stroke engines and then journeyed to the nearby garage where I bought a gallon of premium grade petrol (to avoid future problems with the ethanol added to modern petrol which can absorb water and adversely affect the engine of the mower) Then having got home finally, I made a lightning lunch of ham and those microwavable vegetables which are invaluable when in a hurry.

Meg seemed pretty tired and was practically asleep half her through her meal so I quickly hurried off to our little settee where she fell into a deep doze. Knowing that Meg would probably sleep for the best part of three quarters of an hour, I thought this was an excellent opportunity to at least make a start on the lawn mowing. Ascertaining that Meg seemed to be in a fairly deep sleep, I oiled up and fuelled the mower, adjusting the cut to the highest possible setting and it then started fairly readily. So I got through about the first half of the first cut and then our neighbour appeared to edge his lawn. I enlisted his help to keep his hand on the ‘dead man’s handle’ whilst I keep the mowing running and ascertained that Meg was still asleep. As she was, I finished off the second half of the first cut and went inside, to find that Meg was just coming round. I explained to her that I still had the second cut to perform but she seemed happy enough to doze whilst I mowed on fast as I could. The upshot of all of this was that by the middle of the afternoon, I had got the important front lawns cut and the mower cleaned up and put away whilst the back lawn can wait for another fine day in the neat future. As a bonus, I discovered that the frost scraper I had kept by the front door which although useless as a frost scraper is an excellent tool for the removal of grass clippings from the inside of the mower dome, so this was a happy discovery.

So Good Friday morning dawned with quite a bright look to the day. In a slightly wakeful period in the middle of the night, I had got up and found a copy of the manual for our newly installed stair lift – having run off a copy I bound it between two sheets of acetate film, stapled it and then gave it a good tape binding. I was actually taught how to undertake these elements of document preparation by a wonderful South African lady of Asian extraction who was the manager of our reprographic department at the Scraptoft Campus of Leicester Polytechnic. These skills have stood me in good stead and I was deploying them constantly whenever I wrote a conference paper and wanted some ‘good’ copies to distribute. To make a document look really professional, I would deploy the judicious use of colour and some background printed off on glossy paper and used as the front cover. Of course, you had to have a colour printer to print this off but I have stopped bothering with colour printers about a decade ago as I used it rarely and the inks tended to dry up. Having got Meg up, I wondered if our old care agency was going to turn up at 8.00am as was their wont. I got Meg all washed and dressed and the moment I had finished, the doorbell rang and I was confronted by two cheerful care assistants not from my usual agency but from the NHS ReAblement team who I was not actually expecting. So there was nothing for them really to do so they accompanied Meg down into our Music Lounge where the care assistants were intrigued by the musical instruments. So, acceding to their request, I simulated the playing of Mozart’s Turkish march on the Casio keyboard but also gave them a rendition of the parts of Offenbach’s Barcarolle that I could remember from memory. Needless to say, they were intrigued by all of this not having seen anything like it in their normal round of visits. After they had departed, I made a call to the care agency that social services had allocated to us and received the news that the NHS ReAblement team would be taking over the caring role until two weeks on Monday and then our ‘normal’ care agency would take over. The trouble about this is that I am not sure what timings the NHS ReAblement team have scheduled – my usual agency had almost impeccably prompt timings. For example, although someone is scheduled to call this evening at 9.00pm, I had to indicate that Meg was worn out by 7.30 and fast asleep in bed by 8.15. So I had to request a change in time as I didn’t want Meg to be asleep downstairs only to be woken up in order to get to bed again. Not wanting to sound ungrateful or curmudgeonly, I am going to have over a fortnight of unpredictability before a more normal service will resume.

Normally, on Good Fridays, I feel happy when there is a performance of either Matthew Passion or John Passion during the afternoon. This year, a performance of John Passion was being broadcast so I was anticipating a happy coincidence of Meg having an afternoon dinner doze, me starting this blog and the both of us enjoying the Bach played on Radio 3. Knowing that there was probably going to be some good music on Radio 3 on a Good Friday, I consulted the schedules and discovered that there was going to be a lunchtime concert featuring an accordionist. This performer played some Bach, a special arrangement of Grieg’s Holberg suite and then some Mozart – fascinating to hear familiar music played on unfamiliar instrument. Incidentally, is an accordion fundamentally a keyboard or a wind instrument as it appears to me to be both? I only listen to Radio 3 on a selective basis but on important holiday dates, I think Radio 3 tries to be a little less esoteric and to broadcast music with a wide appeal.

Our Irish friends had very kindly made a present of a box of chocolates for Meg (stored up until Easter Sunday) and some cans of Guinness for myself. I remembered that I when I was down in London, I occasionally went out with a friend and we each bought a bottle of Guinness and a bottle of cheapish cider which we mixed in one pint glass. This drink lasted us all evening as befitted our impecunious state so I thought I would resurrect this drink, formerly known as Black Velvet although I think to do it properly one should use champagne rather than cider. So in Waitrose I bought a 2 litre flagon of traditional dry cider ready for an experimental drink tonight. Today when we returned from town and rather hot with the exertions of getting Meg into and out of wheelchairs and transit chairs, I made myself a mixture of three quarters cider and one quarter tonic water. This had the effect of transforming an otherwise dry cider into a medium cider and I was so pleased with the result, so that I might try this particular mixture again.

There seems to be a Wallace and Gromit film on this afternoon so after Meg has had a good sleep, we might divert ourselves with this. I must say that I am not particularly looking forward to the next few days as my delight in getting Meg safely back home is tempered somewhat by the fact that so many of our family and friends are taking several days off so that they, too, can visit family and friends over the Christmas period. My son and daughter-in-law have spent a lot of time with us whilst Meg has been in hospital giving us practical support but they now need to spend some time with my daughter-in-law’s mother and other relatives which is quite understandable. I am looking forward to Easter Sunday if only that my chocolate eating habit can be safely reinstated but I fear that the other vices I have avoided over Lent might be more difficult to reinstate.

Well, every day has its triumphs and challenges and today was no exception. We knew that the assessor from the NHS ReAblement team was going to make contact and, sure enough, we had a phone call at about 9.30 and by 10.15 up she turned. I recounted to her some of the experiences that we had in had in hospital and at some of my accounts she rolled her eyes as things that should have happened and did not. She assumed that the existing care package was still in place but I informed her that the social worker had informed us that this was voided and a new care package had to be put into place. Then it was explained that it was supposed to work in one particular way but in practice worked in another way. However, the good news is that Meg is continue with the existing care package with the current agency, about which we are happy as Meg (and I) have gone to know and respect the various workers (from about eight) who have turned up to the house regularly. In addition, the care package is to be enhanced by one worker turning up in the evening to help me to get Meg to bed and this is actually what happened. The assessor supervised Meg walking to the stairlift and getting on it and had seen enough to assess Meg’s level of frailty and need. It was a very professional assessment and I felt had been done very well. We had just about come to the end of this when our hairdresser turned up by appointment – I had her appointment put on our planning board but (not for the first time) I forgot to consult it. So Meg had a ‘quickie’ hair do and I had my normal and then we set about preparing lunch, which as it was only a quiche that needed heating up in the oven and a few accompaniments was easy enough to organise. After lunch, I encouraged Meg to go and have a doze on our little two seater settee in the Music Lounge and, as good as gold, she had a good doze for the early part of the afternoon but did not sleep for too long which I felt was all to the good.

The afternoon brought its own particular set of challenges. Not having shopped for a couple of weeks I had been living off our stores and reserves but certain reserves such as bread and milk, I badly needed. So I decided to take Meg with me to get some basic shopping done – in future weeks I will have a carer in attendance so that I can do that on my own but today was a bit of an interregnum until the care package started off again. So I trundled Meg out to the car in her transit chair, got her slumped into the seat and made off to the local but smaller Aldi store which I know well. Then I had to get one of those special trolleys, somehow jam Meg’s transit chair into it (and I succeeded in doing it but the wrong way round) Then I had to push Meg in the wheelchair with the supermarket trolley with a mind somewhat of its own but managed to trundle around the store getting most of my regular purchases because I know exactly where things are. Then life became more difficult as I had to leave Meg on one side, get the shopping onto the conveyor belt and thence into my own bags and then load up the trolley with shopping and Meg in tow. The supermarket has installed a ‘scan it yourself’ system which I actively dislike but I think I inadvertently jumped a queue or perhaps other customers saw that I was struggling. As I was getting Meg into the car, the heavens opened with a cloud burst (having been fine earlier in the afternoon) but somehow I got the shopping into the car and then had to cope with Meg. If Meg does not place her feet firmly on the ground, them my pulling her forward onto her feet only propels the wheelchair forward but a kindly gentleman saw that I was struggling and kept the wheelchair steady whilst I bundled Meg in to the car – all in the pouring rain of course. Then I called in at Waitrose, got a copy of my daily newspaper and had to brave the rain again to get Meg into the house via her transit chair. I have to say that we were both a bit exhausted by all of this so I braved the rain to get the shopping indoors, made a swift cup of tea for both (and a dose of chocolate for Meg) and then watched an episode of ‘Yes, Prime Minister‘ to recover a bit from the afternoon.

For tea, I used up a whole pack of mushrooms to have mushrooms on toast with half a tin of mushroom soup and a good sprinkling of garlic. After this, I took Meg down in our main lounge to watch a bit of the news when the doorbell rang promptly at 7.00pm. It was the care worker from the ReAblement team so she and I put Meg to bed using our normal routines. Although I did most of the work, so to speak, I knew the routines and the extra pair of hands was incredibly useful. So we got Meg into bed before 8.00pm and after the excitement of the afternoon, I am pretty convinced that Meg should sleep like a baby (but I will go up to make periodic checks on her that all is OK)

Whilst yesterday was a pretty good day as the first full day at home after discharge from the local hospital, last night did not run quite so smoothly. Meg was awake when I came to bed shortly before 10pm and then was more than a bit fidgety. But then I undertook some remedial measures after which Meg seemed to go to sleep quite soundly whilst I stayed in the far corner of the bedroom using my iPhone and iPad for various little tasks. This morning, I got Meg up, toileted, washed and dressed without much ado although I have to adjust some of my techniques somewhat. This morning is the day of the week when our domestic help calls round but we have not seen her for three whole weeks whilst she was coping with a bereavement within the family. Naturally, we both felt that we had put through an emotional wringer in the last few weeks so we were happy to swap stories and give each other some mutual support. As it is a Wednesday and we are creatures of habit, we decided to call as we usually do each Wednesday into the Methodist Centre. Normally this is very busy each Wednesday but today it was strangely deserted so Meg and I concluded that the normal ‘Music and Movement’ type of classes had been cancelled this week. We got into conversation with an old lady who herself had memory problems but who had a companion to accompany her who has in a meeting in another part of the premises. The lady who started chatting with us had been the wife of a minister (now sadly departed) and had herself spent some about ten years as a missionary in Lagos, Nigeria. We swapped stories about these types of ventures as Meg’s cousin had at one time ministered to a community in Sierra Leone, and even survived a civil war in that part of the world. One thing that we learned today is that the centre is putting on a special afternoon on the third Friday of each month, rather similar to the club we attend on the second Wednesday of each month, so Meg and I will look forward to attending this when we attend the inaugural session towards the end of April.

After a good half hour of chat we get Meg back home and I did appreciate the assistance of our domestic help who helped with the transfer of Meg onto her transport chair and then onwards into our Music Lounge. We lunched on fishcakes and microwaved vegetables which was a quick and easy lunch to prepare. Afterwards, I set Meg down for a doze after lunch which is a habit which I am trying to encourage as I am sure her body probably needs it after a stay in hospital. When I come to think of it, I was hospitalised in the 1970’s after I was involved in a bizarre type of road traffic accident in which the driver of a Hillman Imp had fainted at the wheel of his car whilst approaching a T-junction with the result that I and a couple of my students were hit and set flying (almost literally) through the air. When I returned home from an operation on the severed muscles in one leg, I seem to remember sleeping for about a week both during the day and all the way during the night as well. Hospitals, with the best will in the world, can be noisy places and even a sleep can be disturbed by a nursing or healthcare assistant coming round to the ‘obs’ i.e. blood pressure, temperature and oxygen saturation levels. So this afternoon is proving to be a quiet one and I am looking forward immensely to tomorrow when, all being well, we will be reassessed by the NHS ReAblement team and a care package can be put in place for Meg. So far, we are coping reasonably well with a judicious combination of transports upstairs and downstairs (in effect metal commode chairs on wheels not used as a commode but as a way of whizzing patients from one room to another) and the recently installed stairlift. I think I fully appreciated how necessary this was when the exceptionally good physio nurses based in the community and is classified as the ‘Falls’ nurse, came round to see Meg and I and to assess our needs. When she witnessed how I was actually hoicking Meg up our staircase at the end of each day she told me that she put her hand over her face with horror as she could not bear to witness us making progress beyond the first one or two steps in a normal flight of stairs.

As so often in times of crisis, one’s family rallies around and have been magnificent. My son took upon the task of making me a meal to be stored in the fridge so that when I returned home from hospital every night last week, I had some instant food prepared for me. My daughter-in-law had raided her store of schoolbooks and brought into the hospital a series of books designed to divert Meg and to while away the long hours. Two of the most interesting of these turned out to be ‘Scrapbooks’ (not literally) but compilations of the foodstuffs, clothes and domestic items available first for the 1950’s and then the 1960’s. These are fascinating for anybody to look at – the Health Care Assistants in the hospital and our own domestic help loved glancing through the contents. What is amazing to behold is how many of the foodstuffs from even the 1950’s are still in the same recognisable packaging, the design of which has not fundamentally altered over seventy years. I suppose the manufacturers must feel that is a product has been chugging along with regular sales over the years, there is instant brand recognition and they might not want to change it in case sales suddenly plummet.For example the design of the packaging for Scott’s porage oats and the Heinz range of foodstuffs is practically unaltered.