The bee man sits by his stove drinking sweet coffee

from a mug with ‘Stud” written on the front

He brought the stove from Talia

near the village in Turkey where he grew up

where he has olive groves

and drove it back to Camberwell

in the boot of his Toyota

stuffed in alongside bottles of olive oil

so green they look like Absinthe

that foul smelling drink

they used to serve in the French

before it closed down

on the exact day when the manager tripped

and threw soup over a large

and very drunk food critic

who turned and punched him in the face

 

The bee man sits by his stove on the allotment

and plays backgammon on Tuesdays

with the Kurdish man

who lives in the new flats on the corner

The Kurdish man complains he can hear his neighbour

tapping her teaspoon against her teacup in the mornings

One afternoon the bees swarmed

into the pear tree

a fevered frenzy of buzzing

The bee man shouted for the Kurdish man to get into the shed

as aftershave makes bees angry

And an angry bee down your shirt is the last thing you need

on a Tuesday afternoon

 

The bee man says you must talk to your bees

you must whisper them your secrets and sing to them

This makes the honey sweet and makes your wife love you

The bee man’s wife laughs and says she loves him anyway

even though he has never washed up

and can’t cook

The bee man says if someone dies

You must tell the bees

If you don’t  their souls will get stuck

somewhere between here and there

 

The bee man says he once saw a ghost

Standing by the runner beans

On a shadowy summers evening

When the light was thick and gold

He asked the bees to get it to come back

So I could see it too

But it never did.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

H’s stay in hospital was not a happy one, but when I look back now it was merely a warm up for her subsequent admission into a nursing home a fortnight or so ago, which has been five times worse.

Hospital wards are traumatic at the best of times, but when you are almost 90, with a broken hip and suffering from dementia, they are absolutely the last place you want to be for more than about 10 minutes, (and that’s pushing it). Everyone was very kind, as they always are, but she just couldn’t deal with the noise, the constant banging and clattering, and the food which she took upon herself one evening to throw across the room shouting ” Get me the French consulate” as she spattered her bedside with a rather unnaturally  coloured orange stew.

There were four old ladies in the ward, thin and wiry in bed coats with unopened copies of Woman’s weekly,  packets of wine gums and Ribena on their tables. The woman opposite spent most of her time asleep but was interrupted every hour or so by H shouting at her to say she was sorry for all the shouting. Next to Mrs Trying to sleep  was a tiny little bird of a woman who had broken her arm and spent all day in tears, wondering where her bed was. And next door to H was a very old woman who barely moved but was coaxed to eat and drink by her sons who held her hands and combed her hair and told her about the weather and how the garden was looking. Goodness knows what they made of us.

H was very confused,  convinced that she had been taken somewhere,  though she wasn’t sure where. Their old house? The secret room she thinks is somewhere upstairs from their flat where she swears I live? ( when I’m not rifling through all her paperwork and hiding her things),  or to Egypt?. Our visits were awkward and uncomfortable as we tried to steer the conversations to every day things, rather than the inevitable unfiltered and unmistakable comments about the nurses as they came and went ( “she’s useless, it must be awful being so ugly,” that sort of thing) all the time hoping they didn’t notice as they cheerfully checked her blood pressure etc and tried to persuade her to take her medicine.  “Step away from me you Jezebel” she shrieked at them,  while her cackling laughter sounded as if she was auditioning for a re- make of the Exorcist.

Progress towards mobility was halted when one of the physios left her sitting in a chair and went away, so inevitably she toppled out on to the hard shiny floor. Her broken hip was not damaged but she had a nasty bruise and we had to drive back to the hospital to talk to the nurses where we found her wild eyed and screaming as they tried to settle her down.

Eventually after 10 days, the doctors deemed her fit enough to travel and she was driven to take  up residence in the dementia unit of a very nice nursing home about 10 minutes away from where she used to live. She is on what is known as the ‘escapee floor’ as many of her fellow residents have been moved  there from other nearby homes, homes who  couldn’t manage them or who had in fact just absconded . My favourite is Charlie who climbed over a wall in his last place and went to the pub. I hope someone bought him a pint.

H was, by all accounts, quite calm when on the morning when she arrived, and asked to use the phone to ring my dad. Not realising that she has absolutely no memory of anything like phone numbers they kindly plugged in a phone for her. She promptly rang 999 and told the operator that she had been kidnapped. This obviously happens quite often as the office then rang the nursing home to double check that nobody had actually been abducted. and the phone was duly removed.

Things started to deteriorate that afternoon and poor H has now lost her voice because she spends most of her time shouting or weeping with dry teared rasping convulsions. Sometimes she calms down and sits listening  to music or watches the news, but then it starts again. The nurses wheel her into the sitting room which has a view of the rose garden with big French windows,  but she scrunches up her eyes and says how sorry she is for the poor souls who have to live there,  and asks the lovely black nurse when she is going back to her own country. Visits are pretty tense and you can usually hear the yelling as you walk down the corridor, a knot of dread in your stomach as you brace yourself.  My dad sits holding her hand,  telling her how much he loves her and she tells him how useless he is because he has never been to visit ( he goes every day). Sometimes she tries to hit us or spits at the nurses when they brings her tea. And then suddenly she will smile and ask me how the children are.

As I drive up the A303 after these weekly visits,  I ponder what to do. What to do when you are very old, and actually you have had enough and your options are limited to put it mildly. And what I would want to do if I were them.

Not be so isolated for a start. Live somewhere that isn’t 3 miles from the nearest shops. Get together with your chums and live together. Make your children buy a bigger house so you can go and live with them. Join a choir/book club/ Pilates/keep fit/paint/walk/garden/ knit/learn how to use a computer.

All easier said than done I know, but anything would be better than one of them being alone in an empty flat,  and  the other having to live somewhere that really isn’t her own home and never will be.

And at the end of the day,  the hard reality is the fact that they will never get to live together again.

 

 

 

 

So after 6 months or so of trying to manage H and her downhill slide into Vascular Dementia and Alzheimers,  it seemed that finally we had our feet on the finishing line and she was due to go into a very nice nursing  home this very afternoon. Before you sigh with relief and put the kettle on, let me rewind.

As many of you are sadly familiar, dementia is a horribly cruel disease, awful for the sufferer and impossibly difficult for the families and carers, as they try to negotiate the confusion, abusive behaviour and agitation that in H’s case, go hand in hand with this miserable and cruel condition. Someone who was kind and compassionate has had her soft edges snapped off and she has become mean and quite simply, nasty.

At the beginning, H was still very much her old warm self, just a bit forgetful and confused, but these days by lunchtime we are in a war zone of wild eyed mania and fury at the world, at my dad, at the carers, at me, at anyone who happens to be passing, even the BT engineer who was startled to encounter a half dressed H wobbling towards him shouting and waving her stick.

Trying to maintain a level head in all this is really hard, because there is absolutely no logic to her ranting and I need to breathe very deeply and try to remember it’s not her, its the illness saying such hurtful things. And much of what she says is almost credible.  After all did I really manage to break in at night and steal all the carpets in the flat? Of course not, but if you didn’t know, you might almost believe her because she is so convincing. And there is absolutely no point trying to persuade her that what she is saying isn’t true, because she will argue until the cows come home that actually she has been forced to live in somebody else’s flat and that in fact there is a secret room upstairs that I hide in ( which frankly would possibly have been quite useful at moments). And it was a relief when she moved on from her obsession with planning my dads funeral (at the top of her voice at lunch as he sat there in silence, and the other residents shifted uncomfortably in their seats). At one point it looked as if we were going to be looking at Salisbury cathedral given the extravagant arrangements as I wasn’t sure we could fit a whole orchestra into the local church but luckily this seems to have been forgotten.

Her study is like a crime scene with papers ( so tidily filed and put away on a weekly basis) thrown all over the floor in a constant search for something. “What are you searching for?” I asked her. ” My father” she said.

Trying to get a formal diagnosis has been extremely difficult, mostly because every time she visited the Memory clinic team they would always asks the same questions, and as she could remember the answers, she sailed through with flying colours. The fact that she then went home,  put all her clothes on back to front and filled each kitchen drawer with basmati rice seemed of little consequence. Again, the GP would pop in early on a Thursday morning and find her making porridge and complaining about Brexit. Again, all must be well in the home. WRONG.

It seems that most of the problem is that nobody the NHS has time to talk to each other  and to join up the dots between the numerous departments so that things take much longer than they should, appointments are  constantly cancelled or re arranged which is impossible for anyone elderly, let alone someone like H to attempt to get her head around,  and it must waste so much time for all concerned. Everyone is perfectly nice once you manage to get hold of them, but if it wasn’t for the fact that I have spent most of the last month on the phone badgering everyone I dread to think where we would be now.

Things really started to unravel about 3 months ago, and it seemed we weren’t getting anywhere. Despite endless falls and scrapes and being in and out of hospital,  it seemed that nobody was in a rush to get to the bottom of it . We lived each day at a time and every time the phone rang I dreaded what it might bring.

The third  assessment  ( after she had fallen and been in  hospital)  finally confirmed that she has Vascular Dementia and Alzheimers, though also put on paper that H said nobody should share her medical records with me and this was typed up in the second paragraph is if it was fact.  It doesn’t matter in the greater scheme of things but I find it extraordinary that a medical professional  took this verbatim  from someone who was extremely distressed and confused by all their questions,  when with a little digging they would have found this to be complete nonsense.  After this meeting  we were told we  needed to get her put on a dementia drug that will ease her agitation and calm her.   However we were also told that no GP can prescribe this drug and that she would have to see the prescribing doctor at the mental health team who could not give her an appointment  until mid October. I could not imagine how she ( or my dad) were meant to  survive until then.

Their flat is too small to accommodate a live in carer ( and my dad absolutely refused point blank to have anyone living with them anyway, and to be honest it was hard to imagine a less hellish job). We upped the care package so that someone was with her  pretty much all day.  The wardens who man the office at the end of the corridor would cough politely and whisper ” could we have a word?” whenever they saw me come through the door and would then go on to catalogue H’s latest antics, shouting at other residents, trying to get out of the front door in her underwear, that sort of thing.

I called nursing homes and looked through brochures. Some were awful, some wouldn’t take anyone with dementia. I went to see two homes nearby and they had places but both  said they could not accept her unless she was on this drug. Two of the carers handed in their notice. I emailed and rang the mental health clinic, the memory team, the GP countless times. I explained that unless something was done H would end up being sectioned and that she was  a danger to herself, to my dad and that we could no longer manage her. Finally  someone arranged  to get an appointment for last Thursday for the prescribing doctor to come out to see her. This doctor arrived with incomplete notes,  assuming she was just there to do an assessment with little idea of our situation and would have merrily scarpered without a prescription if we had not pointed out that they had already done an assessment  months previously and that we were fast running out of care options, and would lose the place at the nursing home if she wasn’t given it, so she relented and very reluctantly wrote out a prescription. At last!

The manager of the nursing home we chose came to meet us and to asses H’s needs.  H seemed calm and understood that she was going to go somewhere. My dad agreed if it was only for two weeks. H sometimes thinks my dad is going too. I don’t say anything. I imagine it will be a little like going to boarding school and after a while you just get used to it. We arranged for her to return after work on Monday and that we would take H there this morning. I printed out forms and thought about what we should pack for her to take.

And then yesterday morning the phone rang. H fell getting out of bed, has badly broken her hip, bruised her leg and was taken off to Salisbury in an ambulance. I went to visit her, in the next ward to the one where my dad was 2 months ago when he broke his hip and down the corridor from where they both were when my dad crashed the car. When I got out of the lift I bumped into one the porters  who had helped wheel my dad to the X ray department. “So you’re back again” he said cheerily.

I have no idea what will happen next. Hopefully the nursing home will still take her.We can live in hope because actually hope is what keeps us going.

 

 

PLAXTOCK

The very word conjures a feeling of summer warmth and love, and in my case a foolish hope that maybe one year, I will not go out all guns blazing in a mist of tequila slammers and dancing on Saturday night, thus rendering myself incapable for the rest of the weekend, a mere shadow of life as I crawl about the kitchen in my apron, my hair looking like Mel Gibson in Braveheart, attempting to make intelligent  conversation, pretending  that making chick pea curry for the masses is exactly what I need to be doing on a Sunday, and then lo and behold S has made vodka jellies for breakfast, and here we go again and suddenly everything is alright with the world,  and once again we are invincible.

It  would be useful to remember that  I’m almost 60 , and one would have thought that pacing would be my second name in the greater scheme of things.

Then again at Plaxtock nothing is what it seems,  and it appears that lessons are never learned amongst the cherries.

And frankly I blame the company,  who seem to misunderstand the term moderation.

The orchard. So much has happened in that lovely  field over the years.

The tent that could tell a thousand stories, whose patchwork canvas holds the imprints of songs and words, of laughter and tears, love,  voices and music, soaring brass, the patter of rain and the smell of damp as the sun comes out. The funeral march and gathering of the clan.

And the mice complain and move out for the weekend as we shake their droppings out of the tablecloths

Twenty five years. A life time.

Small children driven into a frenzy by the lead up to the boy and girl band ( think Gladiator). ” It’s not a competition” , yeah right.

Of whispering Tim and Radio Plaxtock,

A gaggle of sun kissed feral kids straight from the tipi in Devon,  rampaging on the dance floor  until they fell asleep on  hay bales, squeezing the last vestige of the summer out of August before school and hairbrushes took over.

When Clem got bitten by one of the pigs and said ” I think he thought my finger was a biscuit”.

The Plaxtock Olympics with Jon doing dressage which was so funny we cried

The water slide

Chainska

Love Grocer and The Petter All skas

The Tin Pots

Cake competition

Honey tequila and Plaxtock pleasers

Snail racing

The stuffed pepper

Frisbee in the sun

Lotte Reineger in the cinema tent that set Tashi off on her PHD

The group photo that sometimes we get round to, sometimes not, but it doesn’t  matter because there is always next year

Table tennis competition

Getting my head shoved down between a hay bale ( you know who you are)

Power cuts and drum solos

The tent pegs

Cheesy disco, the best disco all year

Lying on our backs looking at the stars

Hanging lanterns in the trees so we can find our way back in the dark

Braden’s tiny rave

Toxic Robot

Tim

Hugo

Andrea

Out of sight but in the orchard with us for always

Our Plaxtock family

We love you

See you at the weekend

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As I looked out of the rain smeared window on the bus  back from Covent Garden this morning,  I thought about the rain in Devon. Proper skin drenching rain, with an earthy dampness that softens your skin and mingles with the  smell of woodsmoke and damp socks, the perfume of summer camping.

This years camp got off to a promising start, with blue skies and sun and my birthday  swim at high tide,  a pint of Tribute and a picnic of squidgy cheese and pickles balanced on the rocks. That’s the thing about the weather down there,  it throws a bit of sunshine at you and you get carried away. You forget to pack waterproofs and boots when you go out, because you simply can’t imagine  that within the space of an hour the wind will pick up,  the clouds start to  bleed into each other like a Turner painting and the soft pitter patter of rain on canvas  worsk  itself into a drumming frenzy of Samba band proportions as the sky closes in on itself.

As I have said before in numerous posts,  we are well prepared. This is not because we are particularly clever, more that 28 years or so of coming here has made it abundantly clear that this is not the sort of holiday for a pop up tent and a quiet night in, with a tin of ready made gin and tonic as you huddle in your ( tiny) porch waiting for it to stop raining. No, it needs to be a holiday of military canvas and a proper drinks cabinet. And a well equipped kitchen complete with saffron and mushroom stock cubes. We probably eat better there than any of us do at home, and its all the more fun because its outdoors and pretty much anything tastes delicious when you have been in the fresh air all day, even the odd slug that may accidentally have found itself in the wrong place at the wrong time. And the introduction of quiz night added to the fun, though certain people should perhaps have a little chat with themselves about the rights and wrongs of cheating before we do it again next year. Personally the local round was most informative and I was astonished to find that the actual cost of a ( plastic) basket of cheesy chips at the quay  is £4.25p. I must thank the quiz masters for that snippet and budget accordingly in the future.

After five days of hot sun, the storm rumours started. Not any old storm, a storm of Biblical proportions, one that would bring down caravans and camper vans , trailing sodden tents  in its wake. The locals even considered cancelling the carnival, an event that had carried on despite everything for the past 100 years. It was hard to imagine the upset this very thought must have caused the gaggle of farmers, who viewed this one day in the whole year as their opportunity to borrow their wives frocks and mascara and frolic down the high street in  fishnets.

Friday morning loomed blustery and wild. The church spire at the end of the field had been swallowed up in a sea mist, and if you looked out across towards Lundy you could see the waves frothing and crashing around the headland like angry wasps. People were packing up , shoving damp tarpaulins and bags into their boots, chivvying children and disobedient dogs to hurry up and get into the car. Gradually the campsite was emptying as people headed out, relieved to be returning to four walls and double gazing.

Obviously we didn’t all go with them. We reckoned that our corner would survive if we moved everything down into the hedge , so we shifted the army shelter and dragged  all the cookers and crates underneath. My van wouldn’t blow down ( hopefully) and the bell tents  should withstand strong winds. So we drank wine and waited.

At about 2am the wind really started to howl, to the point that I had to lie in bed holding on to the main pole of my bell tent. At about 2.30am G came in to say hers had collapsed and that she was moving into the Ford Capri. At about 5 am the wind direction changed and the full force slammed against the front porch , collapsing the poles that hold it together. At the same time the wind whipped around the guy ropes so that the entire front was flattened and the whole tent  was doing some kind of crazy blancmange dance . At this point I went into the van and woke L who claimed to be asleep. After some prodding he got up. ” Fucking hell” he said as we managed to get it upright and pegged backed in.

The next morning the sky was clear, though the wind continued all day through to the evening, rattling and whining through the shelters, which remarkably were undamaged.

Just in case we hadn’t had our fill of wind, we went to the lighthouse, and then down to the quay where huge waves crashed over the quay as we ordered cheesy chips ( £4.25) and pints.

And they got away with the carnival that night though to be honest we were all so exhausted we were all in bed by 10pm.

Roll on next year.

 

 

 

As usual, the sheep and I are up first in the field, with a cup of tea for me and I imagine, fresh grass for the sheep. I remember one night camping in the orchard in Kent in our ( now retired) tipi . Possibly because I had forgotten my torch or possibly because we had drunk too much, we left the tipi door wide open. I woke in the night to hear this weird scrunching noise next to my head and was slightly shocked to find a large damp sheep nuzzling into the packet of cheddars we had left out. Another time down here I had decided to come and camp on my own and for the first time pitched my bell tent in the next field, the field that is wild and windy with a view of Tims stone and the ancient swannery ( though it’s hard to imagine what sort of life they must have had being battered half to death on the rocks). The first night was mildly alarming as I kept waking up thinking I could hear a mad axe man sharpening his knives somewhere in the hedge ( think Withnail and I kind of vibe) . What was also alarming was that there was absolutely no signal at all so there was no way I could alert the ( who? Bideford police.? Coastguard ? ) . The second night there was an awful storm, a storm that whipped and snarled around me like being tossed at sea in a washing machine with sheets of rain smashing against the canvas. Finally the whole front of the bell tent collapsed in on itself emptying a night full of rain on to my bedding and clothes. I gave up and got in the car and drove to the farmhouse where C made me a cup of tea. The interesting ( or perhaps not so ) fact about all this was that that very morning C had introduced me to a very boring gnome of a man who was in his perfectly formed beige caravan and claimed to be a weather forecast expert and even had some kind of weather aerial on top of his caravan. He was extremely pleased with himself and proclaimed that the next two days were going to be perfect camping weather. A claim no doubt based on the fact that he was living in his caravan with a gas heater and a roof so any train was of no consequence to him whatsoever. Either way he was useless and should perhaps consider another career. C later found two pairs of my pants and one sock lying in a sodden heap in the brambles. Being a very polite and discreet gentleman he folded them neatly and put them on the bonnet of my car. I threw them in the bin on the way up to the house.

And so here we are again in the ( other ) field in North Devon and goodness me, it’s a tidy camp. Gone are the days of endless trips in the rain to the laundrettes in Bude or Bideford, the highlight of which was always actually sitting in the car with the heating full on. We no longer have to lug water down from the top field, heat it up and then wash up dirty plates and mugs, while trying to keep a herd of feral children out of the mud, the fire and out of trouble, failing miserably on all three counts. There is now a washing machine , more loos, hot showers AND a washing up room with three sinks and Radio 2 playing at all times. Our army shelter ( Colonel Poppit) is up, we have cookers and my big burners at the ready, Ronnie Sunshine ( my Dutch oven ) has broken loose from our Camberwell garden and is waiting to be loaded up with chickens and fresh herbs for tonight’s dinner. The fire pit is dug and even the cool boxes are perfectly paralleled parked next to each other. This year , to add to the fun we have introduced a white board which hangs in the Poppit. Each morning we add a thought for the day ( yesterday’s offering was ” if you can survive camping with someone you should marry them on the way home”) the weather forecast , a list of the days activities , amusing comments..you get the picture. Its the little things that keep us happy, and frankly I find much to be happy about when I’m here.

Much of our time here is spent discussing the weather and what to eat/ drink next, when is high tide, the state of people’s bowels, whether it really is brightening up ( or does it just look like it because we are sitting under a dark canvas). Its amazing how much of the morning you can get through with these sorts of topics, particularly as it starts again as a new person emerges into the group so we recycle the chat through to about lunchtime then it’s time to eat again. We also spend hours making up games and quizzes. When the kids were smaller we also had to factor in the quad bike ride that happened each morning , the kids straining their ears for the sound of the bike and trailer and would then go off happily in a squealing herd with C who would take them hurtling across the cliffs to feed the sheep ( and teach them about electric fences by getting them to hold on to them, a practice not necessarily embraced by the other parents but it was just fine by us). But now they are all taller than me and would rather stay under the duvet than be out in the fields and I guess the next lot of quad bikers from this end will be our grandchildren. In the old days, Charlie the milkman used to drive round the field in his van with milk, eggs etc. He was a bit fascinated with our tribe of tipi dwellers and one day brought his grandchildren up ” to look inside the wigwam”. His fascination with us dwindled into mild horror as on entering they found a sleeping bag smouldering in the fire, with a gaggle of filthy matted haired children in pyjamas playing top trumps, totally oblivious to the melting bedding in front of them.

Since starting this post the church tower at the end of the field has disappeared into fog, the rain turned from fine mist into a heavy downpour, we went down the road for a swim, bobbing about like corks in the jade green swirling mass of splashing and splashing as the waves crashed over the end of the quay, shivering as we dried ourselves with damp towels, our hair sticky with salt. The church bells are ringing, the rain has stopped, sun has come out and the breakfast team are frying up sausages, mushrooms, tomatoes and fried eggs. And if I hadn’t left the camping radio on all night and drained the batteries I would be listening to The Archers. But actually it doesn’t matter one bit. And as if things couldn’t get better there is a dog show in the village hall.

When I finally gave up pretending I was trying to sleep in the attic oven and got up, I opened the curtains and there was a half dead pigeon lying on its side on the flat roof outside my window. Now there are two things that make me panic..cockroaches and flapping birds.

I can remain cool as a cucumber ( though not today, the hottest day that is ever to be apparently) when encountering a London cockroach, like the one that crawled across the table when we took my dad to Pollo’s in Soho. This establishment, a much frequented student haunt in my younger days is slightly below his usual fine dining radar, but he took to the challenge with good humour as he wedged himself into the rather uncomfortable bench seating in between his grandchildren. All was going well until a Werther’s original sized cockroach strolled leisurely across the formica table and sat there looking at us. We pretended not to notice. The cockroach stared at us. I tried to make conversation. The kids started to giggle. Finally the waiter stepped in, marched over and whacked the cockroach with a napkin and without a word scooped up the flattened corpse and went about his business.

Another time, we went to the opening of a new wine bar in Camberwell and as my friend lifted up her glass of wine a large cockroach that must have been hanging out on the overhead fan fell into the glass with a loud ‘plop’. This resulted in much hilarity and free wine for the rest of the evening. We didn’t return. Indeed the only other story I have about that very wine bar was from T , who went there for dinner one evening fairly soon after it opened . As they sat waiting for their meal a manky old tramp squatted down outside the window and had a very loud and very long shit in full view of the startled diners. The wine bar struggled on for a while but eventually closed down and is now a swanky cafe selling smashed avocados and turmeric tea.

Talking of things falling out of the sky ( well I sort of was), reminds me of two of the best stories I have ever heard.

The first one concerned L and some of his mates who were larking about one evening ( as you do) on the roof of the Bussey building, an old cricket bat factory in Peckham. In the early days the whole set up was a bit ramshackle and resembled an Amsterdam squat with endless rooms leading into dishevelled studios and cafes, now extremely gentrified full of 4×4 buggies and yoga mums. Anyway, they used to get a bit of extra income by hiring out some of the larger rooms to local churches at the weekends and the boys found themselves looking down through the skylight on a church gathering. And I mean the sort of all singing, all dancing churches with huge hairstyles and shiny frilly suits and the sort of dresses you should not approach with a naked flame. The sort of church that breathes fire and brimstone in time to the out of time drum kit with a lot of clapping and shouting. You get the picture. As the preacher got into his stride and the congregation got into their swaying, one of L’s friends lost his footing and fell through the skylight, dragging another boy with him and the pair landed on the preacher, knocking him to the ground as the astonished churchgoers shrieked in horror. He then lay on the pair of them and performed a citizens arrest while his sidekick called the police. After being taken away in a police van and questioned for the rest of the day the boys were released on a caution. And when Lucas got home and told me this I had to lie on the floor and my stomach hurt because I was laughing so hard.

The second one is so unbelievable that you just have to believe it. My friend A was standing at the local cash point minding his own business as you do. Suddenly the bloke in front turned round and punched him full in the face, knocking him over and bloodying his nose. A had no idea what had just happened and the pair of them had a heated exchange, to put it politely. It transpired ( get this) that a pigeon had dropped dead out of the sky and hit the bloke in front on the head. He had assumed it was A . I mean how good is that story?

And I have just realised that as usual I have gone off on a tangent. I haven’t even got round to the Japanese cockroaches.or the flapping birds, or the time a moth flew into my mouth. But there is a coffee pot that needs putting on, and a rucksack that needs packing. Another time.

Stay cool people.

Unbelievably, I am back in a hospital ward, though this time one with a slightly better view over the Wiltshire downs. As I retired from my nursing duties and J made his escape back into the environs of Camberwell and Boris Johnson land ( they live in the same street) I got a call to say that S had fallen and fractured his hip, so I headed down to Salisbury hospital, a hospital that has become so familiar over the years that I even have my favourite parking space.

Unfortunately S and H live right on the border of Dorset/Wiltshire which while normally unremarkable, has a huge bearing when doing things like calling ambulances, because Dorset thinks it’s Wiltshire’s responsibility and vice versa, which results in outrageous delays, seven and a half hours in this case. I thought our waiting times last week were pretty hardcore but seven and half hours lying on the sitting room floor ?

The ward is here is bright and roomy with only four beds and none of the stuffy cupboard like feel of last weeks in Kings with the poor excuse of a window that looked out on a concrete wall. The nurses are tattooed and cheerful and just as in London, you wonder at their patience and kindly attitude, particularly to an elderly bewildered patient who is in pain and exhausted.

The man opposite is a squaddie from Larkhill ( where we used to go to the point to point) and he has some weird kind of swelling on his knee but nobody knows what it is. He is very keen ” to get back to the action” ( whatever that is) and keeps doing press ups. The guy next to him is a Sri Lankan jockey with a delicious smile and a hideous purple sling that has to be hung from on a frame as he fell off his race horse and has broken his hand in five places and has to keep it upright. He is really sweet and seems to take his fate ( 4 months in plaster, 3 more ops) with incredible good grace. And next door we have a smiley colonel ( complete with wine coloured cords and wife in wool Jaeger skirt) who has slipped a disc and is keen to get home as they are off to Barbados on Friday . Aren’t we all.

Yesterday was not a good day by any stretch of the imagination. S was in great pain, not helped by the lying on the floor scenario, and having had nothing to eat for hours. Nobody likes being manhandled and pushed from pillar to post in hospital but S really hates it . Though it is obviously done for a reason, the long list of questions that pre emptied any examinations were rather frustrating . He was perfectly able to give them his DOB, the name of the Queen, to count backwards from 20, the date of the first world war etc etc and I wasn’t sure why they had to ask him them all again and again when it pretty obvious he is tip top in the brain department. Not being able to get up to get to the loo resulted in some mishaps, something unbearable to a dignified and usually immaculately dressed 92 year old. It was very hard to watch and I cried on the way home as I drove through through the valley, golden and familiar, reminding me of when I was younger and had short hair and we were students in Salisbury.

When I finally left the hospital and drove back to the flat, a scene of carnage greeted me ( along with a strong smell of burning). H had attempted to make kedgeree ( using smoked trout, sugar, ham, nuts and rice) for a fictitious trumpeter who was apparently coming to dinner. This had then been dropped all over the kitchen floor. All four oven hobs were full on, as was the oven, and the bottom of the rice cooker blackened . When I opened the kitchen drawers I found that basmati rice had been tipped into each one, a bit like that game ‘Mancala’ we used to have as kids. I managed to calm H down and got her into bed and went out into the garden with a glass of wine.

This morning when I arrived back on the ward I was told that they have decided not to operate because the position of the fracture means it will heal better without pinning and having a plate inserted. This is obviously good news, but S now thinks he can get up and waltz off home. He can’t. He simply cannot bear any weight on his right side and this has resulted in a lot of shouting and swearing ( I had to apologise to Mrs Jäegar skirt who looked a bit startled at the last outburst). It looks as if he will be in here for a couple of days as he simply cannot go home until as the very least he can walk and get himself to the loo and back. So the car crash continues, they crash, get patched up, then crash again. And each time the getting up gets slower until they run out of time and energy and do not get back up.

And when I was looking for his glasses to bring in I found this on his desk written in his exquisite handwriting.

Why do people die so young?

Why do I live so long?

This week I have spent quite a lot of time in hospital, not as a patient, but with our dearest chum J who pinged in and out of A and E like a yo-yo last weekend, before finally being admitted and diagnosed with a nasty dollop of pneumonia and a lung infection.

I have him to thank for providing the inspiration for my last writing module of the university term. We had to produce a segment as if from the middle of a science fiction novel. I don’t really get science fiction, and was on the bus home trying to think of a character , when he texted to say that the lung people were on their way to visit him. You can’t really get more early Doctor Who than that very sentence, and so the seed was sown. As I sat on the 68 bus I imagined what sort of baddie a lung person would be. Perhaps their arrival would be heralded by a puff of putrid green mist? What would it be like to shake a lung person’s hand ? Similar to touching a slimey mushroom, a bit like the house I stayed in once in Limerick, where the bedroom wall was actually wet when you touched it and the sheets had tiny little spots of mould on them that sprouted as fast as they were laundered, dried and put back on the bed.

Hospitals are weird places at the best of times, but A and E on a Friday night ( and a Saturday night as it happens) are like hell on earth. Things always start off with a feeling of optimism when you arrive, there doesn’t seem to be much going on and you start to think that you might even get home to get the supper on. You are seen fairly quickly by the nurse who has taken notes from the paramedics (who themselves are saintly fabulous human beings) and then things start to go downhill. The queue that you thought you were at the front of gets swallowed up as more and more people come in, some in handcuffs with tight lipped police escorts, some on trolleys, in wheelchairs, some hobbling. A jumble sale of hurting humanity arriving with a beep as the automatic doors whooshed open and shut, sucking the last vestige of fresh air from the room that smelt of sweat and disinfectant.

Once through registration, we took up residence on a row of scuffed plastic chairs in a custard yellow corridor with unforgiving strip lighting, and I ventured off to M and S for supplies. I lost interest in my cheese and pickle sandwich when the man opposite, who was wearing slippers with Fuck on one foot and Me on the other, started vomiting violently into one of those cardboard bowler hats. The staff were, as ever, patient and kind, but they are simply overwhelmed by the sheer multitude of patients who flow in like a never ending tsunami of broken bodies and minds. How anyone manages to do this job and remain smiling is totally beyond comprehension.

We read the paper and did the crossword. We talked about our summer holiday and whether or not this might be the year when it doesn’t rain most of the time. J tried his best not to laugh because it really made his chest hurt. Every now and then one of us would go and see if his name was still on a list somewhere. A nurse came and gave him some morphine which he sucked through a syringe like a baby bird. A nice old couple came and sat next to us and were shocked to hear we had already been waiting for four hours. The wife was bright eyed with worry and held her husbands hand tightly. He was silent and confused. I gave him the other half of my sandwich and he thanked me in a tiny squeak like one of those build a bear voices. Then a doctor came and showed us into a room that was usually used for Ebola patients with posters on the wall telling you how to undress without contaminating anything. The doctor was ginger haired and funny and J tried his best not to laugh.

We decided to leave him to it and went home where we had pea and ham soup and watched an episode of ” would I lie to you”. The phone rang at 2.30am and it was J saying he had been discharged. I got into the car in my pyjamas and drove him home. The following afternoon we had to call an ambulance again and once again we found ourselves back in the custard yellow corridor. This time J was not laughing. He finally got admitted to a ward at 2am.

Almost a week later he is well enough to venture out from his ward for walks around the park, carrying his drainage tube and bucket under one hand. The sun warms his skin, and each day he walks a little further. We talk about the trees and look at the goslings who waddle like lanky teenagers through the gap in the fence. The bees are nuzzling the lavender and the roses heavy and full like papery pom poms. We sit on the bench and look at the arch where the man sometimes plays bagpipes and talk about how you rarely see butterflies any more. The gardener scorches the weeds with a flame thrower and a woman runs past shouting for her dogs who are chasing squirrels.

And then it’s time to go back. Back to the stuffy room where its impossible to tell what the weather is doing as the only window looks out on to a concrete wall, but they are looking after him and making him well, and fingers and toes crossed, he will be back home soon.

It must be strange when you get to the age where every day is pretty much the same as the other, with nothing to differentiate between them, apart from knowing that trips to the post office happen on a Monday, laundry gets collected on a Tuesday , the GP pops in on a Thursday morning, Ocado man on a Wednesday, there’s always fish on a Friday lunchtime, and so on. When your previously busy life starts to shrink, little things become big things to fill the gaps, gaps that were once full of books, newspapers, friends, gardening, driving to the shops, going to church once a week, and belonging to a community, to a village.

As time went on, downsizing became an inevitable and a necessary evil, and I doubt whether either my dad or stepmother would still be here if they hadn’t moved into the supported living apartment where they now live. They are safe, warm, in an easily maintained ground floor flat with alarms in each room, a walk in shower with seating, a study each and french windows that open out into the grounds. There is a warden on duty who keeps and eye on their comings and goings, and someone knocks on their front door each day to check all is well. Despite having been there recently during one of these visits when my dad slammed the door in the wardens face and shouted ” YES, I’M FINE” these calm and patient people persevere with smiles and good nature. There is a hot lunch provided so at the very least I know that they will have had something to eat each day, even though they spend a great deal of time complaining about how revolting the food is ( as they devour each last mouthful). The whole set up is perfectly nice, people are friendly, my stepmother visits the mobile hairdresser on a Friday and has coffee with the woman who lives upstairs afterwards.

However, it will come as no surprise to learn that the pair of them are just plain miserable and are going downhill with alarming speed. Though it wasn’t feasible in any way for them to stay where they were, at least there they were part of the community. Now my dad spends most of his time sitting at his desk looking out over the garden. This isn’t very different to what he used to do at their old house but at least then the garden was his. He has, by choice, and because he is very deaf, not made the effort to make any kind of connection with his fellow residents , and since writing off his car 18 months ago is dependant on taxis to get to and from the nearest shops, so spontaneity is not an option and the days when he could nip into town to get a paper are over. Unfortunately rather than make the most of things, he has taken the ” I hate it here, there’s no point in making any kind of effort and I may as well take everyone else down with me ” option, so their lives have become increasingly separate and solitary and emotionally barren.

My stepmother, an avid bookworm, no longer has good enough eye sight to read, and despite attempts to introduce her to the delights of kindle and audio books, is now without the ability to lose herself a good book, or to keep abreast with current events by reading the Times, that is still delivered each day for my father to hide behind in his study. Struggling with the onset of some kind of dementia, she has become a demon paperwork shifter and sorter. Every day she empties her office filing cabinet, spilling bank statements and receipts in her wake, laboriously poring over each piece of paper with a magnifying glass, poring over bank statements, laundry bills and letters from investment companies. Piles get piled into other piles , papers get put in the wrong order, things that were very much in order start to unravel and spiral out of control, the more she muddles things up the more confused she gets and the more convinced she becomes that someone else has been in and messed everything up, that someone is out to whisk all her money away from under her nose. We tidy up, put things away and show her that all is well, there is no need to worry, we go through the statements and reassure her that nothing is amiss. And yes, don’t worry, I know where your will is, what drawer it lives in, who to call when you have died. Because you have showed me a hundred times.

The phone calls, sometimes seven or eight in succession become more regular. The questions get more and more random. Did I steal all her clothes when I left to drive back to London? Why had I been taking all her pills? Did I empty the freezer of chicken before leaving? The lovely woman who drops in every day to help calls to say my stepmother is wearing her clothes inside out and back to front and says she wants to go home.

And now we get on to the funeral. Not her funeral but my dads funeral. This started a couple of months ago when we were having lunch. My stepmother suddenly said ” I have good news, I’ve found a good place to have tea after dads funeral”. Not only did she announce this to the whole of the dining room but also to my dad who though not in the prime of his life is certainly still alive. This has become a regular occurrence and has a large file to go with it . My dad sits through these conversations without saying a word, as she tells me ( and anyone else who happens to be listening) about the caterers she wants to use, the opera singer, the organist, the speakers, a jumble of contact numbers and names, none of whom my brother and I have ever heard of. I tried distracting her by asking her once what she wanted for her own funeral. ” Nothing” she said.

It is impossible to know what to do, other than what I am doing already, which is to drive down once a week, to listen and clear up the piles, hunt in the bins for missing fortunes, make sure there is food in the fridge and check that the bruises on my stepmothers legs are not getting worse ( she falls over constantly these days). The option of them moving up here to live with us is unthinkable on every level so I am destined to drive past Stonehenge on the six hour round trip on a regular basis for the foreseeable future. It’s just what you do isn’t it.

My dad shouts and tells me to ‘bugger off’ and then in the same breath says he loves the jar of marmalade I made for them. We remember people from the past and they ask me if I still see anyone from school days. My stepmother sends me to the bank to check her accounts and then gets me to look through the bin for her necklace as she swears the cleaner threw it in there. I make them tea and my dad has three slices of cake. She shows me her Will and I show her photos of the kids. My dad says everyone has gone mad with this Brexit nonsense and my stepmother starts on about funeral arrangements. I say ” Well, he’s still here actually” and give my dad another bit of cake.

When its time to leave I tell them to stay where they are as its chilly and drizzling. I get in the car and when I turn the corner there’s my dad who has hobbled out into the road with his walking stick in the rain to wave me off.