Theresa’s Writing

  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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…