Summer is fading and so is my mother

At least I look five years younger than I am

Photo by Kent Baker/Millennium Images, UK

My mother is improving, cognitively if not physically. I hate to broach an indelicate subject – if you are having breakfast, stop reading now – but it turns out severe constipation can be a major factor in dementia. Who knew? Well, the doctors, obviously, but not me, until the other day.

Which is why yesterday saw my brother and me going to the Archway branch of M&S Food, looking for a packet of prunes. Outside, by the door, is a large man collecting for charity with a large bucket.

“Hello gents sorry to bother you but I’m collecting for [redacted] and if you could spare something that would be really great,” etc. That’s how he spoke, without punctuation. But I felt some sympathy for him. My brother is a sweet and generous soul in every respect except one: getting money out of him can usually be done only after a brief struggle, and I of course have no money in the first place (having known homelessness, though, I do make a small monthly donation to Shelter and, when in funds, give cash to the homeless on the streets). We found our prunes, and as we left, the chugger restarted his spiel.

“Hello gents sorry to bother you again but if you could just spare a hey wait are you guys twins?”

Now, as I might have mentioned before, my brother and I look enough alike for this question to be asked regularly, even though I am a clear inch taller than him, walk with a studied grace and nonchalance, and have no beard. He is, in fact, five years younger than me, so when people make this mistake I look at him and smirk infuriatingly. Have I mentioned this before to you? You bet. And I’ll do it again.

This time I laughed long and loud, while he sighed. Nearly 24 hours later, I am still chuckling about it. But back to the hospital. I mentioned last week that my mother’s eyesight is going, which is why this time I am carrying the enormous magnifying glass my father needed in order to read. I play at being Sherlock Holmes on the bus. “My God, Watson, these are the footprints of an enormous hound!” etc.

I am glad that I had not brought the magnifying glass the other day, for my mother, regaining her mind, had started trying to read the paper again. Or rather, its headlines. After picking her way through one alarming example, I had to explain what AI was and what its dangers were.

“It could kill everyone on the planet,” I said, again forgetting that I was in a ward where everyone in bed was already staring into the barrels of death’s loaded shotgun. But my mother took this happily enough; she clearly felt she wasn’t going to be missing much. Of more immediate concern to me was the other headline on the top left-hand corner of the Guardian’s front page: “Carly Rae Jepsen on motherhood, stardom and her horniest album ever”, which I wasn’t looking forward to reading out loud, and not just because I didn’t have a clue who Carly Rae Jepsen was. Luckily I didn’t have to. The geriatric wards of the Whittington Hospital are, it hardly needs saying, not conducive to horniness.

This time, my mother managed to greet both her sons without confusing one for the other. But she also greeted a wizened and toothless lady in a sari as my brother’s wife, who is blonde, very much unwizened and has, as far as I know, her full complement of teeth.

“That’s not D—,” said my brother, “that’s a patient.”

“Hello, patient!” said my mother cheerily.

Compared to the ancience (a word of my own coinage) of the bedridden inhabitants of the ward, the doctors doing the rounds all look about 19 years old; a student accompanying one looked to me as if he should still be in school uniform. But the doctors are kind and friendly and patient and considerate and well informed; to speak to them was to feel rejuvenated in oneself. (The same applies to the nurses, except they’re mostly older, which is itself kind of reassuring.) If the NHS was crumbling around us, there was little sign of it – apart from the infrastructure. It is a good day when all three lifts in the main building, and the two lifts up to the sixth floor, work. Though even when they do it is best to bring a good book with you while you wait for them.

Back in the parental home, I attempt to defrost the freezer, which has accumulated months of ice. It makes me think of trying to beat a path through the calcified neural pathways of the elderly – or, for that matter, trying to get it through the cat’s head that it has either just been fed, or still has food in its bowl. And while it is pleasant to be in a house, spacious and orderly compared to the Hove-l, it is not so much fun to be sleeping without its feather pillows. Or, indeed, its ready access to the seafront. The last dregs of summer are disappearing quickly, and what with one thing and another, I have started wondering how many I have left to me. But at least I look five years younger than I actually am. (Smug face.)

[Further reading: In Hove, I am a slob. But East Finchley has made me a gentleman]