29 June 2016
My mother is staying with us. If it were sunny we would plonk her in the garden with a nice cup of tea and a book to fall asleep over (which would be the same book she fell asleep over last summer but claims never to have seen before), and she would while away the day charting the progress of the cat and its bottom from shady patch to shady patch. She and the cat would exchange updates and confidences, in the way that only people who talk to animals know how, and later she would share these updates with us over tea, transposed into Things She Read in the Paper. But it is not sunny. So we have to think of more imaginative things to do. I settle on a gentle shopping trip to Weston-super-Mare, which is about all I can face; my mother needs a wheelchair to get around and the wheelchair needs someone to push it. Actually, the wheelchair arrangement suits us both. She goes exactly where I want her to (being otherwise easily distracted by side roads, passing strangers, colourful things in shop windows and anything that mentions The Queen). She goes there at a decent speed – in fact, if I’m feeling particularly stressed, she goes there at one hell of a speed, and is virtually catapulted into the shop/café/toilet cubicle she chooses to stop at. When things get embarrassing, for example due to unwelcome interactions with passing strangers, I can wheel her away quickly. But more to the point, we do not have to look at one another while she talks. It is better that way. My expression is not that of your usual devoted carer. My face is especially grim when my mother announces she wants coffee and cake, and we end up in a coffee shop surrounded by the generation that voted to stick two fingers up at Continental Europe. It makes me cross that they are still consuming Danish pastries and Italian-style coffees with such catholic gusto.
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