A sudden slew of things unknown.

If you live long enough, everything happens.

After some very dodgy days on the phone and another visit that my mother fell asleep in the middle of which, enabling me to paint fence panels in the garage, as you do in a lull, she seems to have stabilised after her hospital visit.  Although having a ratio of two good days to one bad, in the main she is living in the present and in her house, which is nice because sometimes when she doesn’t know where she is, I wonder why it is costing £350 a day to keep her there.  However, her powers of recuperation, are, as usual,  fantastic and once she has utterly forgotten the hospital visit, she won’t even be worried she was there.  In so far as you can be happy with dementia, I think she is.  She has started eating steak again for Sunday lunch and enjoying it, which I, as a vegetarian of reasonably advanced age, wouldn’t even attempt.

There are, however, some slight niggles on her horizon.  The day before yesterday she was bemoaning the fact that it was too cold for her to: ‘go out and enjoy a nice brisk winter walk.’  As far as I am aware my mother has never enjoyed a brisk anything, especially a walk, though she has been known, back in the day, to stroll round the sales in the shops and enjoy a good complain about the prices, the quality or the shop assistants.  Having spent half an hour putting the shop on the right track, she would then repair to the cafe where she could complain about the temperature of the toasted teacakes (never hot enough),  the quantity of butter (inadequate), the selection of cakes (not what it used to be) and the service (never the same after the war.)  Thoroughly vindicated she would repair to home and a nice long sit down with a proper cup of tea, made by herself, properly, in thin china, not that awful thick stuff you get in cafes, ‘though I imagine they have to because of the waitresses.’

I suppose I could pay for three big strong carers to take her for a walk to fulfil what is apparently, currently, a benefit she is missing out on.

You see this is the difficulty with hanging around the demented long enough, it makes you mean.

Then there was the OH.  Yesterday he left for the pub in the middle of the afternoon to watch the rugby.  This apparently, is utterly essential for all men, even those in outer space, though I bet our man in the space station isn’t doing it with a quick five pints or so of anything.  I imagine drinking your own recycled bodily fluids would cure you of thirst for ever such a long time.  Anyway the OH came home at seven.  Home at seven!  I didn’t know he knew how to do this, as he had always said he thought it was rude to stop drinking if they were still serving.  So he had some wine and then, get this, went to bed at half past ten!

See, I told you, live long enough and everything will happen.

I am just letting them get on with it.  I am sticking to the same old same old, which is up betimes, half an hour to an hour exercise, phone mother and then either seethe and worry or settle down to some work, depending.

The work is fab and I am loving it.  I am modelling again.  At the last show, because a number of customers had murmured that the 48th scale dolls were a bit big for Jane Harrop’s houses I bought a house kit and made it up.  The dolls are going to be so small they will probably fit in the Bespaq Dutch Baby House, which is 144th scale.  I am also doing a few new 2 inch collectable dolls and a twelfth scale portrait boy that has been on order ever since my mother became ill.  There’s a list after that and, naturally, if overtaken by another disaster belonging to my mother it will all go to the wall, but you know, you have to set out hopefully, even if you think you may never arrive.

Yes Hope, that Unknown thing, like an early night or a brisk walk.  As we’re about to venture into the new year of the Monkey. I’d like to be the first to toss you a peanut and wish you all three.

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