What palavers!

Is palavers the plural of palaver?  Should it be palaverae?  Multipalaver?  Pluripalaver?  Anyway, I’m sure you get the gist by now.

To and fro.  Stretched and fraught.  Everything, especially my mother.  It’s not just a case of some days she is settling in and happy, though she is, both.  It is more a case of the condition degrading so that she can be happy as a lark at teatime and on a cruise ship in the morning.  This morning she wanted to complain to Cunard that yesterday there were scaffolders outside of her window all the time.  Yesterday she was very glad of her two rooms but she has been, variously, in Devon, on a train, in a first class hotel and cruising.  The worst of it is I don’t know how much is due to the change of scenery or another downward step in her condition or if one is causing the other.  It is very difficult to tell; she definitely had the couple of poorly days that usually precede another mini stroke.  She put herself to bed and was well looked after but then got up and declared she was all right, though she has done exactly that after a stroke previously.

I meanwhile, when not with her or visiting or talking to her on the phone, all of which there has been a great deal of, have been clearing the house.

What an innocent little sentence that was, so far from the truth as to be only able to wave at it in the distance.  So far three weeks of visits to charity shops and the dump with my beautiful new little car full to the brim of stuff, quite a lot of it with sharp corners which have gouged and scratched everywhere, has scarcely made a dent in the contents of the house.  I do now have three rooms and the loft empty-ish.  The loft!  Let us not speak of the loft and remain friends.

Last week the OH spent three days cataloguing the art auction house catalogues which fill ten boxes.

It’s like that everywhere.  If a lifetime collector of stuff dies when married to a demented person who does what they like with the stuff, mostly hiding it in unexpected places, you get what you get.  Mostly in my case fitful sleep.  My father was also very clever.  The house looked in the public rooms very posh but there was a lot of illusion.  When closely examined the windowsill of African carvings turns out to be three carvings and a brown candle, also carved-looking.  The small Venetian mirror in the hall is actually plastic but you wouldn’t know until you turned it over.  Some of the walking sticks in the hall stand are antique carved wood with enclosed glass flasks, some are modern ones from the local chemist.  It only took me five minutes to realise I was going to have to scrutinise every object closely because the ones of value have to be sold to pay for care home fees.  Dreams of a giant skip in the yard faded long ago.

One thing is sure, when I finally get home properly to my home there is going to be the biggest blitz there’s ever been.

When my grandmother died, my mother and aunt were amazed to discover she had been working on her house for weeks.  In the drawer, one set of underwear, in the cupboard a saucepan, one knife, one fork, hanging on the walls three nice pictures.  She knew her end was coming and had done her own tidying up.

Now that is something to aspire to; after I have finished wading through my parent’s possessions I shall start on my own.

Because if you have too much stuff you don’t own it at all, it owns you and some poor sod will eventually have to don the rubber gloves and pick through every last inch of it.

Me, for example.

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Words are all I aim to leave you, written on the wind and blown away when you stab delete.