Post 411. THIS TIME IT WAS MAUREEN.

TAKEN TO HOSPITAL

AFTER A FALL AT HOME.
There was a bloody great crash, followed by five days in hospital, and now Mo is getting about with a walking frame - very slowly.
I didn't hear the phone ring at seven o'clock in the morning: she did and scrambled out of bed fearing it might be brother-in-law Mike ringing to say that her sole remaining sister, Marg.,who has lately been through a disturbing sequence of health problems, had been admitted to QA Hospital, Portsmouth, again. It wasn't. And, so far as we could later find out, it never was anybody we knew. It was probably just another confounded nuisance call from a former bastion of the British empire. Whatever: she lost her balance trying to struggle into her dressing gown and down she went. Just how she catapulted from the side of the bed to the floor at the foot of it is beyond comprehension, but being beyond comprehension has always been part of her charm.
I got her back to bed, but it became apparent she needed more than an old man's sympathy and breakfast on a tray. She needed treatment in hospital. Two kind and efficient ambulance men duly arrived and took her away. She finished up in a pleasant little side ward at St. Mary's with two other patients. The main ward sister was our next door neighbour when we lived in Newport: it's a small world, the island.

That was on the 10th of this month, so she spent her seventy eighth birthday in a hospital where, thanks to Covid (for want of a better way of putting it), no visitors are allowed access.

With the help of ward sister Heidi and our hospital based granddaughter, Jess, she did get her cakes and chocolates however: so on the day she was probably the most popular patient she could possibly have been with most of the nurses and fellow patients about her. She likes to share.

A fortnight ago yesterday, in the evening, two pleasant ambulance men brought her home by ambulance, wheeled her up the drive, carefully deposited her into her chair in the living room, and left. We were on our own again.

Oh, nice people have been and presented us with convenient seating for the shower and the toilet. Other than that we have been left to our own devices.
So Mo is getting about with a walking frame - very slowly, and I am gradually reawakening the half of my brain that went to sleep way back when 'Mo does that' became the order of the day.
And for the benefit of any macho moron who may mistakenly read this, being a housewife is bloody hard work and requires one helluva load of thought.

Stay safe, kindly non-macho reader.      

Post 410. STILL STAYING UPBEAT.

OR TRYING TO.

NOT MUCH IS MOVING.

Current movement in this house is comparable to that of the cat Angel pictured at the end of my last post and the picture shown above. It ain't startling.
I am trying to stay upbeat. A variety of favourite music on the Steepletone; the fan heater warming up the garden room; writing the blog; it keeps me pushing along. All in all it's an immense privilege whether I can afford it or not. We hang on here by the skin of our teeth: an amalgam of stubbornness, disinclination to broach finances, and despair at any possibility of a fourth move since my retirement in 1989.
Now there is a rumbling that all elderly folk in large houses could be forced to downsize or get themselves tucked away in an old people's home. This, the theorist posits, would free thousands of large houses for young people to buy, especially those with families. A reasonable theory. 

In practice young people need sensibly priced family homes, not overpriced barns. The majority of the homes abandoned by downsizing oldies would be bought by greedy property dealers intent on transforming them into grotty flats from which to obtain exorbitant rents.

Don't talk entrepreneurs to me, a WW2 kid. Spivs are just spivs: nothing more, nothing less.
Morally we are property paragons anyway. Though set in a vast garden this is not a large property, our grandson still lives with us - and hopefully will at least until he completes his time at Platform One College of Music - so we are well placed on the desirable old fart's ladder. By the time we reach the stage where kicking that ladder away makes sense, I shall probably have kicked the bucket and the family will be debating: 'What shall we do about mother?' or in this family: 'What does Mum say she wants to do?' (It had better be the latter or I'll bloody well come back and haunt them.)
Which is enough about us for now. I'm still all adrift from that confounded hour change.
TELEVISION
The box across the room becomes more and more a home cinema, less and less a radio with pictures. Oh, we still watch the news on BBC1, a reasonable selection of quiz shows, select bits of a boring morning (well, there's nothing else on) chat show, most of the competitive prancing dancing, cooking, sewing stuff, and the proliferation of celebrity walking and talking Britain documentaries, presumably launched because it works when undertaken by Julia \Bradbury (for whom we have considerable regard. Get well, lovely girl, get well).
RIGHT NOW 

It is ten to five in the evening GMT here.

Almost dark and I need to put my feet up.
I think we'll ignore the adverts and have a quiet Christmas.

Why am I even thinking about it?

BACK BEFORE THEY ARRIVE