Saturday

The Manager at The Home re-issued his email about the redevelopment first thing this morning. When I say ‘re-issued’, I mean ‘completely re-wrote’.

This email didn’t look like he’d written it. It was much more corporate looking. But that wasn’t the biggest difference.

This new version said that, contrary to what the last version said and contrary to what I’d understood for the past year, Beck House only had about a dozen vacant rooms and DIDN’T have capacity for all the residents currently at The Home. Priority would be given to those residents who were at The Home when the planning permission for the redevelopment was first filed.

Obviously, Mum wasn’t there then. I had chosen The Home on the basis that if the plans ever did get resurrected then Mum would be guaranteed a place at Beck House. Now, it seemed the guarantee was no longer there. Now it seemed we’d be relying on other families who’d rather make their own arrangements than go to Beck House or on people who wouldn’t suit Beck House and had to find an alternative.

That seemed to be our best hope. All bar one of the available rooms were upstairs. The more able residents who make their own way to the lounge won’t necessarily cope with using a lift. It won’t matter to Mum if she’s upstairs. I was hoping it would matter to others.

I knew that some of the residents at The Home had been there for quite some time but just how many had been there in the magic window before the plans had been filed was something I didn’t know. And I wasn’t going to find out just how far back in the queue Mum was for a few days as this was the start of a long Bank Holiday weekend.

There was nothing to be done. The main thing was not to let on to Mum how much anxiety I was feeling. No point getting too stressed about whether the responsibility for finding an alternative, if it was needed, fell on us. No point in even looking at alternatives on a Bank Holiday weekend. No point in trying to find out about the chances of Mum making the cut at The Home when there were no managers about.

The new letter said the decisions would be made quickly. We just had to Keep Calm And Carry On for a couple of days.

Bloody hell

Author’s Note

My Mum is in a nursing home in a small village in the Thames Valley. The photo is not of the home. I used an AI image generator to give the reader some idea of the home she’s in.

All, some or maybe even none (you’ll never know!) of the names have been changed to protect privacy and hide real identities. If you think you recognise someone then let me know and I’ll edit the post or remove it entirely