Sunday

Another day home alone for me and The Dog. Another trip over to see her dad, sister and brother-in-law for Lesley. It was brother-in-law’s last full day in the UK so they were going out for lunch.

A quiet day for me and The Dog. A short walk round the sports field and through the neighbouring housing estate before getting home so I could get on with fixing the back gate, doing some laundry, cooking dinner and going out for another walk.

A horrendous day for Lesley. Attempting to fend off a fire hose of false logic, pathetic over-sensitivity,  toe-curlingly fake empathy, spurious arguments, deliberate ignorance, oversight of the bleeding obvious and distortion of facts over egg on toast in a garden centre café. 

She’s at her wits’ end.

I’m left at home. Powerless in the knowledge that anything I say, any detectable hint of influence that I may have had, can and will be used as the root cause of monumental offence.

The brief messages that Lesley was able to send left me fuming. So angry in fact that I turned to what was left in the Christmas Cupboard.

“I’m so angry that the Twiglets got opened. I’ve had a bit of a snackcident.”

Lesley unloaded the full horror of the day when she got home. It sounded like mental torture in contravention of the Geneva Convention to me.

“I know you write about how what’s going on affects you and your mental health but please don’t say anything about this. If she ever saw it there’d be a massive rift.”

“What, you think there isn’t already?”

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