Saturday

“So are we going to your dad’s today then?”

“No. I can’t face going there. Not today.”

In spite of all three of us having the best night’s sleep in ages now that the weather has cooled a bit, we all felt sluggish. The Dog didn’t stand by the car asking to be taken on an Adventure either.  Instead, she took us on a little local potter round her patch.

It was back to admin for me. I can very nearly see some of desk top now. I did a little gentle sorting through some bits from Mum’s house too. One treasure and one oddity today.

The treasure was a small cardboard box containing bouquets of flowers made from sugar. One was still attached to a slab of cake icing.

“I think these are the decorations from the top of Mum and Dad’s wedding cake!”

The box looked to be the right sort of age as did the name card in the box. The flowers looked in amazing condition.

The oddity was a list of events and dates. It was definitely Mum’s handwriting. Not the spidery, hesitant hand that she’d had since her eyesight and health had started failing though. This was a bold, confident hand in block capitals so it wasn’t recent.

The oddity was the choice of events. The first entry was the date I got my polio vaccination when I was a baby. Next came the date that Dad started his course to learn to ride a police motorbike. Next was the date my brother had his polio vaccination.

There followed the dates that we started school, the dates that we caught measles, the date that Eldest Sister had her appendix removed, when she had braces fitted on her teeth, when she had an audition for music school and when Youngest Sister sang at the Royal Albert Hall.

Interspersed among these entries were the date that we got our first dog and:

“MET BING CROSBY IN BURLINGTON ARCADE 26/7/76”

Entries went back to ‘normal’ after that one. The date I left to go to university, the date of my brother’s graduation and the date of Dad’s  mum’s funeral.

Then the entries changed. They were written in a cursive hand rather than printed and the writing was more shaky than it had been. The entries now were all about her. The date she got Bell’s Palsy and the date of each visit to the doctor, the dates that her aunt and uncles died and when their funerals were, the dates of significant events at her church.

Then the entries changed again. They were lengthier and gave more details about two miscarriages than I thought were necessary.

The final entries were much more like the first page. Printed in block capitals and about the date that Lesley and I got married, the date we moved into our first house. Between those two dates was the day that her mum got burgled.

There was another oddity about the list that struck me. Spelling mistakes. Mum never made them. Writing COARSE instead of COURSE was, perhaps, excusable. Not spelling Eldest Sister’s name properly definitely wasn’t.

If I’d only seen the first page I’d have said that this was an exercise set by Dad’s memory clinic. A list of significant events that he could run through so that he could start rebuilding a framework of memories that had fallen apart when his vascular dementia got bad. A time 15 years ago would match the standard of Mum’s writing.

It would’ve been more useful if she’d included more details about Dad though. When he did his National Service and when he joined the police would have been obvious choices.

Instead, Mum made the list all about dates that were significant to her. So unless I’ve got completely the wrong end of the stick here, this wasn’t a good look.

Bloody hell.

Author’s Note

My Mum was in a nursing home in the Thames Valley for a year and a half until she passed away in December 2024. My Father-in-law went into the same home the following January. But Lesley’s sister didn’t approve and made the situation so awkward that he had to be moved. He passed away in March 2025. Names and locations have been changed or hidden to protect the identities of those involved.

Image Credit

Original Image by Nick Gilmore. June 2025.