Saturday

Saturday

We treated ourselves to a quiet day today. Lesley did the estate admin stuff that needed a brain and I went through the crate of papers that I’d collected from Lesley’s dad’s house yesterday. Experience tells us not to try and do too much after spending time there. We both find it mentally and physically draining. Lesley uses the word “depressing”.

We’d known that Dad hadn’t been coping with running his household for a few years. He’d managed to cover it up until the last few months when even he had to admit that he wasn’t getting away with it any more. Now that I’m getting to the last dregs of his collection of papers I found a batch that revealed just how long he’d been struggling for.

One random handful of paper which at first glance seemed to be articles from magazines on watercolour painting techniques also contained bank statements, letters from the community hospital about an extended course of therapy he had undergone and an urgent letter about some shares he’d bought when Margaret Thatcher was privatising all the public utilities. And in among the letters from the hospital was tucked the manual to the microwave oven. The next handful of magazines came with a copy of his performance assessment that his manager had completed almost 40 years ago just before he retired.

I’m in no position to criticise anyone when it comes to putting correspondence on the Too Difficult pile with the intention of dealing with it later. I can track when I’ve unwittingly slipped into an episode of poor mental health by looking at the dates of mail I haven’t dealt with.

So while Lesley was angry with him for not leaving some of the financial management to her at a time when she was already doing nearly all of it anyway, I was trying, and failing, to have a bit of sympathy for him.

I would have had a lot less of a problem if he hadn’t always been so critical of everybody else for being useless with money. Not that he would ever say anything to anyone’s face of course.

Lesley’s sister is a prime case in point. She’s always lived a life well beyond her means and Dad would pay for her flights so she could visit him from Several Time Zones Away. But a couple of years ago he said that was going to stop.

“I’m not going to give her any more money.” he said, “She just wastes it.”

This from a man who owned enough unused watercolour painting gear to keep a dozen artists equipped for life. This from a man who volunteered to help with a small bodywork repair on a car that was obviously only going to need a couple of aerosol cans to complete but instead bought enough spray painting gear to equip a busy workshop and only used a small proportion of it once.