Nothing, it’s said, is certain except death and taxes. But these days if you invest in one you can sometimes dodge the other.

Let’s start with death, which, being unavoidable, we prefer not to discuss. In the Medieval tarot, the 13^th card doesn’t even mention the word. The scythe-wielding skeleton, the severed body parts, these are there to get a message to us. Or maybe from us. What you take those symbols to mean (and I would suggest what’s being depicted is as generative as it is destructive) is entirely a matter for you. Our swerving any mention of the endgame is a cultural preference which has only accelerated since the middle ages – but I was still surprised how hard it was to get anyone to talk about it in my father’s care home in 2021.

I say my father’s care home – I mean the home in which he died – who actually owns the place is another matter, as we will see. While he was alive and judged to be “participating in activities” like swallowing and breathing – and thus too vital for financial aid – he (or rather we, on his behalf) paid north of 1.5K a week to keep him at the facility.

He was transferred there directly from hospital.  The NHS found him the bed and funded his first six weeks of care – we had no say in where he went. We, he, and the system, just wanted him off the Covid ward. Also the place was nice, you could see, more or less where all that money went – though not, it turns out, where it ended up. When someone is as sick as he was and has savings you are so relived they are well looked after that a sum of money that might blow your mind and break the bank in another scenario seems fair enough. It’s worth mentioning that if he had not had the money or he had lived a little longer then the Local Authority would have had to pick up the tab, and in the end, that’s me and you. In the end, where all that money goes really matters.

Before he died though it was hard to get anyone at the home to talk about dying, his death or if and when and how it might happen, and for that kind of money you might think you are entitled to some plain speaking.

“Dad”, they would say, “is doing very well today.” Or “Dad is confused.” “Don’t say Dad,” I used to think, “he’s not your Dad or some identikit, every-Dad…” but I never spoke this out loud and I got the sense that even if I did it wouldn’t matter since this was the language of the place, the lingua franca, as they say. And they said, ‘Dad’ all the time about half the people in there, but there were other words that were never spoken and death was first and last among them. 

The juxtaposition between years of caring – in which death is much in mind and was in my Dad’s case much discussed, especially by him (see book for details https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/the-reluctant-carer/the-reluctant-carer/9781529029352)

And then this place where death had been verbally banished, felt strange. But then he and I like all of us in the end, were only visiting. Every world has rules of its own. 

I listened to a lot of prognoses and treatment plans, but no one ever seemed to touch on the big question – how long has he got? The senior nurse would have a kind of giggling fit if I really pressed him for some sense of how things might pan out. In the end they would refer you to a doctor who was never around. This person, they said, would have the answers. But this person is not here to tell you them.  

As the weeks went by and the money and the dignity drained away – as did my sense of what constitutes either, (not entirely a bad thing, FYI) I found myself reading a book by Robert De Board called The Psychoanalysis of Organizations.

The Psychoanalysis of Organizations: A psychoanalytic approach to beha (routledge.com)

There is a chapter on hospitals and care homes which says: “The task that society assigns—behaviourally though never verbally—to these institutions is to cater for the socially dead during the interval between social death and physical death’ (Miller and Gwynne 1972:80). Carrying out such a grim and painful task must inevitably create intense stress and anxiety, which affects not only the staff but also the inmates.” 

To make the job manageable the staff deploy what psychologists call ‘social defence mechanisms’. “social defence mechanisms arose because of the inevitable death of the inmates. Using general systems theory, an institution caring for the chronic disabled has only one export, and that is dead inmates, and this is bound to cause intense anxiety among the staff.” Denial is a defence mechanism, and this, I realized was what was happening at the home. In order to cope with so much death, they had stopped mentioning it. In order to be so intimate with those with little time, they seldom used their names. I understood it then, and dropped my objections, let them do as they do. They were kind too, and that is the main thing. When the money’s gone, it’s gone. Then one afternoon, all alone, (the last thing he wanted (‘I expect my elderly parents to die – but to suffer alone?’: the truth about caring through Covid | Family | The Guardian) my father was too(Good Grief – The Reluctant Carer) and, for a time, I denied that also.

Anything we run from is always monetizable. Where there’s muck there’s brass, and when the lights go out certain forces cash in. When someone dies the machinery of the state shakes the tin one last time to be sure there are no back taxes and if the deceased is leaving any money then there is tax on that too.  The money it might have taken to keep them alive in some semblance of decency, in what De Board called that interval, the one between social death and actual death, that, it turns out, is less scrupulously scrutinized. I did worry that my dad’s savings, his house, all of which sprung from a salary on which tax was paid might be siphoned off by a corporate arrangement that didn’t pay its dues here and kept its staff in a zero-hours headlock, but in the end it was all too dramatic to make those kind of checks. And how do you check that stuff anyway?

Happily The New Statesman have the skills and patience to find out.

Chinese-owned care home in Rishi Sunak’s seat is one of 64 in Britain

What they found was what I feared. Some British care homes are kind of portal in which a proportion of families last funds or four figure weekly per-patient cash drops from the NHS are ultimately funnelled offshore. Not the actual home my father was in, it turns out, but several owned by its parent company, one of the so-called, ‘big four.’

So death we must accept, or good luck with the defence mechanisms. Being rinsed personally, nationally as we do our best around it… we don’t have to stand for that, do we?

Marvin Gaye sang that there were only three things for sure, taxes, death and trouble. When the first is a avoidable, the second inevitable, the third might be all that’s left to us to address the situation.   

Marvin Gaye – Trouble Man – YouTube

Since 2019 few things on the planet have gone to plan, and yet, this book, our story, my story and I hope in some sense yours has made it through the vortex of viral and violent twists in our history – which is more than can be said for its particpants, but that’s another story…

This one is now officially for sale. Pick your online vendor here: https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/the-reluctant-carer/the-reluctant-carer/9781529029352

There’s a summing up of some key points from me here:

https://www.panmacmillan.com/blogs/lifestyle-wellbeing/3-things-i-didn-t-expect-to-learn-whilst-caring-for-my-parents

A lovely extract from the book in last Sunday’s Sunday Time’s magazine here: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/gout-insomnia-and-nudity-the-reality-of-caring-for-my-elderly-parents-9g5b5qkcr?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1655593736

Cutting edge politcal analysis of the care criss from myself here:

Why the Health and Social Care Bill won’t fix Britain’s care crisis

You can listen to the fantastic William Andrews reading the audiobook here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reluctant-Carer-Dispatches-Edge-Life/dp/152902935X/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=9781529029352&qid=1655972755&sr=8-1&x=0&y=0

And for old times sake, here is the 2019 Guardian piece which set the whole thing off: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jan/19/dad-more-comebacks-than-elvis-confessions-of-a-reluctant-carer

A startlingly positive review in The Mail

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-11059147/The-reluctant-carer-gave-mother-father-end-life-care.html

N.B Beware comments section in above…

So now you know what’s a foot – and something of my father’s feet, perhaps. Use yours to visit an earthly bookshop if you like.

Buy multiple copies and have your front room look like mine…

Thank you for reading, thank you for buying. Thank you for letting me briefly sell more books than Tyson Fury. And maybe, like a fighter, we can get back into the ring and take a swing at him again…

This is the day, after all:

The The – This Is the Day (Official Audio) – YouTube

Life, being life, throws humans one big question way before we can answer it. Evicted from the warmth. Thrust, wailing, into the world, aware suddenly that we ‘are’ and then afraid that we might not be, the first thing we are seeking in our caregiver’s eyes once our own have truly opened, is some reassurance of our being real. “Are we here?” is how we might articulate this. If we are lucky then someone sticks around and looks back at us as we learn to look at them – meaning, ‘yes we are’.

Congratulations, you have arrived.

We learn to stand and talk, but those inarticulate, imperfect exchanges repeat throughout our lives. That search for self, for meaning is part of what is happening if you ever start writing without a goal in mind. As I did, five years ago. Putting down words without knowing why except that it had to happen. It was a sense making exercise – a rhythm beaten out against the cell of my perception. Whether it was published or folded up and thrown away in a bottle, the statements and the questions were the same as before I had language to say them: Are we here? OK, then why? And what next?

I hope you are still reading because after the long, existential preamble the reason I am writing this is to thank you for doing so. In particular the subscribers to the site, the responders to the posts and the Twitter faithful. I wrote, and by reading you answered. You said it was real, and though unknown to me in the beginning you are a reason why. I was looking for proof, and the attention you paid was the evidence required to continue. Now the book is upon us, all kinds of people will be coming on the ride but before opening up the cabin for general boarding I wanted to thank you. Here’s what the book will look like – more or less. It is very much yours, although you will still have to pay for it – life having not just questions but ironies too.

You may pre-order it here: https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/the-reluctant-carer/the-reluctant-carer/9781529029352

The hereness of things is very much in mind at home where Mum’s perception has declined or advanced to a quantum level. Every mealtime is a new paradigm. Here’s one I call Schrodinger’s soup – after the famous physicist who posited that a cat in a box might in theory be dead and alive at the same time.

Me: “Do you want some soup?”

Mum: “If there’s not enough then I don’t want any but if there is some soup I would have some.”

Me (showing her the tin) “Do you want some soup?”

Mum: “No. Unless there is some.”

Me: (close to losing it) “There is soup.”

Mum: “Then yes. If it’s there”

She reads mainly poetry now. I fancied this was a late life shift in perception, some glimpse of meaning beyond the sense and sentences of prose. What I realised is that she can no longer remember the plots or details of longer stories – except the furthest reaches of her own. 1932 – no problem – 13.02 today – not so good. I wonder should I tell her she is in a book she might not understand? That the woman who looked back at me and let me know that I was real can still recognize me is wonderful – that she taught me to read but perhaps will never grasp what I’ve written about us… there’s an irony I can’t yet fathom. Life, being life again.

I am a creature of habit, much like my father, which is how come I was stirring a risotto when I found out he’d broken his ninety-year habit of staying alive. Some people nowadays think you can leave risotto alone, here, we do things the long way round.

My sister called. She calls a lot, with a flair for doing so when I am doing something. I didn’t pick up but she kept ringing, then the landline and then my mobile again. This is not an unusual pattern. The banalities of life, laundry for instance, burn as brightly in her mind as the big stuff – so that was what I was expecting – something like “I’ve got Mum’s towels,” but instead she said our father had died. The prior months had been so consumed by the logistics, costs and consequences of his survival that I had quite forgotten this was where it was always heading. For all the fatalism and dark humour, near misses, planning and pragmatism, it still came as a surprise.

Death was not so much the elephant in the room but the room itself was all elephant, or the room – Dad’s room in the care home – was within the elephant – you can look at it any number of ways – and getting stuck in and then rebuilding metaphors and analogies is what I do – not for fun so much as automatically. The more I write – or my brain writes — which it does even and perhaps especially when I am not at a keyboard or within reach of a pencil – the more I have come to suspect that the drive to write was formed to make sense of the world. The primary sources of such behaviours are primal fears of abandonment which in early childhood mean prolonged absence and, by extension, death of a primary caregiver. So now that has finally happened, fifty odd years on from when the notion first rattled my cage, and here I am writing about it. What do you know? I wonder about free will sometimes. Sometimes it seems like life has nothing to do with ‘us’ at all.

I went into the front room, sat with Mum and told her that her husband of sixty-five years had died – there was no easy way to frame it and she is deaf so it’s hard to be subtle but what she said was—

“I didn’t think he was that ill!”

Which — given that he had been that ill for four years, left the very room in which we sat on a stretcher and had only been visible through a window and then through masks in a medicalized institution which did a fair job of looking like budget hotel – how could you think he was anything but “that ill.” I had to laugh, but then thirty seconds earlier I was surprised too. Still, “that ill.” How ill do you want him? 

At the long edge of life, at least in this house, mortality became so normalized, or maybe so hidden under the minutiae, the moment of passing is so completely outnumbered by the billion moments of its planning and avoidance and conception that we just said ‘oh, death, that thing…’ like it was something we had meant to pack only to realise we had left it elsewhere but then of course, thank God, we start to cry.

I should say that what I am talking about is a difference category of bereavement from that attending deaths premature, sudden or somehow wrong. At ninety, under these conditions – on whose behalf would one be resisting such a truth? Not Dad’s – whose last months were everything he never wanted though he made the best of it. Not mine – who had so many times had to accept my own wish that this day should come –  this wish becoming a rational conclusion so frequent, so divested of its innate charge that you couldn’t call the attendant feeling or the lack thereof ‘guilty.’

We went to see for ourselves. They had laid him out nicely in the home, in his bedroom tucked into the bed he had never been able to rise from. Flowers in his hands. The night staff almost bashful, waiving the regulations. They could have made us do a flow test in the carpark as per and we would have accepted that but I am thankful that they didn’t. You don’t need fresh material for grievance while grieving. It will get in the way.

“Oh” said Mum. No way to deny what was before her. She took his dead hands in hers and said, “you did your best.” That was almost too much for me because it was true and I think an example of real, practical love and its component forgiveness and it wasn’t long before we were back in the car and I was wondering if anyone could say as much of me.

I dropped Mum at home and bought a bottle of good scotch from the shop just as they were closing since this was Dad’s favourite drink and it looked like a long night. Then I went back and heated up the risotto and despite my absence or perhaps because of it – like it too had a parent called away from home– it was fine and so perhaps would I be.

• “They won’t give me a gun,” moans Dad from his care home bed. A kind of wipe clean pre-coffin. “I don’t think they have any,” I say. Although, you wonder why not, I think. I mean, come on. Who are we fooling anymore? It’s not often you wish you lived in America, but sometimes…

• After a month in hospital with Covid — which he somehow survived, unvisited, alone, against his will in the first place — here we are. Ten weeks since they put him here… finally I can finally come inside. In gloves that are too small to snap on and a cheap mask and a senseless plastic apron, like a slaughterhouse boy on a tight budget. “Good to see you!”

• What Covid couldn’t do, hospitalization has. The small amount of power, the figment, the dream, the rumour of strength that let him live at home with me and Mum and the carers, has gone. Now he can’t move. Now it takes two people to turn him over, like something on a grill. Now here he is for as long as it takes.

• You get six weeks of free care, then there is a kind of online court case to see who pays for this. It turns out swallowing and talking and breathing are “activities” which he is “participating in.” So he is not ill enough by these measurements. Merely old. So we are paying for him.

• The bill comes. Christ. Who is looking after him. Paul Pogba?

• Dad likes it anyway. At least he did when he knew what was going on. Now a UTI has claimed his mind. He thinks he’s back in the army. Malaya, 1949/50. Hence the gun thing. “No gun. No bullets!” He complains. Suddenly he’s OK. Asks me how I’m doing. Then he’s off again. “We’re sailing soon!” We may as well be. I see the future – floating care homes. Care rigs. Slightly offshore. Only answerable to international law. Credible hulks.

• I’m glad the pandemic is easing so now I can finally stop explaining to Mum what it is. Every day. “Was I ill?” Yeah. Just a bit. “It’s quiet here!” “It’s quiet everywhere, Mum”. “Will you see your friends today?” “No.” Etc etc. Amen.

• Serious question. If you killed someone within 28 days of a positive Covid test – would it still be murder?

• I come home and tell Mum Dad is asking for a gun. She shrugs. “Maybe that’s the answer..?” I laugh. Then she says, “he could fight his way out…” . Like he was poised to escape. Like Steve McQueen. As opposed to being poised for very little, somewhat immobile, like Steve Hawkin. But I know what she meant. I accept the first answer. I accept everything. As they say in New Jersey, “What are you gonna do?”

The alarm is set for six a.m. but I wake at five because that’s what happens when I set an alarm. At 5.30 I put on nitrile gloves and separate the tests. At six I wake Dad in the dark, he remembers that this is happening and why, which is good but he can’t keep his tongue still while I swab his throat but it will have to do.

More surprisingly, at 6.15 Mum remembers why I am in her room but also does the tongue thing. Neither of them complains though, nor do they retch and splutter as I do each time I am tested. I am impressed, and the tests are in the fridge now waiting for the courier and so at least that is done. I take some pride in this pre-dawn accomplishment, like I were a wartime bomber pilot, but the truth is I am not the pilot. I am way down below, far from the decisions. The truth is something heavy is going to drop on us.  

It has dropped already in fact; we just don’t know it yet. Not for the first time I am like the cartoon character running as if on solid ground, but really out in thin air and fated to fall.

The courier comes mid-afternoon and takes the tests away. The stoic climate collapses early evening when Dad says he has a sore throat. He is a constant symptom reporter ordinarily, calling out that he is too hot/ too cold/breathless/hungry/something all the time.

“I swabbed your tonsils, maybe it’s that?” I counter.

Seems reasonable. I mean they’ve both been vaccinated, once. This is all you need, the government say. Mum is up and about now after her flu. We’re doing these tests just to be sure really, out of politeness almost. It’s a busy house. A small care home, in effect. It doesn’t seem likely that anyone could have…

“I can’t swallow.” He says an hour later, raising the stakes.

“This is palliative talk,” I say to him, “of course you can.”

I give him a Strepsil. He cheers up, briefly.

The evening carer who helps him to bed also judges him OK, and he is closer to Dad than me in some ways these days. That said, this is the same carer who has argued at length with me that vegans eat eggs and wasps take holidays.

Whatever the truth of any of this, the Old Man gets horizontal again and we call it a day.

In the night I can hear him coughing but that’s normal. It would be more worrying if things were quiet. I get up around six and he sounds different. The daily drama in his lungs sounds suddenly aquatic. Swampy. I go into his room and his lungs bubble like a bong.

The dawn phlegm spasm is a daily thing, so I somehow convince myself that this nothing to worry about. Not totally though, in some secondary sector of my mind, sirens blare.

Morning carer comes and Dad, heroically, lets himself be dressed and paraded to his chair. Once there he can’t swallow his porridge, though he tries. He gives up so easily on small things sometimes that to see him press on is blowing my mind. My sister calls. I tell her what’s up and she calls the doctor to see if they are even sending people out anymore. An hour later there is one at the door, dressed like a welder in a nuclear war*.

Chernobyl MD takes Dad’s SATS. If they are less than your age you are in a lot of trouble and his are well under 90.

“He needs to get to hospital as soon as possible,” says the Dr, gravely.

“No hob spittle!” gurgles Dad.

Here we go.

The doctor has his laptop out and explains that though he can see Dad has expressed a wish to die at home he feels if he had some oxygen under supervision he might pull through this.

“He’s strong enough to have a shot.”

“Give it a go?” I urge Dad.

“OK,” he acquiesces through the rising fluid. It sounds like the Poseidon Adventure in there.

“You might be back in a couple of hours.” I say to Dad. I don’t know where I’m getting that from, but no one corrects me.

My memory becomes sporadic as does my consciousness at this point but seconds later me and the doctor are in the kitchen and his tone is quite different.

“You should understand, there is a chance he will die and, if that were the case… you will not see him after this. So you should prepare yourselves for that.”

There are things you know in life and then there are the moments when you feel them. This would be the latter category. The doctor will call the ambulance from his car, he says, and goes. 

My challenge now is to explain to Mum who can barely hear and whose short-term memory has been mislaid that her husband of over 60 years might not be coming back this time.

Tough at the best of times but perhaps, mercifully, comical. Plan B is to write “HE MIGHT DIE” and an arrow on a piece of paper and hold it next to Dad’s head. Happily, Plan A succeeds, which is me pointing at him and yelling “HE MIGHT DIE!” until she nods her head.

She shuffles over to his chair; we do a kind of group hug. They start saying goodbye. This is too much. I go to the kitchen but can hear Dad gurgle-yelling, “SIXTY YEARS! IVE HAD A GOOD LIFE!” and Mum yelling “YOU WHAT?” until I don’t know what my tears are about.

I’ve had a couple of scrapes myself, and my sense of what dying felt like was clear enough to think that the real thing might not be that bad – as of itself. Quite amazing, in fact. I run back and tell him. He looks pleased to hear this. Like he’d found money in his trousers.

I call my sister and brother. If they can make it here before the ambulance then they might want to try.

There is a pause in the drama, we all sit there for a bit and then Dad makes an announcement.

“Take to me to the toilet. I’m not going to soil myself on a trolley.”

I am not about to question what might be his last request, and I can see his point. If this is the final thing we do together then so be it. No one can say we didn’t keep it real. And so having posited some kind of heaven I heave him onto the toilet perhaps for the last time. It occurs to me I might miss this. But then many things occur to us, and few of them are right.

The paramedics come in a less severe version of PPI than the doctor. One of them offers three potential diagnoses: heart failure, secondary infections from his rotting foot, or Covid. They give him oxygen and he reanimates entirely. As they wheel him out he rises from the trolley.

“I’ll be back!” he murmurs. I’m not sure he’s seen Terminator.

“Hasta La Vista!” laughs the paramedic, who clearly has.

My siblings arrive just in time to bid the Old Man farewell as he is heaved into the ambulance.

As exits go. If this is that. It isn’t bad.

The ambulance leaves, and there are now loads of us in the house. Not wise. Now the admin is done the emotions queue for processing. My sister deals with her anxiety by reeling off a list of unanswerable questions about care arrangements for the following week.  Eventually I have to say I don’t know.

“Ooh.” She says to our niece. “Men under pressure.”

I am sincerely worn out by that kind of analysis and so refute it as politely as I can under the circumstances:

“This is not about fucking gender!”

She flees into the extension and starts loading up the washing machine, which somewhat undermines my thesis. Then Mum trundles in.

“He said he had a good life,” she reflects, kindly. And then her tone hardens just a fraction.

“Well he would say that. He did what he wanted.”

Tony Bennett – The Good Life (Original) HQ 1963 – YouTube

*slight exaggeration

“Just got a touch of flu today,” fibbed the luckless addict in the 1980’s anti-drugs campaign. 30 years later and flu has become the preferred narrative in our house since Mum took to her bed and stayed there, accepting little more than Lemsip and offering nothing but tissues and phlegm and what you might call a new, continuous cough, but I don’t.

This is not an old lady who stays in bed lightly, so we know something unusual is up. Dad is downstairs, as ever. Forever. And I am suspended between the two of them. Halfway up the stairs. As in the song, “A little mouse with clogs on…” The mouse is me; the clogs are all this grown-up, growing old stuff. It just doesn’t fit somehow. We order some Covid tests. Better to know, right? Better to be sure.

The day of the tests become a test in itself. In the movie Goodfellas the climactic sequence is a day in which the lead character has to drop off some guns, make dinner for his family, take one of them to hospital, organise a drug deal while taking a lot of drugs and being followed by a helicopter which might just be a figment of his imagination. Today becomes my version of that.

Mum says she feels worse, can’t get up, and Dad’s morning carer is two hours late. The postman drops off the tests and runs away from the house when I open the door as if the place were about to explode. I envy him. My sister, who ordered the tests texts me to ask if the tests are here since she has had an email saying they are but wants to check anyway.

Next I have to register the tests online, unpack them without contaminating them and get Mum and Dad’s medical info together which ought to be centralized or embedded in my memory but instead is scattered all over the house, bits of paper and prescriptions and DNR’s all over the place like deathly confetti. Mum calls me from upstairs, Dad from downstairs. All the ordinary things need doing and it also takes time to explain to them both that I am going to test them and what that means and how and why.

The test registration page is a seven-page online accumulator that won’t let you save the information you’ve input, and which crashes every time I get to the end. I try multiple times from multiple browsers while simultaneously dialling into the government’s Covid helpline which like the website is overwhelmed and thus no help at all. Meanwhile I have to navigate the ongoing argument between two of Dad’s carers and my sister about the antibiotics he needs for his foot which has turned purple again. When the two hours late morning carer has made his position clear he retires to the toilet here for 20 minutes which is entirely fair enough – he starts work early and you’ve gotta go sometime, but now mum is in the upstairs bathroom and I need to go and then my sister comes around and explains her view on things to me from the drive since she won’t come in the house since she’s asthmatic but that means I have to stand out on the drive to hear her and it’s freezing and I’m not really dressed yet so then I feel like I’m getting a cold. The real headline is nothing is getting done but I’m done with government portals which must be quieter later, right? So I go out for a drive.

When I get back mum is back in bed. I lure her downstairs for some soup, let in the next carer for Dad and then try to register the tests again. The online system still won’t work but eventually I get to the final level of options on the phone and speak to someone who says they can do it though it’s too late to drop the tests off for collection today but what the hell, yes of course.

Except… I’m calling for two people without emails or cell phones and I’d like their results sent to the phone of a third person who isn’t me, and no their address isn’t my address or this number my number and so we are on the phone for thirty minutes using the phonetic alphabet to relay and recheck 11 digit numbers while not mixing the tests up and because tomorrow is Sunday a courier will have to come and collect them and he might come at 8am so I will have to wake my parents in the dark and swab them an hour before this but then again the courier might not get here till four, so who knows and who can possibly say? Either way, I’m in all day tomorrow until he comes.

Mum tries to get upstairs without using the stairlift and as I come down to intercept her I fall down the stairs and cut my hand open on the teeth of the stairlift rail. There on the stairs. Right there. I have been here for two weeks which now feels like one long day since I can’t visit anyone else because of the restrictions and I really, truly, want to get out of here.

I call my sister who says just leave the tests on the step since its colder than the fridge and makes no concession to the fact that I have given an entire day to organizing this now and so am in some way expert, before telling me what she thinks and then asking me for unknown unknowns about stuff we can’t possibly know about until the tests — which I can’t administer till the morning — have come back. My frustration is audible, to put it mildly. She says I should have texted her if I didn’t want to talk but last time I texted her she rang me up to talk anyway. We hang up. She texts me another question about next week – so there. I call my brother – who has Covid and is now worse than he was yesterday.

Now it’s evening. Dad is obsessed with strawberries and the trade-off for having to find them is that they do at least cheer him up, so I don’t mind getting them for him. This being January they have been flown in from Egypt which is funny since I call his room ‘Pharaoh’s Oven’ which sounds like a Cairo pizza joint but it’s just because the place is full of stuff and clutter he appears to want with him into the afterlife and it is always very, very hot.

“Luck is a big thing in life” – says Dad as he sets about his strawberries. He is gearing up for one of his occasional speeches, but Mum has called me upstairs again since she wants half a glass of water. Fear of spills and arthritic joints mean we deal in halves of everything now but that of course means all things happen twice as often and I set the alarm for 6 AM and lie down since tomorrow is another day though not, I hope, like this one. But if it is, well that is that, and then another line from the old drug campaigns comes back to me, another addict’s mantra: “I can handle it” Well, we’ll see. Luck is a big thing in life, apparently.

Mornng (if morning it be where this finds you), and season’s greetings. The good folk at The Guardian have let us back in the paper again. You can find the story here:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/dec/26/i-expect-my-elderly-parents-to-die-but-to-suffer-alone-the-truth-about-caring-through-covid

The faithful and observant will note some borrowed content from the last post, but there is new material as well, I swear.

To anyone coming here from the new Guardian piece, welcome. Again, you might bump into a couple of sentences you recognize in the next post but scroll down the page for fresh elderly larks aplenty.

If you missed it, here’s the original Guardian piece from 2019.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jan/19/dad-more-comebacks-than-elvis-confessions-of-a-reluctant-carer

And news of the book, which, due to the ‘Rona, will now be with us in Spring 2022, it seems.

https://www.thebookseller.com/news/picador-pre-empts-reluctant-carer-after-viral-article-970451

Thank you for clicking and reading and sharing and so on.

A better New Year to everyone.

More here soon.

TRCx