Thanks for coming to the site. This is where I write about looking after my parents. It’s anonymous to protect their privacy, that of any healthcare professionals and local authority personnel who might get mentioned, and too a lesser degree myself.

The best writing comes from some kind of truth, and it’s easier to share some of these things if I don’t have to worry about discussing it over dinner with anyone, even if I have to feed that person with a spoon.

So for the sake of the aforementioned and to ensure a steady stream of detailed and confessional tales from the TENA pant* tabernacle, please don’t speculate on here as to where or who it’s coming from. Trust me, you’ve never heard of us.

I thought I would set up the site since people reacted strongly to the stories I shared verbally about caring for mum and dad, and I had been noting down a lot of what happened, since that’s what I do. With luck some things I’ve written will appear in the media soon so I will add them to the site as and when. More importantly I hope something here helps you with something in your life when and if it should start to look like ours. There’s a lot of it about, and more to follow.

The broad strokes are that my folks are in their late 80’s, I’m nearly 50 and I look after them in part because I had to move back in with them when I made a giant mess of my life. That’s the main reluctance, as oppose to the actual, natural reluctance, which of course intersects with the love, sometimes, and its affiliate and opposite emotions, which is sort of what this is about. We’re here because we have to be. How we feel about it is another matter.

*Heartily, but not ruminatively endorsed btw.