Tag Archives: Big Con

There’s rosemary

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This little iPad keyboard is perfect, absolutely perfect. Everything about it is beautiful; from its shiny piano-black surface, the pressure required to register a keystroke, to the satisfying clickiness of the keys. I love it.

And because of this, I shall now continue to type something.

One week on from her dramatic entrance into the Big Brother Hospital, Big Con still hasn’t been evicted, despite a morphine-induced fight with a couple of the night staff who decided to put her on a commode without waking her first. Things are very serious. She’s well, but has a severe infection in a knee joint that was replaced eighteen months ago. For eighteen months, she’s been voicing her concern that the joint was painful and inflamed, but nobody seemed to take these concerns seriously enough to fully investigate where the problem lay. Essentially, the joint was full of pus and bugs and she’s having to stay in hospital until the worst of the infection has cleared. These things happen. They shouldn’t, but they do, and all you can do is hope for the best while being aware that drastic measures may need to be taken if things can’t be resolved through the use of antibiotics.

Anyway, the daily trips to the hospital are slightly draining, but it’s good to witness her improving in health and humour. Unfortunately, hospital visiting also exposes you to:

  • Hospitals
  • Hospital patients
  • Hospital visitors

    • Not being known for my tolerance of rule breakers, I found myself constantly distracted by the six visitors at the bedside of the woman opposite my mum. They were noisy, but worse than that, there were more than the “maximum of 2 visitors” at a time. “Stop being so numerous! And you, woman, yes you! Stop looking like something from Big Fat Gipsy Weddings!!” Perfectly nice enough people, but THEY WERE BREAKING THE RULES.

    They keep moving my mum too. I don’t understand this. One day her bed is in one position, go to visit her the following day and, before you’ve realised it’s not her, you’re sat down next to a complete stranger. Luckily a lovely stranger who my mum, once I’d found her, wasn’t at all subtle in telling me that “Sylvia has dementia, but she’s lovely”. Sylvia seems perfectly fine to me, it’s Rose on the other side of you who I’d be worried about. Rose seems to think that I’m a volunteer hospital visitor and wants to hijack me. Rose is very pleasant, but she speaks very quickly in an Irish accent and is a little hard to understand. But I don’t want to understand her, I don’t want her speaking to me and interrupting my time with my mum.

    One of the most disturbing thing about visiting my mum is seeing her feet: both are deformed by bunions; one has had a toe amputated; and let’s just say, she can’t reach down to attend to her toenails or dry skin. As soon as she gets out, I’m paying for a pedicure for her.

    All being well, and I’m confident it will be, I’ve decide to have the family round at my house for Christmas Day this year. This will be the first time in history that we’ve not spent the day at my parents’, so I’d better not fuck it up. To ensure success, I’ve decided to let Mum and Dad do the prep for the dinner as some traditions simply can’t be broken and my dad loves peeling the veg, which is great because I can’t abide this task. It’s an exciting and slightly daunting prospect, but I’ve been given the idea of producing a spreadsheet to help me plan and I’ll get my folks smartphones so they can have calendar reminders of what to do and when.

    For me, last Christmas was lost in a haze of despair, anxiety, prescription drugs and booze. I am determined for the festive season of 2012 to be a metaphorical door slamming on twelve difficult months and an advent calendar window opening on a new and happier phase of my life. If not, there’s always sherry… and turkey curry.

    School dinners

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    When I spend time with my parents, conversation often turns to the youngest (human) family member, my niece, Little Con. She’s recently started her second year at primary school and I asked my mum (Big Con) as to how she was settling in with her new teacher, classmates, and the like.

    “She came home starving the other day; hadn’t eaten a thing”

    With our family, food is everything. I can trace this to a few things:

    • My parents being children during the Second World War (Mum’s family were in Liverpool and living on rations and whatever could be grown in allotments, Dad’s family were in the south of Italy and literally had to go and dig in the forest for food after the Nazi occupies had taken all the village’s provisions);
    • My Dad being Italian;
    • The acknowledgement that our combined tempers become unbearable when we’re hungry (we’re a pretty irascible bunch at the best of times)

    So the news that Little Con “hadn’t eaten a thing” all day at school was tantamount to national disaster.

    Con used to take a packed lunch to school with her, but her mum recognised that a hot meal during the day might be better for her powers of concentration as the intellectual effort was increasing. But things aren’t the way they were when we were at school. When we were at school, you lined up in the dining hall and you were given a plate of whatever was on the menu that day -no choice. The dinner ladies patrolled the tables to ensure that you ate everything (including the odd bit of gristle) and that you drank plenty of water before the main treat of pudding completed what generally a good meal.

    I understand that primary school children are given a choice these days, but they don’t know what the choices are until they reach the end of the dinner queue, by which time it’s too late to go back and they end up with a crappy sandwich that they don’t want.

    Choice and young children do not mix, this is developmental fact. This is something that parents and people responsible for the care of little ones need to understand, especially when it comes to providing food to kids who rely on school for their only hot meal of the day.

    I’m going to write to my Little Con’s school and tell them what’s what:

    • Hot meal every day, including pudding
    • One meat (if necessary), one veggie option
    • Chips no more than twice per week
    • Lots of veg
    • A healthy mix of flavours
    • No choice
    • No processed shit
    • SAS trained dinner ladies
    • Death to any parent who complains

    And now as I hit the “publish” button, I see what a cock up I’ve made of my bullets.