This has been an interesting day but we are still in ‘recovery’ mode a little after last night’s little episode. Our carer was designated to call at 7.00 so I got Meg into her chair and ready to utilise the stairlift. We waited for half an hour and then I resolved to try to get Meg to bed on my own. But as soon as we got as far as the airlift, it became evident that it might have been slightly difficult for me to get Meg onto the chairlift unaided. So we decided to wait for what turned out to a wait of an hour and a half altogether and it was fair to say that Meg was becoming somewhat uncomfortable and a bit agitated after a wait of this length. A call to the office indicated that their timings had indicated that the call should be made at 8.15, not the 7.00pm on my spreadsheet. So what is happening is that the schedules change daily, not to say hourly, and the only fairly secure way to know what time the next visit is scheduled is to ask the carer on the previous visit because their app always points to the next visit ahead. So, to make sure that tonight we have an easier time and not a repeat of yesterday’s wait, the carer and I exchanged telephone numbers as she is on duty again tonight and it means that this way we can be in contact with each other and thus we can get the time of the next visit aligned with each other.
Yesterday was election day and I could not resist staying up a little to see how the results were likely to pan out. Once I had made myself some tea and toast, I fell asleep in the comfortable armchair in our Music Lounge and woke up at about 3.00 in the morning. but not before the Blackpool result had been announced in which the seat fell, as expected to Labour. But what was extraordinary about this result was that the ‘Reform’ party aka known as the Brexit party came to within 160 votes of the Tory party and very nearly made it into second place. This morning as I awoke, there were many more interesting results to digested which one of the most significant was the result in our neighbouring town of Redditch. Bromsgrove and Redditch are separated by a fast dual carriageway and the two towns provide a lot of services in common – for example our local hospital is actually in Redditch and not in Bromsgrove. The Labour party had taken 21 of the 27 seats on the Redditch council and was a sweeping Labour gain. This has all kinds of implications for the forthcoming General Election in Bromsgrove because a Labour victory in Bromsgrove at the forthcoming General Election may now be considered a possibility. We are losing our sitting MP Sajiv Javid so it this adds to the possibility that Bromsgrove may actually go Labour which it has been at some time in the dim and distant past. The other election result in which I have a personal interest is one of the Winchester seats in which one of my ex University of Winchester colleagues is a Liberal candidate. I can tell from the BBC website that the Liberals have retained Winchester and have actually increased their representation by three extra seats but whether my colleague is one of the extra three I will have to wait until tomorrow (or even later) when I get the full results. One little election story which I found quite amusing was that Boris Johnson turned up to vote but was initially denied the opportunity because he did not have with him the necessary Voter ID (a policy which the Johnson regime had initiated as a form of minimising the anti-Conservative vote).
Today our domestic help called around and we always take the opportunity for a aught and a joke, as well as a bit of story telling. I recounted to bet how this time last week we had been in Alcester and had been delayed by a police car blocking our exit – and it transpired that in the hotel next door there was a dead body on the floor, three ambulances and two police cars. I told our help that in my day when I worked at the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate, we occasionally had to cope with the occasional death of a guest (about one a year when the hotel was about 375 bedrooms and full most of the time) To avoid bad publicity that attended a death, we resorted to the expedient of wrapping the body inside a roll of carpet and then bringing it downstairs on a service left until we could whisk it round to the back and off to the undertaker. I also repeated to our domestic help the comment made to me yesterday by the Admiral Nurse after I made the remark that I helped to deliver my own son as the maternity hospital was a little short staffed that night. The Admiral Nurse turned to me, having seen me caring for Meg over the months and remarked to me ‘Why am I not surprised by your story?’
Today, we received a telephone call from one of our local doctors who did say that he would call round and give Meg an overall checkup. He did discern a very slight crackling in her chest that might indicate a small chest infection so was going to order us some antibiotics to get it cleared up. This afternoon, we had a young male carer call around and after Meg had had a good sleep after lunch, his visit was timely and we got Meg cared for between the two of us. For lunch, neither Meg nor I felt particularly hungry so I fell back upon the expedient of making ourselves a Spanish omelette. I fried off some onions, sweet peppers, mushroom and petit pois and then transferred this mixture into what was became one enormous omelette. I must say that Meg and I found this to be a very tasty alternative to our normal fish dinner on a Friday and as it was so tasty, we may well repeat this type of a meal on a future occasion.
© Mike Hart [2024]