My mother is back in hospital, having had another stroke. We’re still at the stage of not really knowing what has happened to her, but it seems fair to say that more of her mind is slipping away. At present she’s not really recognising anyone and is having trouble speaking. The thing about my mother is that you can never rule her out – shortly before this happened, she was apparently making good progress in her recovery, even reading books again. I never thought she’d get so much capacity back, and we were all pleased. But this is another thing about my mother – she’s always been very good at surprising us. There have been many times in my life when I haven’t seen her coming, as it were. I certainly didn’t see this coming. Anyway, if previous experience is anything to go by, it will be a slow process of squeezing a prognosis out of the medical professionals. So we’re back to waiting.
Given there’s nothing much useful that I can do, yesterday I went book shopping. I happened to have come into a £20 Waterstone’s voucher. Last year, one stormy day in November, I opened the door to a couple of wet and windswept young medics who asked if Mr Litlove and I would take part in an NHS survey on eyesight and hearing. I felt rather sorry for them, and we’d kept saying we should get our eyes tested and doing nothing about it, so I said fine. They were going to set up a test center in our village, so that sounded great on paper, we wouldn’t even have to go into town. I booked us appointments – myself at 4pm, and Mr L. at 4.30pm. Great! we thought, half an hour and we’re done. Oh, how naive were we? It would be a long two and a half hours before we emerged, having gone through a barrage of tests many of which were cognitive in nature. They were delightful students who were running the survey, really sweet people, but disorganised. They had just the meeting room at one of the sheltered housing complexes, and we did wonder how effective it was to ask us some of the questions when everyone waiting to do the tests could hear the answers. But on the other hand, it was entertainment while we were waiting, too. The task I found surprisingly hard was to list as many words as I could that began with the letter ‘F’. I kept thinking of French words, which wasn’t helpful. One woman was brilliant, however, and I heard her say that she’d always wondered if she should go on a games show. I was tempted to encourage her. It’s quite a skill to be able to do these things under pressure.
Anyhow, one of the dangling carrots to sign up for these tests was this £20 voucher. When we walked away, Mr Litlove and I thought it highly unlikely we’d ever see it. But we unfairly maligned those disoganised students because lo and behold, they arrived in the post last week. I also happened to have in my handbag £6 of book tokens that had been a school prize for my son. He’s not a reader, despite the fact that I read to him every night until he was twelve (I blame Mr Litlove’s genes). I felt that I’d left the tokens long enough for him to claim (somewhere in the region of 18 years) and that they could now revert to the person who found them (me when decluttering the house the year before last). What is slightly shocking is how few paper books you can get for £26 these days. I buy all my reading matter either as cheap Kindle books, audio books in sales, or secondhand online, so it was a surprise to realize that most new books have crossed the £10 threshold – wow.
But I also have to give kudos here to Cambridge Waterstones which has outrageously good stock. I went in with a long list of possible titles and they had far more of them than I expected. In the end I came out with four books (and spent more than my budget!). And when I arrived home, my copy of Douglas Bruton’s new novel, Woman in Blue, was in my postbox, so here in all their glory are my recent acquisitions:
In case that’s not clear, I have: First Love by Gwendoline Riley, Woman in Blue by Douglas Bruton, The Blackmailer by Isabel Colegate, Super-Infinite; The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell and The Art Thief by Michael Finkel. It’s been an absolute age since I went book shopping and had a bundle like this in the house. I have left them out to admire and give them a little pat whenever I go past.
I’m in the middle of writing two longer essays at the moment, either one of which ought to be here in the place of this post. I have a plan of collecting together enough long essays to make a book, or at least a virtual book type thing. I’ve got several already and will probably post the new ones here on the blog, and quite possibly put the whole caboodle on the blog when it’s finished. Everything that’s going on with my mother makes me feel that a) life is short but b) far too often it’s stressful, and it’s easy to stress about things that don’t fundamentally matter. Well, it certainly is in my family DNA. I’m not sure that you can go through losing parents without being changed in some way or at least having a reassess of core values and aspirations. Whatever happens in the rest of my life, I just want to enjoy as much of it as I can, and be as relaxed as possible. So much turns out not to be important. Anyway, I don’t know where I’m going with this, but more substantial content on the blog is imminent for those who may be interested in it.