Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

So last night we ended up in what we affectionately call the ‘Double Meat Palace’ in Pimlico. I think it is actually called ‘Presco’ and if any place in London is Kryptonite to vegetarians, it’s there.

Our original plan was simply to go home, make some kind of carpet picnic out of the vast amount of cheese we inherited after visiting Furtle’s folks last weekend. As it transpired, however, Alix (Furtle’s sister) has got the entire week off and had spent the day doing the sights of London, which frankly, is only something that people who live here rarely do. Anyway, having visited the Abbey around the corner, she and Furtle met up in a pub around another corner and I joined them about half an hour later.

A couple or three pints of Young’s IPA down the road, it was decided that food might be in order and with a sort of inevitability, despite Furtle’s and my attempts to ration visits to the place, we ended up wandering deeper into Pimlico to find the Double Meat Palace.

For those who’ve never been, the hook is simple: you go in, order a pitcher of cocktail (!), they give you a token with ‘yes’ on one side and ‘no’ on the other (in Portuguese, natch). You then go to the buffet bar and load up your plate. This is the time when most people make the rookie mistake of actually loading up their plate. DO NOT DO THIS. Simply pick a few bits and pieces to chew on until the bloke with the skewer arrives.

There are actually several blokes with skewers and they wander around the restaurant remorselessly, bringing different sorts of meat, which they will slice onto your plate as many times as they can until you flip the token to ‘no’, or expire at the table through sheer meat exhaustion. It’s not a cheap meal, but it’s also not a rip off – you just have to pace yourself carefully. Avoid the cheap, filling carbs and go for the meat. Of course, this does not apply if you are a veggie of a vegan, but then I would direct you to my observation to my opening sentence. This place has nothing to offer you if you be not of the carnivorous persuasion (except poss pitchers of cocktails).

We had been intending to take Arch-Carnivore Alix there for some time and we were not disappointed. There was not quite the meat haze around her that we had happily anticipated, but it was fun to se someone cheerfully learn and experience the concept of the meat sweat for the very first time.

Surprisingly, part way through the meal, a couple of scantily clad Brazilian dancing girls appeared and proceeded, rather bizarrely, to gyrate around the restaurant for a half hour or so. They’ve not been there on previous visits and I wonder if they’d missed the plane home after the Notting Hill Carnival and were taking the opportunity to scare up some money for the airfare…

This being our third visit, it will probably also be our last for sometime. It doesn’t do to overdo it, though. Don’t forget to take a belly-wheel.

I wish I was working at home right now. I haven’t got a huge amount to do and the office is largely empty with people on their summer holidays. A couple of things I should like to get on with are stalled for various reasons and frankly, it is all a bit of a chore, sitting here pretending to be busy.

Still, it could be worse, I guess.

Our new office is actually quite pleasant, though it will be a much sterner test of its capabilities next month when more people are in at any time. At the moment we have the luxury of more desks than people, but if everyone was here we would suffer – there are seven desks for every ten bums.

Although a couple of us have managed to swing ‘fixed’ desks (we like them higher off the ground than most people) I haven’t always managed to grab one (mostly I do), so I have to join in with the flexible desking that we are supposed to use as routine. Never been so keen on that, but given that staff comfort is entirely supplementary and everything is driven entirely by cost and savings (no matter how much they try to polish the turd, it’s still a turd), we have to live with it.

I suspect that it is entirely accidental that the office is pleasant. Quite how long that will last, I don’t know. There are more coffee bars and a very good restaurant, so that’s good. Meeting rooms are at a premium, which is less good and we are not yet fully integrated into the (probably incompatible) electronic systems, so conference and video calling is awkward.

Still, I’ve worked in worse places.

Ironically, one of those worse places was the building I worked in 20 years ago, which was on this very site, though I was at the north end rather than the south as now. THAT was an awful building; the only real plus point to it being that while you were in it, you couldn’t actually see how awful it was. For the last 10 years of its existence, the sides were covered in awful green netting to stop the cladding braining passers-by when it fell off.

Google ‘Marsham Towers’ – I think there are still a few photos of the old dump hidden away on the intarwebs.

I am currently reading ‘Catastrophe – Europe Goes to War 1914’ by Max Hastings. I have previously only read one of his more recent histories and I like his style. I don’t know if it is something he’s done throughout his career, but the inclusion of observations and quotes from ordinary contemporary people add life to the story as it unfolds. The previous history of his that I read, which follows the same pattern, was ‘All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939-45’ and I thought that was the first time he had employed this style (I shall have to go back and read the preface to check).

Anyway. It works. I think it builds on the recent trend for narratives from participants of all ranks that were published in increasing numbers after the millennium, while the final handful of veterans was still alive. It remains effective and I think, makes for a better book. The more traditional style concentrates too much on politicians and generals, whilst the remembrances of the veterans, whilst interesting and valuable, ignore the wider sweep even as others ignore the particular. Hastings appears to have found the right mix of the two to give a rounded view of events.

The current book only concentrates on the events of 1914, commencing with the last month of peace between the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the outbreak of hostilities and ending with the Christmas 1914 football match in no man’s land on the Western Front and the expulsion of the Austro-Hungarian army from Serbia.

I would and will have to read more material to compare his views with other writers. Apart from Barbara Tuchman’s ‘The Guns of August’, which covers the outbreak of war, and John Keegan’s ‘The First World War’, which is an excellent one-volume primer, I don’t remember reading anything else on the period since school.

One of the things I find refreshing is Hastings’ willingness to cut through contemporary chauvinism and jingoism to point out that many of the so-called exploits of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in 1914 were exaggerated and achieved with rather more help from the Belgians and French. He is merciless with reputations on all sides, but he is also fair where it appears that someone deserves credit. His opinions on how matters developed, for good or ill in any case are generally balanced by an examination of the context in which they happened, drawing on diverse reports and other sources, all contemporary, so he presents his opinion as a balance of probabilities and uses the same method to explain why he does not favour contrary theses.

Over all, I think this is an excellent piece of work. Hastings teases out a cohesive and evidenced train of thought to show how things happened and why. Few of the protagonists are entirely competent, or incompetent. The officers were not donkeys, but neither were they geniuses. The men they led were not, generally speaking, lions, but neither were they weak. They were just men, men in a position that no one had fully anticipated or thought through, making assumptions and consequent decisions and justifications that went unchallenged because frankly, the fog of war in 1914 was a complete pea-souper, not least because in addition to the technical difficulties in getting information from one place to another, or moving millions of men from one place to another, relatively few of the generals liked or trusted each other, much less wished to tell each other, their respective governments or indeed anybody anything about what was going on.

Some of the big names of the early war come out with precious little credit; it seems incredible a hundred years on that some of them got their jobs in the first place and almost inconceivable that they held on to them for so long afterwards.

Well, it looks as though Mum will not be coming home.

She has been passed ‘medically fit’ i.e. she has no current infections, but her capacity is now so diminished that she needs care 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This is something the family can’t manage, what with work, school, life and that sort of thing.

Luckily the social worker is the person who brought up the question of a care home and there are a couple close to where my sister lives that look suitable and have good reputations. Unfortunately we can’t afford to top up the costs of residential care, so Mum will get it at the local authority rate. On the plus side, the place we have in mind accepts that rate and we can always make the occasional top up if we wish.

The question now, is how well Mum will take it. Back when her memory and capacity were both better, she always railed against care homes and if her condition was slightly better, she probably still would. Understandably she just wants to be at home. That said, her memory is shot to pieces. By Saturday afternoon, she had forgotten that I’d visited her 24 hours earlier. In fact she had no memory of anyone ever visiting her at any time, though she accepted reassurances that she HAD had daily visits by at least one family member.

During a visit, she will ask every few minutes where she is and if you speak to her (or more importantly if a stranger speaks to her) she will laugh a little to cover the fact she has no idea whatsoever what you’re talking about. She will occasionally admit to family that she can’t remember anything, but she seems to be still wary enough of admitting that to people she doesn’t know.

I worry that she might recognise a nursing/care home when she’s in it and that might speed her decline, but when she’s been in a decent respite home, she seems to have been okay (though that was some time ago). On the other hand, when she has someone to chat/gossip with – someone of approximately her mown age, she seems to have more ups than downs.

So, we’ll see.

Well, here I am again, grumbling.

Earlier this week, my sister brought Mum home from a fortnight in a respite home (a break need as much, if not more, by my sister as by Mum). Mum had a bruise on her forehead and a slight cut above the eyebrow. The rest home staff remarked that she had a habit of throwing herself into a chair (which is true) and suggested that this was the cause (which seems odd).

Well, the situation went down hill quite rapidly. After demolishing and thoroughly enjoying a pub lunch, Mum was reportedly in a good mood, but on arrival at home, she decided that her seat of choice would be the coffee table (which would be funny if it wasn’t so sad). When asked to sit on the sofa instead, she just stormed out in a huff and her mood remained almost evil for the rest of the day, to the point where she accused everyone in the family of trying to kill her, and then telling my sister, who stopped her from unpacking my sister’s swimming kit, that she ‘hoped she drowned’. She eventually stormed off to bed and refused any of her medication.

This is clearly the dementia talking rather than Mum, who I fear is less and less present as the days progress.

Next morning, Mum was tearful and confused, to the point of not recognising her surroundings even though she was at home. Anyway, she managed well enough with a bit of cajoling, to get ready to go to the day care centre as usual. My sister noticed a little bruising on her arm, but frankly, that’s not unusual, these days.

Later, however, they received a phone call from the staff of the care home. Mum gets an assisted bath with them and they had discovered extensive and heavy bruising all down the side of her body and on her buttocks. Mum was taken to see her GP who confirmed that they were fresh and consistent with having fallen out of bed. The gash on her eyebrow is apparently also consistent with banging her head on her bedside table when she fell out of bed.

While we don’t necessarily blame the care home for her fall (though they could have put a frame on the bed to prevent it – though no one actually asked them to and Mum doesn’t have one at home), we do worry that they hadn’t noticed the bruising or the gash. It leads us to wonder whether or not she actually received any care, or help with self hygiene at all while she was away, or was simply left to her own devices. This is clearly not good enough for any frail elderly lady with dementia, much less our Mum.

A little investigation and questioning drew no information from the care home at all, but it did transpire that the healthcare worker who dropped Mum off at the home a fortnight ago reportedly felt a little guilty at doing so as none of the staff there welcomed her or showed her around and left the social worked to settle her in.

So, another day, another letter of complaint. This time copied to our local MP and the MP for the area where the Care Home is situated. I am coming to the rapid conclusion that there is no decent health care in Shropshire, particularly for the vulnerable elderly. This time however, the letters go with a POVA (Protection of Vulnerable Adults) notice attached and no care home wants one of those. It’s not good for business.

Last night after work, I trekked up to GOSH Comics in Berwick St (of market fame), hidden away in the depths of seedy old Soho in the West End of London. The reason for the visit was to meet and listen to Jessica Martin, a relative but exceedingly enthusiastic newcomer to the world of comics and comic-making. She was the speaker at the latest of GOSH’s regular ‘Process’ evenings. Process evenings are open to all, though space is limited, so it’s best to get there in a timely fashion.

To the wider world, Jessica will be best known for her work on stage and TV as a singer and actor (and voice artiste for Spitting Image), but she has also recently published her first comic, ‘IT Girl’, a potted biography of Clara Bow, the silent movie actress and biggest star of her age – and possibly if you adjust for inflation, the biggest star of all time. Jessica talked us through the way she came to comics via fine and performing arts, her first attempts, lucky meetings and new friendships with other creators based upon persistence and a refusal to give up. It was an interesting and enjoyable evening.

At the end, after chatting very briefly – small as the group was, it was too big realistically to take up too much of her time when other people were anxious to talk – I was presented with a sheet of Strathmore paper, which I’d never heard of before. Strathmore paper is an acid free paper, and quite substantial, feeling much like cartridge paper, but rather tougher. Most importantly - and who knew such treasures existed? - it has lined edgings designed to aid in the design of panels for drawing comics. It’s not cheap paper, but it clearly is the tool for the job.

The ‘price’ that came with the gifting, was that it should be used for a single page of comic art. Properly used.

Having got it home, un-creased, against the odds I must say, I spent much of the night and early morning (between sleeps), day dreaming about character designs and layouts. Having got that far (i.e. not very, though still enthused), I continued such daydreaming on my commute in to work this morning. Arriving at Victoria as usual, my phone buzzed as I emerged from the underground and I see, via Messenger, that the idea has morphed: a small group of, I think, six of us are now kicking around the idea of submitting four pages each of our own comic story, to be self-published (if we can work out how to do it reasonably) in a ‘zine’ anthology, in time for Thought Bubble in November.

I am intrigued and ideas are beginning to emerge via FaceBook Messenger. Watch this space.

Well, I am back in the office after a rather longer than anticipated break for Easter.

My original plans were to add Maunday Thursday and yesterday, the Tuesday after Easter Monday into the mix and have a long relaxing weekend. In the event I was off all last week. Mum had another stroke and we were very anxious at one point.

The weekend before Easter I was contacted by my sister to tell me that Mum was back in hospital following a suspected stroke in addition to that she suffered last October. We were very worried (frankly we were scared, if I’m honest), particularly as she appeared to have lost the power of speech and it wasn’t clear that she could understand what was being said to her. For my own peace of mind, I am glad that I didn’t get there in time to see her still curled into a ball sobbing with fright. No-one wants to see their elderly Mum in that state. I know it sounds selfish of me, but I really think it would have hit me too hard.

Still. The crisis passed, and over the period of the week, she recovered to the extent that she was able to sit in a chair and chat, occasionally wandering a short distance. Her memory though, is probably even worse than it was before and when she gets tired her speech slurs. There is still something that needs to be looked at and I fear that no-one quite knows what the problem is. She was kept in hospital until last night because earlier in the week she seemed to have some sort of small seizure in her sleep. From time to time she complains of a pain like pins and needles in her right hand and wrist, and one time when I was massaging it for her, the left side of her mouth drooped alarmingly as if she was having another stroke. That passed, happily, but it has not been explained. Oddly, the droop on her mouth was the opposite side to all the other symptoms. It is her right wrist that aches, her right ankle that swells and when she is drinking, the right side of her mouth that gives her difficulty.

I am not going to details here, but we are once again left dissatisfied with the standard of care she received and some of the decisions seem remarkably misguided to the layman. There may be good reasons for giving a frail 85 (nearly 86) year old dangerous antipsychotics to calm her down, in place of mild tranquilisers, but I have yet to hear the case made. We will not be letting this go unremarked, nor will we let them get away without an explanation of why it took 12 hours between diagnosis and commencement of treatment, followed by a hospital transfer of which the family were left uninformed.

Still. Guerrilla warfare with the NHS Trust notwithstanding, we have our Mum back home and I have a photo of her sitting in my niece’s living room, grinning like a good ‘un over a steaming mug of tea.

I need a rest now, though, I think.

It really is most tedious.

For some time now, I have thought that I have been drinking too much coffee at work. I don’t drink much coffee at home these days, I have a mug of instocaff on a weekday morning with breakfast and we will either use the percolator or brew up a cafetière on a Saturday and Sunday and get a couple of mugs of proper coffee down our necks on those days in the morning. Beyond that, at home I tend to drink tea and for the past couple of years that’s been decaffeinated tea.

On weekdays I get into the office and buy a large latte downstairs (occasionally, very occasionally, I might have a regular latte in the afternoon), but between times it was always instocaff, because it’s quicker and easier. Over the past fortnight I have largely switched away from instocaff in the office, preferring my decaffeinated tea.

The problem is, every afternoon, I just yawn and yawn. I think that I must have overdone the caffeine reduction.

I do drink water from time to time, but I have to confess that I prefer tea when I’m sitting at my desk. I do like water (a friend of mine always contends that he hates the taste of water, to which I always responds that he has clearly never been properly thirsty). I just wish that I could stop yawning, or maybe find a job where I could have a couple of hours’ siesta…

Of course today there remains the lingering suspicion that I might not have slept quite as well as I might last night, which would be a contributory factor right now. In theory I got around 6½ hours’ sleep (which might be cutting it fine, but equally should be something I can cope with, though I admit that a little longer would have been choice). No, the problem today is that we went out after work last night. It was Furtle’s Ma’s birthday and the in-laws came into the West End to see a matinee. We met them afterwards, had a couple of pints of ale and then repaired to a restaurant where, in addition to two bottles of wine between the four of us, we had a meal and finished it with an Irish coffee.

I can’t say that I felt even marginally drunk, though I guess the units piled up into that little lot, but it might have been a contributory factor to why I’m yawning so hard this afternoon. Booze and quality sleep rarely mix.

Here's the irony.

I have spent the past two days at home because I put my back out on Sunday and have been barely mobile since. I wouldn't mind so much if I'd been doing anything strenuous, but I simply leant forward to clip the loose hatch on our gas meter back in place and *spang* something went in my lower back.

It's getting better, but I think I might have set it back this afternoon in a misguided effort to make it better. I lay on the bed with a hard cushion (actually a stuffed toy) in the small of my back to try and make sure that my spine didn't settle in the wrong position in relation to my pelvis. Then I dozed for an hour or so listening to the radio. Anyway, when I woke up and decided that visit to the smallest room was in order, it hurt like all hell when I put any weight on my left leg and I had to hobble slowly to the loo. Ah well. I was hoping, would you believe it, to go to work tomorrow. Maybe I shall be able to, I don't know.

The irony of course, is that for the past couple of days I've had plenty of time for updates on here unlike recently and nothing has happened to stir my writing buds.

Thanks to everyone who commented on my last post about Mum. It’s easier to update from here than to respond individually, though I’d like to if I had more time.

She will be seeing the doctor again today and my sister will bring up the issue of eating and drinking. I don’t think that for the next couple of days it will be too much of a problem, because finally Mum remarked her mouth was dry and managed to drink some squash, so hopefully she is at least beginning to get some liquid in her, albeit not enough. She has lost quite a bit of weight and can’t afford to lose much more, but if necessary, she will just have to go back in to hospital and be fed through an IV. We don’t want that, obviously, but the strain of visiting on a daily basis is frankly less on my sister than the stress of watching Mum slowly starve and dehydrate, even if she herself is not fully aware of it.

The logistics of the situation mean that while she is not on her own for prolonged periods, other than a six hour period on Fridays, there is no one at home all the time to try the ‘little and often’ option of feeding and drinking. I really don’t know how we’re going to square this circle and keep Mum at home. I don’t know if it can be squared.

I worry that the best case scenario is that Mum will end up in a home, which I think might finish her off. My sister is worried that Mum has quietly given up and is content to just fade away. I’m not convinced, but I don’t see her every day.