dear diary :: getting back into the swing

Home again and back to normal daily life and all that entails. Already there have been ups and downs in the couple of weeks we have been at home. Mum has had another urine infection – they make her say and do the oddest things as these infections disturb the brain. It is generally known now that a lot of the ‘dementia’ in elderly people is actually a lack of fluids but even though they are told to drink more they don’t as it means more trips to the toilet. For mum this is not easy as her mobility is so reduced she is on the verge now of not being able to walk at all.

We had a trip up to see her last Sunday after having Little L and Sweetie to stay on Friday and Saturday night. As they left we jumped in the car to drive the 90 miles to see mum – she hates being alone on a Sunday and my sister was away for a rest (though you can hardly call it being on her own as the carers go in 4 times a day).

I have started a course of acupuncture to see if it might help my ear problems and the peripheral nerve damage in my legs and feet from the ruptured disc I had over a year ago. I have never minded needles and quite frankly the doctors are at a loss so I will have a go at anything.

Last Monday we woke to a phone call from my younger daughter who, if you have been following my blog may remember, we helped to buy a new used car – the one that had a burst tyre on the motorway 14 minutes later. Perry’s in Rotherham have been very good and sent a cheque to her for the replacement tyre and we are hopeful we might recover some of the money for the recovery charge we paid to get her off the motorway. Anyway back to the phone call….”mum, the car is at the garage again”, “oh no” I said, ” what has happened this time?”…….. “a taxi driver came out of his driveway on the school run and straight into me and then drove away – I am waiting for the police”.

Daughter, Little L and Sweetie were shocked but OK, my daughter is now having to have physio because of bad whiplash.. the taxi driver eventually came back to the scene after his neighbour, who had seen the crash, rang him to tell him to come back. He has had a similar accident before coming out of his drive. Obviously he doesn’t have great timing and luckily daughter was not going fast. The car is not quite a write off but badly crumpled. Such
a shame.

On Wednesday it was such a beautiful sunny day we used our free NT coupon and went to Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire for the day. It must be over 30 years since we last visited and there is now a huge car park which was almost full and a new visitor centre. When we previously went you parked almost outside the door in the car park that had all of about 10 cars in it and the cafe was in one of the old kitchens. It was very interesting as the volunteers had time to chat and tell us quite a bit of the history and odd quirks of the place.

The little book on the left was found hidden behind one of the wooden panels in the dining room. There are never as many little artefacts of this nature in a place of this date as you find in later Georgian and Victorian properties so this was quite unusual.

We had arranged to go to help my elder daughter this week, who lives nearby, with her young baby but unfortunately baby Chocolate was unwell with a virus and a high temperature at the same time as her husband was also ill in bed. We could only help wash dishes and do a few household chores and nurse the baby to give mum a break as no way was he being put down in his cot – all he really wanted was to snuggle up with his mum. He is no better today so we will have Master Freddie here tomorrow to help out. I did have plans but of course I can put them aside.

I seem to have got quite a few unfinished decluttering jobs on the go now as it has been quite a broken up week one way or another. I am still wading through old paperwork and managed to scan on to the computer a lot of documents that I feel need keeping. I know you should not keep things ‘just in case’ but we have been saved a few times by hanging on to things. When we had the flood we could produce every receipt and got a good price for our contents, when there was all the endowment policy scandal we could produce plenty of evidence and more recently when the Skipton B.S. failed to transfer our ISA savings we could tell them the day and almost exact time that we had dropped the transfer request forms (that they claim they had not received) into the branch because I had kept the dental card machine receipt which showed the date and time we paid and the appointment was prior to us dropping in the forms. With each of these issues there has been a lot of money at stake that we might have missed out on if I wasn’t quite as diligent at keeping old paperwork.

It is so easy to keep a record digitally and I can then archive all these documents onto a memory stick. I hope I will never need to look back at them but you never know!