An email received...

this morning from Audrey...

‘Please could you get me some 

KY Jelly?  I hesitate to ask Gavin, nor my more prissy neighbours for fear of the talk around the old folks’ apartments, speculating on the use of the aforesaid?’

Why she doesn’t feel able to ask the district nurses who come every day to apply her medicine to the parts other medicines don’t reach, I have no idea?

It made me smile anyway!

My reply...

Morning Oh Sexy Lady!

Of course I don’t mind!

Signed off...

BIG love from your 

‘Slide and Ride Monitor’

Says it all really about how at 94  she is so worth all the love and help we can give her.  Still full
 of fun as her body is biting her BIG time on the bum.

What a woman!

A funny sort of...

a week.

We are at the end of an interesting week.

The work is just about done in the house and guess who on the way to the pub wanted to take in a quirky house featured in Country Life?

This morning, while all was quiet in the house the two things I looked up on the internet were dogs looking for a home and humans looking for a new home.  Imagine my surprise on tapping in unusual

properties a house in Hythe popped up.  In the photographs it looked just the thing and reasonably ‘cheapish’!  We all know photo’s tell HUGE whoppers.  There was one small problem it looked in need of TLC and shedloads of money.  The fact it only had one loo and no parking was to me a mere trifle.  It was odd and had a walled garden... what is there not to like?


Good morning!  I have just found this in draft.

It was dated 12 August.  A lot has happened since then.  Not least we went to see the property and boy could I see us living there, a little gem tucked out of the way in the middle of Hythe.  It has so much going for it, so much going against it.  Not least money and huge upheaval.  I am getting too old for this caper, not to mention the man, who like so many husbands humours me, wants me to be happy.  For himself all he really wants is a quiet life!

The here and now is... the house is finally finished, looks superb, just the curtains.  My ideas have worked well, I say rather modestly!?!  Trouble is you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s 
ear.  This pig’s appendage is in a prime location, smack on the sea 
front.  As I sit knocking this 
out, the door is open, the sea is flat calm grey, clouds the same, a gentle breeze, all 
is quiet... what is there not to like?

Last weekend we went 
up to Cromer to look at a house, knowing all the while that Audrey is failing.  A crazy hair brained idea.  I trawl the internet for quirky cottages, knowing full well the one I left behind will be hard to replicate.

What am I like?  Get a grip LL, pull your socks up and get cracking enjoying your life by the sea...  spoilt lump!

Hythe

Is Lakeland...

the latter-day Betterware or Kleeneze...  

I idly wonder?
Looking through their
Autumn 2018 brochure I notice the word Plastic has gone from their company name... wonder why!?!  Call me an old cynic, I really don’t care.

Am I showing my age by feeling all nostalgic?  Remember the brushes that were designed to clean between the all the rage venetian blinds, the curved brush for who knows what?  The clothes prop for the washing line?  The clothes hanging peg bag, the polish, the egg beater?

I well remember Auntie Nell confiding to my mother about the Kleeneze man whose brush reached the parts other brushes had until that one... never reached!!!

Who in their...

right mind makes their own pasta.

I am a chef/cook and wouldn’t for one second contemplate making it!

I read in today’s paper that Italian nonna are a huge hit on the television making pasta.

My only, never to be repeated experience was to an Italian matriarch in St Leonard’s.

She kneaded the pasta with the air of the Boston strangler.

It seemed to take forever, all the while notching up the fear.  The rolling pin was brandished like a sabre.  I fully expected her to turn to the fridge and get out a horse’s head to make the sauce.

Relief flooded over me as I scuttled to the car.

‘I got away!’

I roared off, all the while thinking life is too blooming short to make your own pasta.

Scarred for life by fettuccine.

Call me a wimp I don’t care.

Added to which the Italians make some belissimo dried pasta.

They have been doing it for thousands of years, why would I want to compete?

She said...

‘I have taken those drugs before and they will make me psychotic!’  
They have, and her evil ire is aimed at me!

We picked Audrey up from hospital yesterday, set her up safely at home.
Today, she on faceTime is accusing us of dropping her in it, not to put too fine a point on it

the frigging brown and smellies!

It was all our fault that we arrived ten minutes early and prevented her from taking the all important paperwork with her to hospital.

‘I was just in the middle of highlighting the pertinent points, when you arrived!’

The fact she could hardly breathe was completely forgotten.

She fired off a list of things we had said that in her mind meant she didn’t get the treatment she 
should have got.  Completely forgetting that armed with my iPad I at every stage from reception to triage nurse to doctor showed them the email that explained her team were expecting her.

My B.P. shot off the scale, hers tickled along at 120/80...
is that I idly wonder, why she is still up and at it at 93, 94 in September?

Where to go from here, when I am rapidly feeling I am totally and utterly out of my depth.

Today the renovations are finally done, the glass is in and looks superb, pictures are hung.  Just the bit now I like the best, the scene setting and fiddling.  

I’m fiddling alright while the Rome that is more commonly known as Aud burns with anger and angst.

Happy days!

Have cobweb will...

travel.

Can you believe this has been with me every one of the sixty eight miles there and back to see Audrey in hospital?

You will have heard of the worldwide web?  This is it 

personified!  Alright not exactly 

worldwide, Kentwide any road!  

Speeding along in my Brabus Smart car it bucked and flexed, but didn’t break.

Audrey update.

We have what I take to be a fairly typical mother, daughter relationship.  Not having a mum for forty seven years I forget how it goes.  My old mum, when she died was 48, no age to die.  She 

was loving and we had a super open caring and cuddly relationship.  Audrey is highly intelligent, she went to university back in the year dot.  Has the full compliment of faculties and some: running 

rings around my simple brain.  What we do share however is a degree, (the only one I can claim anyway!)... Masters in Battleaxemanship.

‘Just let her talk!  Man said kindly as he waved me off.

And talk, she did.

One of my cotton nighties I had taken in for her was given short shrift.

‘Take it back!’

Don’t rise to the bait flashed through my mind!  She sat 

resplendent in red satin jim-jams, talking through mouthfuls of fish and chips. She looked thin and pale, at the same time as looking  for all the world like a galleon in full sail.   Capt Jack Sparrow 

would have been proud to take the helm of such a magnificent craft.  Tugboat Lett moored alongside the bed, melting in the heat.

A dishy doctor came in

‘Who are you?’

I, by this time had lost the power of speech.

‘Err, I am a friend of Lett’s, err, double err... Audrey!

Her smile, lit up the room as she gazed into his eyes.  Pity all talk was of poo and nothing more 

juicy, although on occasions... Stop... too much information. 

The hands of the clock lost the power to move, as the hours dragged by, still she talked. After what to me seemed like three days I suggested she might need a snooze!?! 

‘I think I will have your nightie, the nurses are complaining about me having to remove my pyjama bottoms for the twice daily enemas!’

Back out of my bag it came and 

graciously she accepted it.

As I climbed into my potbelly 

stove of a car, on what seemed like the hottest day of the year, I thought as I weakly drove away...

Audrey is as tough as the 

cobweb on my car.  

Writing foibles...

I love to write.

My prose leaves a lot to be desired insofar

as being grammatically correct.  In fact I would say I enjoy doing things my way, for example using words to suit my style of waffle... wrong, but to me right for what I want to get across.

I love repeating a series of the same words, why?  Who knows.  The contrary in me I suppose.  I also enjoy making up words that to me are more descriptive of what I want to say.  It amuses my small brain.  My addiction to exclamation marks and my beloved question mark.  There really should be a rhetorical one that sort of floats slightly higher on the line, if you get my drift?  

I go weak at the knees when I read folk who can obviously write, it seems effortless.  Mine in comparison plods along, sometimes smoother than others.

The other odd thing is tapping out on a machine is where I find the 
words flow; with pen in hand I get all primary school ‘Write a day in the life of a penny’ composition ... bored!

I fire off a post and then think about proof reading!  I need a sub editor, on second thoughts, they would iron out all my funny little ways, then I might just of not bothered.  This at the end of the day is for me.

Why do you do it and come to think it, waste time reading mine?