WEEKEND WOES

Saturday May 4th, 2013

Somehow I'd managed to get myself into such a relaxed state about my mother's condition that I actually forgot to speak to the hospital at all on the Saturday morning of the Bank Holiday weekend. In another reality, I might just be able to persuade you that it was because the weekend staff just aren't as communicative or familiar with my mother's case and so there wouldn't have been any point to it, but who am I trying to kid with that apart from myself...?

However, I did still plan to go and visit, this time during the afternoon to add a bit of variety into the mix, and duly headed back to the car after a light lunch and pointed it once more at the traffic, expecting the kind of delays that only a Saturday can bring.

I also had to pay a price for my neglectful ways of the morning. Karma does have a way of doing that to you, even if you don't really choose to believe in karma, but call it what you will, coincidence, fate or whatever, the machine in the car park accepted my £2 coin before I had noticed the LCD display saying that it was "not accepting coins at this time" and refused to give it back no matter how often I pressed the coin return button.

Sulkily I went off to put the last of my change (which I was lucky to have on me) into another machine and got my ticket, before going over to harangue the gentleman in the fluorescent jacket who had magically appeared by the first machine in the interim.

He wouldn't give me my money back either (well, why would he...?) but told me that I needed to go to the travel office on Monday and they would issue me with a free day ticket, or something. I fumed about this for a while, and fumed about it some more upon leaving when I spotted a different man in a similar jacket who was actually refunding some other disgruntled visitors who had obviously picked the correct moment to have their similar problem occur, but the fuming has (just about) stopped now, and I'm trying to think of it as a "charitable donation" to probably much-needed "hospital funds" or something.

Ah well, when you get home and the TV is telling you that "Just £2 can save a child's life" it's difficult to quibble over an excessive parking charge.

Karma again, you see...? Or coincidence...? Or perhaps the mind tunes in just because that tiny chunk of the zeitgeist happens to fit your own experiences at that time.

Meanwhile, the visit went well. The bed was set at a quirky angle diagonally across the room for some reason, and mum was quite irritated that the staff had made her stay in her chair for a lot longer than she would have liked to, about which she complained a lot. You can usually tell that mum is feeling better as the complaints increase, so it's probably a good sign, and it's even better for me because I'm not currently the one in the firing line.

Well, not yet anyway...

For most of the duration of the visit I was joined by a church friend of mum's, the same bubbly lady who also visited during that long, long day of a couple of Tuesday's ago when mum was first taken so badly ill and I was summoned to the hospital in expectation of the very worst of news. Amidst all her tales of Canada and the multi-millionaire her daughter married, I did manage to get the impression before this visitor departed that some people are actually rather fond of my dear old mum, and that they had been quite concerned about her for a while there.

Of course a whole bunch of them who were once the "movers and shakers" of that community when I was very young are all now of a similar age to my mother and are all facing similar problems to the ones she has, which makes them all keeping up to date with each other a lot more difficult as a lack of confidence, or mobility, or just old-fashioned illness and old age isolate them from each other more and more, and it all suddenly seemed rather sad to this old hermit.

Meanwhile, mum had obviously missed out on the sleep she wanted by being forced to stay in her chair, and was obviously getting sleepy, so I left well before the hour was up and drifted back to the car park and fume once again over the four quid I'd ended up feeding into the machine for standing my car in the watery sunshine for just under a hour...