Custard Cream

My mother, who has dementia, has been starving for weeks - not forgetting to eat but actually refusing all food as though she wanted to spite everyone, to spite the world, to fast in a negative sense, to ultimately die, like an anorexic. So she is in hospital.

She has a catheter and an occasional drip as she often refuses to drink as well. She has been treated for a mouth infection (candida) and (at last!) a Urine Tract Infection has been diagnosed, and the treatment is being administered by medicine. There was some talk of putting a tube down through her nose to her stomach and feeding her that way.

But today there was a packet of custard creams, with two missing, on her table. I idly wondered where the missing ones were. "Who ate the custard creams?" I asked her.

"I suppose I did." she said.
"Do you want another one?" I asked, giving it to her.
"Oh OK." she said, and put out her hand from under the covers, and took it and crunched a bit off.

I was so happy! Ha, HA!

And I thought many things, about how you don't know why you love your crazy old person who so often has you in despair, but nevertheless you do; and without meaning to at all, they can make you happy, sometimes, by just being themselves. And I did not envy my brothers who don't try to have any kind of relationship with her, or have any responsibility for her, because they are missing this extra little bit of life with its bittersweet emotions. It is like another parenthood. There should be a name for it like - mother mothering.

Autumn again.

This is The Big Tree at the rowing club. It grows right on the point of the land where the stream rushes out and the roots are very exposed - it is a Maple. It is my favourite tree, big and gnarly, but hard to photograph..
 

Heather garden again, VW

My son has put on weight during his stay in the USA.

Heather garden, VW

Acer, VW

 

Couldn't find a label on this tree

Wraysbury skiff and Punting club

Acer and mushrooms

Into Desborough cut, Weybridge end, autumnal poplars

Things which might cheer one up on one's birthday

Lunch and a big bunch of flowers from JB - also a Monkees CD.

For some reason my phone is taking pix as though through a heavy mist. I had to edit the colours in the photo to get something like the flowers that I can see.

The design of the London telephone box

The London telephone box was designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. Originally. The design has been modified many times.

Here you can see a view of the tomb on which the design was based - not very closely! It is Sir John Soane's tomb in Old St Pancras churchyard.

This is the design and I have to say, it looks wonderful in this imagined landscape (nothing like the churchyard that really exists as we see in the photo above.)