Category: Family
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A new hope
It’s been quite a week.
My Mum has had a rough few years. Eight years ago, aged 71, she lost John (my step-Dad) to cancer. One moment he was fine, the next he started deteriorating rapidly, was soon bedridden, and spent weeks waiting for for death to take him as his body wasted away. Three months and he was gone.
Mum sold their beautiful big retirement bungalow she’d nursed him in, and got a smaller bungalow in the small town where she’d grown up and her cousin still lives and owns the amazing wool shop.
Two years later she had a mini-stroke, fell and broke her ankle, and had to hand in her driver’s licence while she recovered.
Then came COVID-19 and the isolation, followed by misdiagnosed heart failure, and then cancer of her own. She needed major surgery, but the doctors said she wouldn’t survive a general anaesthetic (because of the misdiagnosed heart failure).
She prepared to have the surgery with an epidural. On the day of the op, they decided she couldn’t have the surgery without a general and so that’s what happened. Then there was the radiotherapy and follow up tests every three months since. She survived it all.
Then her beloved, very elderly (and very fat) cats died one after another.
She’s been through a lot!
Just before xmas last year she had a chest infection. She’s had breathing problems on and off for as long as I can remember. As a kid she said it was bronchitis. Later it was asthma. Now, like me, it’s COPD.
She hasn’t recovered from this episode and is struggling to do everyday tasks including personal care. Her neighbour has been a godsend throughout and describes my Mum like she’s her own mum. I’ve been trying to help from a distance (a four hour drive away) to organise home help, etc.
Last Sunday I noticed that my neighbours on the ground floor had a For Sale sign outside their relatively (these days) spacious one bed flat. I messaged my Mum saying it’s a shame she can’t move in there. Me and my wife could help her with the things she can’t do for herself plus keep her company and she gets to see her grandsons in the flesh more than twice a year.
I didn’t really expect her to take it seriously, but as her helpful and caring neighbour said, “It’s a no-brainer.” The neighbours downstairs told me that they hadn’t decided if they were selling or letting, but today I viewed the flat opposite which, although I’d forgotten about it, has been on the market for longer. It’s also in good condition, and my neighbour is not in a chain and has somewhere to move to.
It’s given my Mum some hope. It’s a big move at her age. Fingers crossed it all works out.
Relaxing morning with the kids.
I’m sucking on stray lumps of Red Leicester while stirring the rest of the grated cheese into thickened white sauce, monitoring the macaroni simmering in the other pan (for big kid and me), and checking on sausages in the oven (for little kid).
Big kid is playing Minecraft with a friend and little kid is exploring space on his tablet.
Wife is having her morning nap.
The code of life
Big kid has been learning about WWII at school. He took in a photo of his great grandfather (my Grandpa on my Dad’s side).
Grandpa Fred was a coder. He was in the Royal Signal Corps decoding Morse code messages from the Nazis. When war broke he tried to join the Royal Navy. Because he knew Morse code from his job at the Post Office they sent him to Scotland. If he’d joined the Atlantic and Arctic conveys he’d very likely have ended up at the bottom of the cold, dark sea, and we wouldn’t be here.
As a teenager, I remember spending hours typing in pages of machine code from computer magazines into my Dragon 32 PC hoping not to make a single error and produce a playable game “Bomber” at the end.
We’re all coding - encoding and decoding - stories that give our lives meaning and purpose.
Weaving our own unique patterns in the fabric of space-time, searching for answers and connections in the world wide web, and gazing at the stars in awe and wonder for millennia.
Using threads from the code of life created by and handed down to us by our ancestors and their ancestors before them since time immemorial.
From cave paintings to fossils and footsteps on the moon, from the Pyramids to the Parthenon and the Pentagon, we’re leaving reminders of our existence, building structures that help us to organise, process and understanding information about our world.
Now we’re coding large language models and training them on the whole of human knowledge and history hoping that they can tell us the meaning of life and/or not destroy us in the hands of our new Nazi overlords, or serve us up tasteless slop.
I’m not sure what Fred would have made of it all. Like my great grandfather Frank before him, he was from another time, conservative, happy with his lot. He loved Oldham Athletic (“Latics”), the Telegraph crossword, driving carefully, and Freemasonry. He wrote letters on a typewriter.
He had all his teeth removed at a relatively young age in a “buy one get them all removed free” kind of too-good-to-be-true offer, and spent the rest of his days struggling to eat food that wasn’t tasteless slop with dentures that never fitted properly. Raw egg mixed with milk and Ribena was a particular favourite, if I remember correctly.
Fred would have loved his great grandkids. It’s a shame they never got to meet.
He would probably have said, “Give over, lad!”
Wife beefed about the beef (“too salty”) and the horseradish (“tastes like jalapeno flavoured toothpaste”), but otherwise enjoyed the “perfect” roast potatoes and the veggies.
Kid A said he would try the tiniest piece of beef along with some cabbage, but ate neither.
Kid B said, “Maybe yesterday”.
Wife has just got back from Ealing Broadway on a work visit with a very nice pair of brand new trainers.
While she’s decontaminating in the shower, our friendly neighbourhood Evri delivery driver has delivered another new pair of shoes for her.
Wife has had a sore throat on and off for a couple of weeks, so naturally she asked me to “get some beef” to cure it.
This reminded me of childhood weekends at my Granny’s house, especially with the hot horseradish sauce.
My Dad has been radicalised by the far right on YouTube, and now he’s started using emojis in messages.
