If I say I am working flat out getting ready for Miniatura, for some reason there will be a distraction. Merely the act of mentioning how busy I am seems to invoke Loki the joker, who will toss his card in the mix ensuring you get a tricky hand.
Yesterday it was the OH, complaining for the umpteenth time about his skin. The excessive dryness and itchiness of his skin he has ascribed to the humidity level in the lounge and the new carpet. He found a site on his phone that suggested humidity levels in the house should be at fifty percent. It didn’t say at which percent you would have to develop webbed feet.
There was a list of other symptoms, he complained of loudly, and then I shouted at him if he was worried, to do something, instead of endlessly telling me how stupid I am when I ascribe his classic symptoms to alcohol ingestion. I went upstairs and started working but shortly he appeared at the door saying he had rung the NHS advice line, whose advice had been to get me to take him to the hospital at once. So I did. After a battery of tests he returned home very pleased that nothing abnormal had been detected. See! See! What am I worrying about!
There has just been a phone call offering him a brain scan this afternoon. I will not be able to take him, he’ll have to walk up the hill or find a space in the car park himself, because I have an appointment to pick up my driving spectacles. I am not being cruel, I have had a few scans, including brain. It is not difficult. You take off metal, you lie on the bed, they inject you, the machine goes backward and forward, you get up, you get dressed, you go home or back to the ward. By the third go you arrive in stretchy leggings and underwear with no metal anywhere, which speeds things up considerably.
I know many readers (hello) are drawn here in fellow feeling, who are carers of one sort or another. Living with someone with a difficult condition, whether it is acknowledged or not and however slight or otherwise the caring role, is not easy and never convenient. No one is ever overtaken by disease at a time when there is little else to do. The trip to the hospital has never arrived as a sudden distraction from boredom.
Sudden distraction from work, yes, all the time. Inconvenient for everyone else, always. Something that could have been prevented from becoming a drama by action thirteen years ago when tendencies were first noted, absolutely.
I’ll keep you posted. All things being equal I have a lovely twenty-fourth scale assembly of residents of Versailles to show you. Yes they were living the high life, yes there was glamour and cocktails and all-night games of cards. Yes the end of the eighteenth century in France was as OTT as OTT can get. They didn’t even have to go to the pub, there were butlers with bottles absolutely everywhere and a massive marble staircase that people used to wee down while waiting for an audience. (I know, visited as a teenager with the French family I stayed with, in the sixties. They had definitely mopped it up by then, the staircase is huge, as waterfalls go it must have been impressive.) (And damp.)
But we all know what happened next.
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