Centralisation’s curse means craic appearing in Irish society

“Cork licensee Con Dennehy believes publicans and hackney drivers should work together to provide discount fares for elderly customers so they don’t live in rural isolation.”

Ha! I bet he does, was my immediate reaction to this report in the Irish Examiner. Nothing self-serving in that, I’m sure.

Reading the rest of the report, however, swiftly removed the smile from my face. Much as it may often look to enjoy a certain detachment from the destructive frenzy of modern living, Ireland, it seems, is feeling the social pinch in those very areas that grace so many tourist brochures.

‘Gardaí have noticed in the past few years that the age profiles of those committing suicide in some rural areas has increased…

…Mr Dennehy said that normal places of interaction for people, especially those living on their own, were disappearing rapidly in rural Ireland.

“It’s not just pubs which are closing, but post offices, creameries, garda stations etc. Even the postman is not now calling to some houses in rural areas and is instead putting letters in boxes down lanes,” [he ] said.

However neat it may look on the spreadsheets of those who decide such things, this is the flipside of the streamline and centralisation fetish that has long dominated the management of public and private sector concerns alike, certainly on my side of the Irish Sea. It sucks life out of areas that ultimately cannot live on nice views and birdsong alone. More and more, it also begs the question – if centralisation is so right, so imperative, how come we managed without it for so long?

Our ancestors weren’t all commercial dunderheads, I’m sure. How come there was a time when villages had their post offices and hospitals and small towns their railway stations and the British Isles not only survived on such arrangements but thrived on them?

Getting to the heart of it, is centralisation something commerce does to survive, or merely something it does to make big profits bigger?

I’m neither an historian nor an economist, so I would genuinely like to know. As might those among Ireland’s elderly for whom a place to die for seems in danger of becoming precisely that.

Bruce Forsyth – a slip of the tongue or a damning insight?

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Let’s hope Sir Bruce Forsyth was just a little emotional and sloppy with his words when news of his knighthood broke yesterday.

Let’s hope that it didn’t quite come out as he meant it to when he described how the honour “makes me feel as though my life has been worthwhile”.

Because taking him at his word doesn’t bear thinking about. Especially if you’re his wife, or his children and grandchildren, a close friend, or one of the millions of people he so effortlessly entertained when in his pomp. Thanks for the love and support but quite frankly it means bugger all alongside having the monarch dab a sword on my shoulders…

And how on earth are the rest of us to cope? We who may never get within a thousand miles of a knighthood and have somehow deluded ourselves that aspiring to live for every day and in such a way that our funeral is standing-room-only was pretty much all we needed to make our time on this planet feel well-spent.

What mugs we are. No gong, no meaning. Who knew?

So yes, let’s just assume that Sir Bruce simply chose his words badly and does not in fact possess a sense of self-worth so brittle that a glittering career and the love of family and friends don’t quite do it for him when it comes to feeling “worthwhile.”

Probably for the best, eh?

Bye bye, Dad

If you never forget where you were when you heard that your dad has died, I’m stuck forever with the mundanity of a residential side-road just outside Stamford; the first available backwater off the A1 when it came to returning a call whose content I knew before I even reached for my phone.

It didn’t matter that you couldn’t wait for me to reach you. Two hundred miles away for over 30 years, I’d always known the odds on my not being there were miniscule. What mattered was that my sister was; holding your hand at the nursing home while unseeing eyes flickered for the last time and cathedral bells pealed in the background.

Given the sorrow I felt when you’d told me months before how lonely you were becoming in your own house, I was more than content with that arrangement.

I continued my journey regardless. Stared you and death in the face together, stroked your cool cheek and thanked you for everything.

That was the easy part. The worst: engaging my stroke-ridden mother with small talk in an upstairs room while watching the body of the man to whom she’d been wed for 51 years, being slid into the back of a hearse in the forecourt below.

And now, back home, I sift through the mental rubble, as grief – hitting home as belatedly as people warn you it will – congeals around the usual outcrops.

I despair at the unknowing brevity of our last conversation last Tuesday: me on holiday, you weak and exhausted after treatment. “I’m a bit better,” you said quietly down the phone, “but I won’t stay on long.”

A bit better. I went fishing with barely a care in the world the following morning. I would never talk to you again and I smiled contentedly at catching three stupid trout.

Yet had I known that was our last contact, who would have ever got the phone out of my hand?

I think of the last time I saw you alive. Surrounded by impending death, I was still happy just to have you around, rants and all. Happy to see you among people, and close to mother, the pair of you spending evenings together in the bedsit-type suite that you’d turned into a home from home. A year or two of this, I told myself: the perfect ending.

All told, you were there just a matter of  months, yet for all I might wish you back, would you thank me for it? Life was closing in and you were an old man increasingly unable to reconcile yourself with a body that could no longer run like clockwork. It took so much to make you happy and so little to make you angry these last 18 months, an imbalance that I fancy would have only intensified the longer you lived.

And I wrestle with the same awful perception that tormented me when my grandmother died. A sense of you being stranded in time, unable to move beyond 22nd August 2010 because the world has dropped you off and is moving on without you.

Yet if the Christian message is true, you’re the one who’s gone on ahead, and I’m the one playing catch-up. So I wrestle with perspectives.

Worst of all though, and there’s a moral here for those who swear by routine, is the period between 8.30 and 9pm: the time we’d speak on the phone every evening. Will it be weeks, months or even years before that thirty-minute spell comes and goes without me aching to hear those conversational bookends you used every time?

“Dad here…”

“Love to you all. Bye-bye. Bye-bye…”

[pic courtesy of Light Knight]

Care Home Chronicles Pt II

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The residents’ lounge must have eight or nine elderly occupants asleep in there this morning as Dad and I walk by, all of them leant forward with their heads slumped on their chests. Out like lights.

It occurs to me that I’m just one loud “BOO!” away from being a mass murderer.

Care Home Chronicles Pt. I

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Staying in an old folks home for four days: part parental visit, part glimpse of the future.

“You might get someone sticking her head round the door in the middle of the night, wanting to know if your position needs changing,” says the Warden.

Promises, promises.

Slow death

Just back from five days with my parents.

Between the grim realisation that – more than 12 months on – this may be as far as my mother’s stroke is prepared to let go and my alienation in what was once a home but is now a regimented pressure-cooker of suppressed despair, I struggle to get my bearings.

In the inner debate of slow death, quick death, where parents are concerned, slow death still edges it. There is at least time for unspoken goodbyes that way, as you clear childhood belongings from forgotten drawers and reflect on the sound of your own voice from 40 years ago, while looking around the garden.

Time too, to accept the preparatory lurch in your life’s centre of gravity, as you realise that ‘family’ is starting to mean wife and children more than parents.

By the end of my stay, I have begun to adjust to the round of carers’ visits, relentless planning and an 88-year-old man who can no longer function without thinking aloud.

The only residual sadness as I head back to the station, is that he and I will never laugh together again. Not in a secure, carefree way. Routine dogs him now and any respite is fleeting. Everything but this I can rationalise, even the two-hour train journey that I used to call ‘leaving home’ but now regard as ‘going home’.

One more subtle shift in the pageant of slow death.

Digital TV and a different kind of revolution

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The in-laws have bought a new TV, in readiness for the UK’s switchover to digital television nationwide.

“Go and make sure Grandad has programmed all the channels in properly,” my wife tells Older Son, despite her father’s protestations that it’s already taken care of. He used to work in electronics but advancing years mean his self-confidence in such matters is increasingly outstripped by reality.

Older Son returns five minutes later, slowly shaking his head. “I’m not even going to ask him why he’s got Gay Date TV down as a ‘favourite’…” he whispers to his mother.

Hope springs eternal

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Dad is genuinely perturbed by the medication prescribed for him for his recurrent bladder infection.

“I asked the doctor,” he tells me in a sombre tone, “you mean I could be on this stuff for the rest of my life?”

He’s 89 in August.

I’m cheered by the fact that he’s more optimistic than he realises.

The most immature 88-year-old in town

Blow-by-blow account of dad’s latest bladder infection on the phone last night.

He’s tended to my mother after a stroke for almost a year now, his fortitude and dedication investing him with a noble, heroic status in the eyes of his children.

So why must he ruin the aura by referring to his “willy”?

You’re almost 90, I want to tell him; for pity’s sake call it a penis.

But that’s a conversation I guess you can never have with your father, whatever his age.

Old men called George

What is it with old men called George?

R and I swap old folks’ home tales during a lull at the office. An old guy called George I use to visit took his affability too far and was confined to barracks after climbing into bed with several female residents – individually, I hasten to add. No sexual impropriety took place; he just didn’t want to sleep alone.

R, meanwhile, knew a man who’d had a heart attack that entailed his being effectively brought back from the dead in an operating theatre. Recovered and back at his residential home some weeks later, he embarked on a one-man crusade .

“You can forget your God,” he’d tell everyone. “I’ve been there and there’s bugger all.”

He too was confined to his room. Not so much because of his message as of the effect it was having on morale.

And his name was George.