Muddling through changes - by Lu Hersey

 Life is all about change, when you think about it. As the year turns and early morning autumn mists form down on the Levels, I'm trying to get ready for a few changes I know are coming. But the thing about preparing for change is life often doesn't go according to plan...

Yesterday I went to see my father, who lives a hundred miles away, on his own. He's 96 this year, but manages to live independently and is in reasonably good health. He reads the Times every day and does the crossword. Every so often he has health scares and I spend more time there, trying to improve the levels of hygiene and discarding moulding things from the fridge, but mostly he manages perfectly well, considering.

Yesterday he'd told me he wanted to sort through family photographs and to give me a list of instructions for things I'll need to do when he dies. It sounded reasonable, though not a lot of fun - but I'd planned to visit him anyway, so whatever. I mentally prepared for a difficult, but necessary day.

What actually happened gave me an insight into my father's mind that left me so discombobulated I wondered which of us was losing the plot fastest. 

We started with lunch at 11.30 when I was expecting coffee - I'd wanted to bring lunch for both of us, but he'd insisted we had his favourite sandwiches, which he'd prepared the day before. Or possibly the week. It's hard to be sure with my father.  

I ate them politely and we talked about his new neighbour, who he likes. I asked a few questions about the family, but he forgets the names of all his nieces and nephews and muddles them up. Sadly. He likes his surviving brother, but he's not really a family person. He didn't ask me about mine, so instead I  asked about the photographs. "Follow me," he said.

"They're in here, somewhere." 

We were standing in what was once a very organised dining room when his last wife was alive. Now it's a sea of dead electrical equipment, piles of papers, books and unwanted things that harbour life forms I find scary. "Do you know approximately where?" I asked. 

We stood for a while, silently surveying the chaos while he thought about it. "What am I looking for?" he asked. I reminded him. "Oh yes," he said, and found a box that held a few photographs of his last wife and her family, and a copy of Debrett's Peerage from 1987. His last wife was some kind of aristocrat, and she liked to see her family listed.

I told him they should probably be given to her children, who might appreciate them. 

"You don't want them, then?" 

"No thanks."

He decided he needed to go for a walk. He does this most days when he's not driving across town to visit his current girlfriend. (She used to live around the corner, but is now in a care home.) So we walked slowly up the road to the open green at the top, and sat on a bench to look at the view. "Your mother liked it here," he said. He confuses his late wives quite often. 

"Did I ever tell you about the time I saved her from a krait?" 

"What sort of crate?" I ask.

"K-R-A-I-T. Deadly snake. I pushed her into a hedge and she was furious with me, but I saved her life."

I google krait while we look at the view. Deadly indeed, but only found in the Indian subcontinent. My mother never went there. In fact I'm not sure he did.

"Are you sure it was a krait?" (What I meant was, are you sure it was my mother - or if this actually ever happened)

"Quite sure! I hate snakes. Deadly. Did I ever tell you about the baby adder on our bed when we were on holiday?"

And so we walk slowly back to the house. It's not time for a cup of tea yet, so I wonder if I should mention the list of things he wanted to tell me about. But now he's decided we're going to watch some Michael Parkinson interviews with Peter Ustinov from the 70s that he recorded. I'm impressed at his ability to use his new video machine. I didn't know they still made them, but gave up trying to explain how he could use his Virgin Media box some time ago. The programme is an hour long. 

Finally we have a cup of tea and he tells me about his new neighbour. Again. "She was a doctor too, you know. Nice woman, better than that crook with the vicious dog who lived there before. She's about your age."

Ironically, as I'm leaving, the new neighbour shows up. She's at least 80. I feel depressed. But she's also very bright and seems to like my father, so that's good news. 

As I drive away, I wonder how long this can go on. I was hoping we'd come a little closer to preparing for things to come, even if I just took some of the rubbish in the dining room away. But instead, I've learnt far more about Peter Ustinov than I ever needed to know. 

I think that's why I like writing. There is a structure to a book - and an endgame. Along the way, you can resolve things the way you'd like them to go. 

Real life isn't like that. You just have to take each day as it comes. Maybe that's no bad thing, but sometimes it feels like my father's dining room. A big sea of chaos.

Lu Hersey 

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