‘I want to learn Iranian,’ said my father, resolutely, as he watched the bombing on the television.
‘Farsi,’ I said, thinking I would talk to him about that very happily on the basis it was better than helping him contact the Ukrainian government so he can fight the Russians.
‘What’s that?’ he said.
‘Farsi,’ I repeated.
‘Parcel?’ he said. But it was pointless trying to explain, for he was up and looking out of the window and telling me to look in the parcel box.
We were waiting for the special food I had ordered for the new cat someone irresponsibly rehomed to my parents and which already has a stress condition from living with two dementia sufferers.
I need to take it with me back to Ireland when I get a spare week or two to gather the papers for the EU. As a holding position, I stuck ‘feline cystitis cat biscuit’ on my to-do list.
I have my own list, which is becoming epic, while my father has so many lists for me there’s what he calls a master list. The sublists pile up on cue cards he presents me with and the latest one demands I arrange pottery lessons for Mum and adopt some children.
I told him I don’t think I can at 55, although possibly they might let me foster some waifs and strays if I massaged my commitments a bit, chief among them parent to two parents.
I do feel sorry for him having to be upset by all the things he once knew but is now noticing for what he thinks is the first time. What? No grandchildren! I had to explain what infertility was. It was like explaining the facts of life, child to parent, in reverse.
He sits like an emperor in his TV room, the nerve centre of all our lives now, writing lists and commanding impossibilities, which the builder boyfriend and I run around trying to achieve because if we don’t at least try, he is inconsolable.
The poor, poor man. But also, poor us. He’s all right in his bubble, telling the doctors he disagrees with their diagnosis. The CT scanner must be broken. He’s fine.
He spends the day watching the bombs going off on television while I shop, cook, clean, organise carers, arrange pottery classes my mother doesn’t want and make it look like I’m calling child services to adopt some Ukrainian orphans, or whoever it is needs adopting these days. I have no idea.
Dementia is contagious. After a while, you realise you are losing your mind because you have to lose it in order to even pretend to act out the demands of the person with the condition. Or the two people with it. My mum watches one episode of The Great Pottery Throw Down and she’s demanding classes. My father demands I make this happen. I make it happen. My mother shouts: ‘I’m not going there! Why would I want to learn pottery?’
And my father demands I make my mother stop not wanting pottery classes, and when I can’t, he formalises his disappointment in a capped-up complaint email. Yet again, he informs me, I have failed. For I am no longer their daughter. I am the complaints department.
As my dad worried about parcels, I looked out of the window of their little house and stared at the St George’s flags flying from actual fixed flagpoles on the fronts of most of the other houses on their estate.
It’s madness inside this house, and it’s madness outside as well, thanks to the lefties driving the white working classes into the arms of the lunatics on the other side. There’s a campaign in Coventry to ‘Raise the Flag’. I got back here from Ireland this time to find a very tense atmosphere. They set off fireworks on this estate for Shrove Tuesday and will do so again for Easter. It’s designed to knock back those who have said they don’t want Christian culture celebrated.
My father sits like an emperor in his TV room, writing to-do lists and commanding impossibilities
Some residents are ripping the flags down and petitioning the council to remove them from lampposts. Anyone who thinks that isn’t the genesis of coming social unrest is in denial.
The left seem to think they invented multiculturalism but when I was growing up in Coventry it was standard and no one felt the need to raise the flag.
Where I went to school, we all wore the same, prayed the same, ate the same and learned the same, even though we were all ethnically very mixed. That would be contro-versial now, I suppose. But the divisive madness of flag-raising and religious-festival-competing has to be worse, surely.
I feel sorry for both sides. I feel sorry for the flag-raisers, and I feel sorry for those who feel they need to pull the flags down. I feel sorry for my mum and dad living on this estate because they think they like it. And I feel sorry for me, squeezed into a box room every other week trying to cope with it all.
Sorrow is the overwhelming emotion I feel most of the time when I’m back where I used to call home. But sometimes late at night, when I review the day’s events, text-ing the BB as I lie in bed listening to all the TVs in this little house, one in every room, blaring at odds with each other, and my parents having their rows about pottery, and why they can’t decide whether to learn it or not, I laugh.
I remember one line from the day – and it might only be his to-do list for me saying ‘2. Adopt some children’ – and I laugh so hard I have to bury my face in the pillow.
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