Dementia

The plumber was shouting hysterically at me down the phone because I had asked him to install a heated towel rail. ‘Towel rail? Towel rail! Armageddon is coming! Did you fill your oil tank up? It’s tripling in price by Christmas! I’ve got 40 jobs piled up! Forty jobs!’ ‘So are you saying I can’t have a heated towel rail?’ I said. I know the plumber only too well. Many a time he has sat at my kitchen table chain-smoking while rambling about the devil, and how the world is coming to an end. If that is his default setting, you can imagine how he reacts to things going very badly on a global scale. He lives on his nerves at the best of times. Major world events are apt to put him in a particularly nihilistic mood.

The oil delivery man had way too much swagger and, as he waved his nozzle about, I realised that he might be expecting a little something. Oh dear, I thought, as he pushed the nozzle into my oil tank, pressed the button on his lorry and spent less than ten seconds giving me the amount of oil I could afford. Oh dear, what if the oil crisis is now at such fever pitch that desperate housewives in remote places are offering a little something on the side to get more oil? Ten seconds’ worth of oil did feel like the end of the world. Usually, I can afford to let the lorry fill the entire tank and it comes to about a grand.

‘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.

After a week in Coventry dealing with two parents with dementia, it would have felt like a nice spa break to go to Guantanamo Bay. The smallest cell at Gitmo and a pair of sensory deprivation earmuffs would have been sheer bliss. I got back from not picking up my father’s car from the garage and my mother was standing in the doorway crying. In the time it had taken me to drive three times the distance to the MOT test centre in a circle of unfathomable six-lane 30mph Midlands bypasses, because that was the way my father wanted to go, the garage had shut and his car was locked up on the street outside. I was rocking backwards and forwards slightly in the car seat making a humming sound as my father stood arguing with the closed shutters.

‘I want the stairlift to go faster!’ said my mother, as the machine she was sitting on whirred furiously while she moaned to me about it on the phone. ‘How fast do you want it to go?’ I asked, imagining it doing 60mph down the short run of stairs in their little house in Coventry, coming to an abrupt halt at the bottom, then catapulting her across the living-room floor because she never does the seatbelt up. ‘It’s too slow!’ she declared, and I could hear her slapping various bits of it and banging the switches on the arm. ‘When the man comes to service it I’m going to tell him to make it go faster. Come on! Come on!

Sally (la Sal, the Salster) is part whippet, part Labrador and part dormouse. She is 16 years old, stone deaf, three-quarters blind and has dementia. She sleeps like the dead all day but loves her evening walk. We’ve decided that for as long as she enjoys her walks and remains continent indoors we’ll delay taking her to the vet and asking him to put her light out. ‘We’re talking about you,’ I shout at her after we’ve had a review because the dementia has become more obvious. No response. Deaf as a post. ‘You’re on borrowed time, sweetheart,’ I say, lifting her ear to speak into her head. No response. Strange it must be for a dog to live in silence.

The Six Nations begins today, bringing joy into the hearts of millions of rugby fans. It will, as ever, be a predictably unpredictable tournament – there are always upsets – which will showcase great athletic skill, close teamwork and raw physical courage; and like the first snowdrops, it is one of those reliable harbingers of spring guaranteed to lighten the gloom of cheerless February days. But this year, hovering in the background, is a spectre at the feast; the fast-accumulating evidence that rugby is a danger to the players’ health and well-being. The truth is that many rugby spectators, who love the game, end up feeling guilty.