The Parcel

I arrived in Kettering today and spent a delightfully quiet weekend with my parents ahead of next weeks madness. My mother says life at her age is something akin to being either treated as a child or a parcel, to be handed off to the next "responsible" adult. Still she doesn't seem to mind too much about this situation. She just observes it and (thankfully) is accepting of it.

My father is somewhat worn out and I don't mean that lightly. Since the whole stress of being on all hours while mother was in the hospital my father has caught up with his age. Ali warned me this was likely to happen. What he did in terms of being there, morning, noon and night would have worn me out and he is 81. His ankles now swell within a couple of hours of getting out of bed to a point where he must where his shoes unbuckled and he is now complaining of breathlessness. He won't get further tests until September. We shall see...