Last week was lovely. Been on a social distancing visit to my mother, seen my eldest daughter and had an another amazing contact from someone I’ve never met.
Now the Lockdown is starting to ease, I went to see my mother in jolly ol’ Weston-Super-Mare and we were joined by a last minute visit from Becky. I hadn’t seen Mum since sometime in March, although we have spoken daily. It seemed such a weird experience sitting outside her patio door for lunch and not being able to step inside, as we do want to comply with the Coronavirus rules.
As you can see from the photo, we went for a stroll along the deserted seafront. Again this was weird and the lack of people, cars, donkeys and silly seaside things seemed really odd.
Friends
We called our friends Neil and Lisa for a natter a few days ago. They are the kind of people who are easy to converse with; we might go ages without speaking and when we do, we immediately pick up on the conversation as if we see each other every day.
More on saying ‘thank you’
I have blogged before (click here) about the importance of saying ‘thank you’. This is about friends and other people who mean a lot.
The whole thing was started by hearing an extraordinary story on BBC Radio 4’s chatty programme called Saturday Live. There is a ‘thank you’ section where people can call in and belatedly express their gratitude to someone. One day it was a lady calling to say ‘thank you’ to the Doctor who delivered her in a remote part of Uganda and saved the life of her mother by donating some of his own blood.
This started a chain reaction of some people, myself included, saying ‘thank you’ to various people for their friendship. The listener later spotted another blog of mine where I spoke of this and wrote to me a few times with more detail.
Unexpectedly the same post caught the eye of the Doctor’s granddaughter who got in touch with me a few days ago. She never knew her grandfather, Dr Chance, and it was nice learning a little more about him.
Quite a fascinating tale and serves as a reminder for me – and everyone – that we should be expressing our thanks to people who made a positive impact on our lives.
As for my mother-in-law….
She’s getting on a bit and we visit daily. Things are catching up with her in terms of being so isolated and cut off (through her choice) and yet she occasionally mutters something about being bored.
Nowadays she is being more careful about saying anything like that as we tend follow it up with organising something, or at least threatening to organise.
“Shall we take you out for a walk around the village, we can push you in your wheel chair?”
“No”
“How about getting Margaret on the phone so you can have a chat with her”
“No” in a slightly firm tone
“How about…..”
“No” in a definitely firmer, more assertive tone
And then she sometimes forgets a word, so we start playing a kind of guess-the-word game. Yesterday we had….
“It is some thing I wear and I can’t remember what it is called”
Me “Are you wearing it now?”
“I dunno”
Me “Where do you wear it?”
“Against my skin”
Me [thinking I know where this is could be going] “Top half or bottom half?”
“Bottom half”
Conversation duly deferred to Rachel.