Not Being Boring.

My mum's back in hospital. She was dehydrated and refusing water this morning and didn't want to get up. So the carers noted this in their little book and fucked off and left her. It was only when her brilliant cleaner arrived that anyone realised the seriousness of her condition. She called my brother, Barry, who came round to try and convince her to go to hospital, and while she was, as always, fiercely resistant, he persuaded her that she would die if she didn't: she has an infection, possibly sepsis. 

I spoke to her two days ago and she was fine. We had a laugh, chatting about nothing. Our standing joke is that nothing ever happens to us. I call us "The Anchorites". "Anything new?" "No, you?" "No." "We are the two most boring people on the planet." "Yes, we are. Ha ha ha." 

I loved that we were being boring. Excitement is never good. Excitement means illness, falls, infection, hospitals, the ever present threat of Covid. She never wins a Pulitzer or becomes Britain's Best Young Butcher. It's just knocks, cracks, a slow erosion. She is being slowly, expertly taken apart, picked at with tweezers by a Celestial clockmaker. She's old, 80, but she should live to 90. She struggles to walk and she keeps getting infections, but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with her: vital organs all still functioning and still in full possesion of her marbles. But I'm not sure she's that bothered about living another ten years. What's in it for her? 

She's in hospital again. She'll be getting I.V. fluids and antibiotics. She'll be bored but probably no more bored than she is at home. She'll have her prayer cards and her books and she sleeps a lot of the time now. Two days ago she was fine and if Barry hadn't convinced her to go into hospital she would have been dead in another couple of days. That's the margin she's working with now, the thin ribbon of mortality.