Evenings from Hell

MARIE:  Almost two years ago, I gave up ‘proper’ work and was instead employed by our local authority as Jon’s carer. Back then, they assessed his needs at something like 11 ½ hours per week. There have been a few reassessments since, first to about 20 hours, then to 31 ½. Such a change in less than two years speaks unpleasant volumes about Jon’s decline and the strains his diseases now put on our daily lives.

 

The result is that I’m developing carer stress, and it’s making me less able to care in a good way. Stress (from caring or any other kind of work) makes you irritable, tired, unfocused, irritable, clumsy, forgetful, irritable … you get the picture. Recently, I was at an excellent talk by a woman who has worked with dementia sufferers for many years. One of the issues raised was how you can know when it’s time to take a step back from caring and leave it to the professionals. “When the carer is so burned out that he or she can no longer care with kindness” was one part of the answer. That’s so uncannily, precisely what I fear may be happening with us.

 

So I am taking a step back by leaving the nighttime tasks involving drugs and pump etc. to our local nurses. It happens too often for comfort that at the end of a long day of putting Jon’s needs before my own, I just haven’t the energy, physically or mentally, to deal with the madness that has become a regular feature of our evenings. What happens – not every night, but most nights – is that Jon gets one or two ideas in his head that he just can’t shake loose.

 

One is that he needs the toilet. Nothing happens when he goes, but the moment he’s back on the sofa or in bed, he feels the urge to go again. Since he moves very unsteadily at night and has epic battles to do up his trousers, this does not make for relaxing nights in. The other idea is that he wants his duodopa pump off, and he will keep nagging with increasing urgency and insistence, until he drives me to distraction or forces me from the room. The duodopa should be stopped as late as possible so that the effect of the slow release tablets he takes instead can last him until morning. At great cost to us both, we negotiated a truce to the effect that I stop the duodopa at 10:15 pm, but in the grips of his fixed idea Jon forgets the deal and forgets the logic, and I can’t reach him with reason. And seeing that I’m already irritable…

 

I’m sure there are better ways of dealing with this, but it’s clear that I can’t find them or carry them through at the end of a demanding day. So nurses to the rescue. Starting last week, Jon gets professionally nursed at bedtime, with an extra visit around 3 am for another tablet and a general check on his condition.

 

I hope that will be enough to bring us to calmer waters, at least for a time. As I write this, we are on a four-day trip away, which should have been a relaxing anniversary celebration in a wonderful German spa hotel, but is turning into yet another nightmare for entirely predictable reasons. We’ll have to accept that we simply can’t get by without nursing help anymore, and that means we can’t go away together anymore. One more loss.

 

I hope you won’t judge me harshly when I say that I want my life back. It's too much to cope with now. I’m very much afraid that this marks the beginning of the end of my time as a home carer.

Travels with the pump

MARIE: We’ve just had a long weekend in the UK – partly to see Jon’s daughter’s new house (and family and friends, of course), and partly to test out traveling with the duodopa pump. We were both mildly apprehensive. Would we be believed by airport security when we told them that Jon now has a tiny metal part inside him and can no longer go through the scanner? Would they accept that we carried all Jon’s gel form medication in hand luggage? No way would we ever let drugs go in the suitcase, a delay or misdirection of luggage with drugs doesn’t bear thinking about. Would the drugs stay cool in their special thermal bag for the duration of the journey? And would the hotel be able to keep the drugs cool for us, yet allow easy access to fresh drugs in the morning?

I am so happy and relieved to say that the answer to every one of the questions was a clear YES. Apart from having to carry the thermal bag around – which would be quiet heavy for a long trip – travels with the pump are significantly easier than travels with pills. Going across time zones? No problem. We used to try and stretch or compress drug timings on travel days to fit both with time zones, long days, and urgent bursts of activity. Now, the meds are just constantly flowing, there’s no need to plan or discuss anything, Jon just presses the lovely extra-dose button, and off we go. Put the pump on in the morning, take it off at night, and don’t worry about a thing in between. Oh, the relief. It’s wonderful to know that we’ll be able to travel by air again without any anxiety.

Two more things helped make the trip a success. It was clear on our last trip to the UK that the whole business of travel and any lack of home comforts at the destination really wears Jon out, to the point where he hasn’t the energy to enjoy the purpose of the trip. So this time we broke it up. We flew over, but instead of getting the airport train and then waiting for a ride and then having a social situation, we simply checked into the airport hotel and stayed the first night there. We’ll definitely do that again, it’s now vastly better to have two unstressful travel days rather than one demanding one.

 

And the other thing that helped was that we swallowed all pride and asked the family for help with lifts and a really comfortable place to sleep. I have regularly suggested to other carers that they should ask for help from their families instead of waiting for people to guess at how they can help, but I’ve not been good at taking my own advice. I was really quite overwhelmed at the generous help and consideration we got on this trip, the trouble they were prepared to go to in order to give Jon the best basis for having a good time. Which he most certainly did, as did I. We’ll be back, as he’s taken to saying.

By the way, it was funny to note how un-embarrassed we have both become. This was the first time the family had a chance to see the pump and Jon’s extra orifice, so he prepared to do a little show-and-tell. I’m not sure if it was discretion or a slight squeamishness on the part of his audience, but that didn’t take long at all. I guess by now Jon and I are so used to the evidence and paraphernalia of disease that we don’t think of it as anything out of the ordinary. Maybe we need a little reality check.

 

MARIE: Well, first of all: we got the letter confirming Jon's appointments for neuropsych - and are much relieved.

Even better, I am writing this from our holiday (though burglars beware: we have a very keen cat sitter). The 8+ hour flight really took it out of Jon and it's only now, 6 days in, that he's beginning to feel normal again. Or whatever passes for normal these days.

Once again we have made it all the way through customs with more drugs than anyone has any right to need for the length of time we're away. Although we came with everything in original packets carrying Jon's name, plus copies of prescriptions and a letter from the psychiatrist who prescribed the Ritalin (which apparently has reasonable street value), it's always an anxious time when you face the customs guys. I once got in trouble for carrying half an apple, so what couldn't happen with two gross of class B tablets?

Jon has decided to spend the holiday growing a beard. He had one before I met him, and has always claimed to have remained a man with a beard in spirit. Well, it's coming back, and I think I rather like it. It'll save him shaving, which may be the real reason he's growing it, and I must admit that the idea of cut-throat razors and PD is best avoided. Here's how far he got. V. cuddly.

Things to look forward to

JON: In my last posting I moaned about being OFF for far more of the day than I am prepared to put up with. Well, nothing's changed: my back hurts like buggery, various and varied bits of me feel as if they are in spasm, and if I ever find the incompetent git who designed this body – well, he’s not going to enjoy the meeting. Intelligent design? Ha, more like 5pm on a Friday … And it is raining again, not proper rain like we used to get when I were a lad, but this new fangled miserable drizzle that goes on for day after day after damp bloody day. Not that I want to appear negative in any way, because I do have a couple of things to look forward to.

First, I’m off to the UK next weekend to see some old, old friends who I’ve known since my school days (I would have said “since I was a small boy in short trousers”, but in fact my German mum made me a small boy in lederhosen …). Since we’re now all terribly middle-aged, I doubt there will be much debauchery, but I’m all geared up for drinking too much beer and talking bollocks.

And the week after that we’re going to the Parkinson’s congress in Glasgow. I’ll let Marie talk about that, she does cheerful so much better than me.

MARIE: In the course of our work lives, Jon and I have both attended numerous academic conferences – he to make presentations and build a network, me to sell books and build a business. We’ve both enjoyed this hugely, so when we heard of the World Parkinson’s Congress in Glasgow later this month, we were immediately interested.

It sounds pretty excellent, with four days packed with lectures, events, displays, games, posters – and full of people who really know about PD. An embarrassment of riches, really, and the difficulty is in choosing which bits to attend. We’re also hoping to meet others from the internet chat forum we frequent, I’ve promised to write a few articles for the Danish association’s magazine, and Jon is on a mission to take photos for a poster – plus we’ve signed up for every available optional extra, from the opening reception to the closing ‘brain game’ session.

Quite ambitious, and if Jon continues to feel as he does now, we’ll not manage everything. By luck and design, though, our hotel is very near the conference venue, so he can slink off for the occasional nap with or without me. It’ll be brilliant.

High spots

JON: To a dentist like I was, a high spot is the annoying bit of extra filling material that prevents your teeth from coming together, a bad thing. But to normal people it means something rather good, and as it happens a number of good things have happened for me recently so the last few weeks have seen a series of ‘highs’.

As you know, I’d been invited to chair a session at the Food and Oral Processing conference (FOP). This may sound a bizarre topic, but all sorts of fascinating people crept out of the woodwork – academics studying the mechanics of chewing and swallowing, people from industry who wanted to know how to make food cheaper, more nutritious, healthier, etc., and clinicians who treat dysphagia which is an inability to swallow caused by stroke and other neurological deficits – such as Parkinson’s, for instance. For me, the high spots were several superb sessions from a clinical specialist in dysphagia from whom I learned more in a 30 minute chat than I had in the previous 12 years of studying oral processes. So far I have no swallowing problems, but give it a bit longer and these issues may well become a bit more personal.

On the PD front, I found that sitting still for sessions of 3 hours at a time can be hell. So I missed a few of the papers, and had to leave the room during a presentation once or twice. I spent a lot of time walking up and down corridors trying get my muscles to work in unison. But I had my walking stick as public proof of my state, so no one complained and I didn’t feel at all embarrassed. Still, I had to increase my drug dosages and even then I spent far too much of my time OFF when I really ought to have been ON, but with an audience of neuro-this and neuro-that, people were very kind and understanding. Most of them worked out my diagnosis on their own and everyone had a pretty good idea of what Parkinson’s is and so understood the concepts of being ON and OFF.

I also noticed that when people asked me politely ‘how are you’, I tended to give them my full life-history which was perhaps slight overkill. I suspect this self-absorption comes from having such a time-consuming and life-changing disease, although it could also be that I have simply turned into a boring old geezer. I prefer to blame the PD.

At the end of the second day was the conference dinner which was another high spot. I sat between a world famous neuro-physiologist and one of my personal heroes, both giving me advice on PD. I was ON for most of the dinner but I was still in bed by 10:30. In the old days we would have talked till 3 o’clock in the morning and had too much to drink. I can’t do that any more, but I still had a fantastic time.

After the conference, I stayed on and visited family and friends for a few days which was great but pretty exhausting, before dragging my weary body and surprisingly heavy suitcase to the airport. By then I felt 100% shattered, I’d run out of pain killers, and was definitely OFF, but again I had my walking stick and people were kind. Normally I’d have made my own way home, but I felt so bad that I rang Marie and asked her to collect me at the airport. Had she not, I might still be stuck somewhere in the underbelly of Schiphol Airport, a quivering jelly with the IQ of a concussed bee. Nothing that a few days of home comforts couldn’t cure, though, so I’m back to my particular brand of normal and just feeling really quite pleased with myself for having been well enough to enjoy the trip so thoroughly. Oh, and look what I found at the supermarket!

The strange nature of time

MARIE: I suspect I’ve been getting a lesson in relativity or some such deep subject this weekend. It could be the heat, but I think something has happened to expand time itself.

Jon is now in England where he is attending a conference. This happens to be in the city where his grandchildren live and near other family and friends, so he decided to go over there early and also stay on a few days after the conference. This should be enjoyable, and is also useful because he now needs time to acclimatize even after such a short journey. We always used to take trips like this on our own before Jon got ill, and it is rather marvelous that, after a period of relying on me rather a lot, he now feels up to doing it on his own again.

To be honest, I have been kind of looking forward to having the place to myself for a bit – you know, the easy life where a vegetarian dinner doesn’t cause a riot, there are no car shows on TV and the toilet seat is always down. The usual pattern was always to enjoy this greatly for several days and then to start feeling a little bit lonely a day or two before the joyous return. But this time, just 48 hours into Jon’s absence, I feel time dragging. The house is clean from top to bottom, the laundry basket is empty and the fridge is full, I’ve picked a year’s supply of black currants in the garden, read a self-help book about a family with cancer and am now well into a fact-based novel about Alzheimer’s (such fun topics both), so it’s not as if I’ve been bored with nothing to do.

But it seems Parkinson’s disease has permanently changed the pace and focus of life more than I had realized, a change so gradual and incremental that it has been invisible from day to day and only becomes obvious now when Jon has removed PD from my life for a week. We have made a conscious (but not altogether painless) decision to focus on the here and the now. It is a “smaller” life than we would have had without PD – smaller circles and smaller ambitions, but a better life together, with time and energy to enjoy each other every day. Not madly chasing deadlines and promotions at work, not exhausted at the end of a busy week with too many appointments, not short-tempered with stress at all the chores still remaining to be done.

This is a good and right choice for us. But it means that when I now suddenly find myself on my own, all the time that we have made specifically for each other hangs a bit heavy on me. I don’t wake Jon up with a handful of pills and climb into bed for a cuddle (we sleep separately because of his REM sleep disorder). We don’t have breakfast together to the dulcet tones of the BBC news and the London congestion report. I don’t help Jon dry off after his shower and make fun of his choice of T-shirt. We don’t go for a walk in the woods and enjoy the view from one of our favourite benches. I don’t cook him dinner or listen to the radio with him, he doesn’t point me in the way of an interesting article and I don’t make him come and look at my nuts in the garden.

I had got it into my head that, as a general rule, Jon is missor and I am the missee, but I now see that this is quite wrong. At least tomorrow is Monday and I can take the opportunity to get more work done this week than I would normally get through in a month.

The good life

MARIE: We are just back from our long holiday, and what a brilliant time we have had! When Jon was diagnosed three years ago, it was a kind of wake-up call to seize the day and enjoy the good stuff right now, while we both still can. One decision was to take those holidays that we (okay, perhaps particularly I) had been dreaming about, and bugger the costs. If Jon is still up to big holidays in 5 or 10 years’ time, that will be a great bonus, but we’re making sure not to miss out by taking our pleasures up front.

So, soon after diagnosis in 2007 we booked a safari in Tanzania involving some primitive camping which would be beyond Jon today. The next year we took a tour through Cambodia and Vietnam where we rarely stayed more than one night in any one place, also something that would now be a challenge for him. And this year we have again stretched Jon on a holiday through the natural wonders of the western US that may not be possible in a year or two because of the sheer amount of time difference and jetlag. That completes a hat trick of dream holidays, so even if health and finances keep us firmly within Europe for the rest of our lives, that’s okay – we have seen the world, and Jon has thousands of photos to prove it.

Apart from the grand splendour of canyons and mountains, and the thrill of seeing wild bison and bears, we realized some way through the holiday that we were also thoroughly enjoying taking a break from Parkinson’s. Normally not a day goes by without at least one of us going online to one or more PD chat forums, rarely a week goes by without some PD related appointment or other, our home is filling up with grab poles and back massagers and pill dispensers, and our minds and conversations are often preoccupied with Parkinson’s too. Of course PD came with us on holiday in the form of a sponge bag packed full of drugs, a propensity for late mornings, and a need for me to stand in as occasional grab pole and putter on of socks. But these seemed minor issues, and on the whole this was a well-earned break from all things disease-related.

Normal life is now gradually resuming. The suitcases are empty and the fridge full again, we have waded through tons of post and email, have (at last) put in an offer for the bungalow that we hope to move to before the end of the year, and are ready to engage again with the vexed and vexing issue of Jon’s medication schedule. Now, even the blog post is now done. The sun is shining, the tea is brewing, and all is well with our world.

Feeling good

JON: I mentioned a while ago that I had added a “hit counter” to this blog and as you can see from the map below, our fame begins to spread far and wide. Since January we have had 160 unique hits (that is 160 different people) of which about 90% have made return visits – which seems fairly good to me. So thanks for reading the blog, it makes a big difference to know that there is someone out there who likes it enough to spend time on it (repeatedly).

Last week, Marie and I went on separate trips, hers involved working for a living, while mine involved having a good time. And much to my amazement I did. At home I get very, very tired, sometimes as early as 8 pm, and am regularly in bed by 9 pm. On this trip, however, I stayed up past midnight and woke at my normal 7:00 – even better, I woke with no hangover.

I’m not entirely sure what I was doing right. At the first sign of fatigue, I gave myself booster doses of L-dopa (in half tab increments) and added an extra Ritalin tablet per day. In addition to the drugs, I drank beer. Not in excess – less than a pint per hour, but that’s still much more than I’ve had in a long time.

So the question is, what was it that made me feel so good? Just the fact of seeing old friends (and having a very good time)? Increasing the dosage of L-dopa? Increasing the Ritalin? Drinking beer? My guess is that it was a combination of factors. This is clearly an experiment that needs to be repeated under completely uncontrolled conditions, so I am already thinking about my next trip.

At the airport

MARIE: Apologies for the slight interruption in service – we have been away on each our long weekend trip. I went off in one direction to a conference, while Jon went off in the other direction to visit friends and family in England. As a result of good fortune and careful planning, we had flights out of Amsterdam within half an hour of each other. It felt very jet-setting to kiss my husband goodbye not at the train station, and not at passport control, but actually airside at the gate.

The trip also led me discover something new about Jon and Parkinson’s. A lot of people with Parkinson’s complain that when they are out in public, people treat them like they’re drunk. I’ve never really understood that – okay, the slurred speech that PD can cause does perhaps sound a bit drunk, but how can somebody walking towards you in the street know what your speech will sound like? And drunks don’t tend to shake and twist, do they? So although of course I believe what people say when they complain about being treated like drunks, I’ve never really understood how this came about.

But standing behind Jon in the queue for passport control, seeing him wobble up to the counter, and then watching as he swayed and gyrated while the officer checked his passport – now I know where the drunk thing comes from. It’s all about balance.

In addition to all the other things PD does, it affects “postural stability”, which is the ability to take up a posture and maintain it. People with advanced PD often fall because of impaired balance, and already Jon is finding it almost impossible to maintain balance when walking backwards. And, as I realized at the airport, he can’t stand still for even the 20 seconds it takes to get his passport checked. He was in constant motion, swaying a bit to the right, righting himself but then leaning to far to the left, bending the knees to lower his centre of gravity and regain balance, then straightening up and starting all over again with the gentle swaying. And he looked exactly like a morning drunk. It is heartbreaking to see, and to know that there is nothing I or anyone else can do to make it better.

Actually, it reminds me of our last trouser-buying expedition where I sat outside the changing rooms as Jon did battle with shoes and feet and trouser legs. Meanwhile, a much older man strode out of his changing room to confer with his wife over trousers and as a totally natural thing he did that deep knee bend that you do to check that the trouser legs aren’t too tight. Such a small thing, such a natural and familiar movement, and so far out of Jon’s reach. I felt a right idiot, coming over all emotional outside the men’s changing rooms. Jon isn’t the only one to make a spectacle of himself.

Pacing ourselves

MARIE: We’re recently back from holiday, where we made more or less a circle by car from home in The Netherlands through a few days in Bruges in Belgium, a week in a chalet in the Loire Valley in France, and a couple of days visiting friends in Luxemburg on the way home.

There were a couple of firsts involved. This was our first driving holiday together and partly served as a taster / tester for a trip we are hoping to make in the spring, driving through the national parks of the Western US. Since Jon now only drives shorter distances that he is already familiar with, I did all the driving. Would that exhaust me? Would we bicker about directions and the need for breaks? Would Jon’s back complain at the amount of enforced sitting? Happily, the answer in all cases was NO. Our GPS (known as Mrs Tom) played a big part in this, but we also found that this is a holiday form that suits us both, at least for now.

This was also the first holiday Jon has ever suggested in all the time we have known each other. For the last 16 years, every holiday we have been on has been my idea – even most (but not quite all) of our visits to see Jon’s children and grandchildren have been suggested and organized by me. It was so nice, just really nice, that for once I didn’t have to convince and cajole him, but could sit back and think that “yes, that sounds like a pretty good idea – okay, let’s do it”. A first, but hopefully not a last. Admittedly, the reason behind it is that my one-time workaholic husband now finds himself with too much time on his hands and not enough energy to spend it in a productive manner. But I count this holiday (and those to follow?) as a thick silver lining.

Lastly, this is the first holiday where we have had to fit our activities around Jon’s medication regime and periods of wearing off. He is still struggling with strangely slow effects of his drugs, and fairly short periods of optimal effects. He takes a dose every four hours, but each dose only gives him about 2 ½ hours of peak condition, which obviously means 1 ½ hours out of every four hours when he is slow (both physically and mentally), tired and often in some discomfort.

It is an evolving task to find the right pattern of daily activities to fit around Jon’s ups and downs. We would regularly get in the car when Jon was on top of the world, only to find that by the time we arrived at our destination he would be hunched and shuffling and in no fit state to enjoy anything other than a sit down. So we spent much time enjoying the late summer sun in the street cafés thoughtfully provided by the tourist industry, and less time exploring monasteries and castles and medieval town centres (which I am sure suited Jon absolutely fine). We also fell into a rhythm of doing much one day and little the next, giving him time to rest and both of us time to make a good dent in the large pile of books we had brought with us.

These are obviously patterns that we must also make room for on future holidays, so perhaps our days of traveling in small groups with a guide are over, and perhaps we have to adjust our rather ambitious itinerary plans for the US trip. But what is also clear is that holidays are still very much an option and highly enjoyable for us both – so long as we allow for the fact that Dr Parkinson is our constant, invisible companion.

Driving (me nuts)

Right. I’ve just come back from spending rather a lot longer with my in-laws than either I or they had planned (though to everyone’s great credit, without any actual physical or mental damage being done to me, them – or indeed to my wife).

Plan A was for Marie to go to Denmark on her own a fortnight ago so that I could enjoy a quiet week home alone with one cat and several family-sized packs of English bacon while she did whatever it is she does for money. I would then fly up to join her for a long weekend of socializing before returning home together at the sort of leisurely pace generally set on the German motorways.

However. This was before we started reducing my medication and bringing back some semblance of a sane mind, and we had to agree that it was not, at that time, safe to leave me alone. So Plan B was set in motion, involving extended cat minding, a long and lonely drive for Marie while I snored and fidgeted in the passenger seat, and writing off the cost of my plane ticket which was of course much too cheap to be refundable. Plus, I should think, a certain amount of scurrying about in the ancestral home where they had not reckoned on my delightful presence quite so soon.

And when I got to Denmark, what did I do but … sleep some more. This insomnia stuff really is ridiculous: I can’t sleep at night, and can’t stay awake during the day. In a nutshell, the trouble is that once I fall asleep, I can’t stay asleep. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes under is all I get before some twitch or spasm wakes me up again. Many short naps makes the night feel like I have hardly slept at all, and the day feel like I hardly do anything but sleep, neither of which are the least bit satisfactory. For the record, my neurologist is supposed to be making me an appointment with the hospital’s sleep clinic – I am looking forward to an interesting night and hopefully a useful analysis.

Driving for myself has also become an issue. I was tested sometime in the spring and pronounced fit to drive anything with an automatic gear box. But I felt a lot better when I took that test than I do now, even with my mental faculties (largely) recouped. It’s an issue of independence, though, and of some practicality. For instance, Marie was unwell the other day when we had a birthday party to go to, so I decided to go alone. By car. Happily, going out was no problem – but coming back was much more … interesting. My driving foot had seized up, so I had terrible trouble getting my foot to the gas pedal, and even when I succeeded at that, there was not much I could do with it – the thing was just like a lump of dead wood. Salvation lay in taking shoes and socks off (with some help from the host who may have invited me for the last time). Once I could touch my feet with my hands, I regained feeling in them and all went well on my barefooted drive home.

The episode freaked me some, I must admit, and my first reaction was that I should leave off driving for a little while longer. Marie, however, does not deal well with such timidity, so despite my best efforts and some really rather creative excuses, I have spent much of the day practicing my driving with her looming in the passenger seat. Which is just as well, really, because she is off on some other work jaunt in a few days so if I can’t drive myself I’ll miss three lovely therapy sessions and most likely get cabin fever into the bargain. But now, freaking and anxiety behind me, I can spend the days pootling along at the safest of paces and watching in the mirror as the workaholic in the car behind me gets furiouser and furiouser. Could be worse.

Soft spots

I’ve just been in the UK again – one last dental appointment, and another opportunity to see the kids and grandkids. This time I travelled alone, and although I think Marie and I were perhaps both a little apprehensive about how that would go (will he fall asleep on the airport train, will he be able to get his shoes on and off for security control, will he lose his way in the maze that is Schiphol airport), once I got into it I was just fine.

The grandchildren were wonderful. I have been over often enough this year that they really know me now so we can cut out the coy/shy stage. My granddaughter of 2 ½ was sweetness and light and wrapping me round her little finger. She really brings out the best in me, had me crawling around under the table chasing lost crayons and playing silly games. I was amazed that I managed – but it was OK, somehow the medicinal effect of those big dark eyes just melted my stiff joints (or more likely produced a useful flood of endorphines). Just the thought of her makes me feel better.

My grandson of 4 months is still to small to demand much of me besides a soft lap to nap on (which I am exceedingly well equipped to provide). I think he will grow up to be a smart kid, already showing native intelligence in the way he examines everything in great detail (I know, I’ve gone granddad-soft-in-the-head).

Having been down to 75 kg in my morphine addict days, I am now at a record-breaking 93kg. All my trousers are too tight and I suspect the beginning of man breasts, worrying that chest hair can hide only so much underlying porkiness. I also have some knee pain, but whether that is related to Parkinson’s (bad posture and poor walking) or caused by me becoming a fat bastard is anyone’s guess. Anyway, the upshot was that my daughter took me out to buy new trousers from my life-long suppliers at M&S. I decided to go super-comfy and bought three new trousers with some room for growth.

When wife #1 saw me strutting my new style later that day, she asked if wife #2 had approved this purchase. When I answered no, #1 smirked knowingly. Numbers 1 & 2 get on frighteningly well, so #1 was of course entirely right about the reaction I got from #2 (who also wasn’t impressed by my braces and claimed that [braces + trousers 3 sizes too big = Bozo the Clown]). As I write, my wonderful new trousers are being boiled in an attempt to reduce their size and my braces are sulking at the back of the cupboard. So much for my attempt at hobo chic.