SHERINGHAM DIARY 19 ~ Au Revoir To The Croaking Frogs

After Dad's funeral, Jnanasalin and I returned home, and home already felt different in tone. There is nothing like a death in the family to alert you to the time limitations preset into our lives. Our future plans suddenly had an urgency, pregnant with a potential that we needed to start tapping into now.  Where were we now with our dream of building our own business? As long as we continued to do what we were currently doing, not much further than Bodham.

We know we have sufficient money saved to fund us for a year. Sometime in the next twelve months, one would hope, Dads house will be sold and his estate wrapped up. At that point further money will filter through. The choice was, either hold on until that point arrives, or begin the venture now. We've chosen to do the latter, because if we don't strike whilst this momentum is here, will we ever? We plan to give Cottonwood 100% of our energy, effort and time, and see what  develops over the next year. Its a risk, but then any such enterprise will have an element of that. If it doesn't work out we'll return to paid work, but at least knowing we've given our dream a good try. With that decision made, we both handed in our notices at our respective work places. We are both feeling excited, with a background of anxiety that I guess is understandable, as our ideas and combined talents are about to be truly tested.

Post Dad's death I've been generally OK emotionally. Just one moment of gushing at the end of Grayson Perry's excellent Channel 4 programme called Rites of Passage (highly recommend) It was the one on death rituals, that got to me, unsurprisingly. The pre-death ritual he devised was just such a beautifully poignant and meaningful expression of a life. It made the traditional Western forms and ways to process the death of a loved one, feel empty and sterile. I have, however, been holding a lot of bodily tension this year, as its turned out to be quite an eventful year so far. Its been worse since Dad died, particularly in the last month leading up to leaving work. This physical bubble duly burst on my penultimate day at work. I was cleaning a sink and whilst making a slight torso sideways turn there was a click and my back became touchy and tenderised. So during the last two days at work whilst training my replacement, I was nursing my back, bruised and brooding, through its snappy moods and spasms.

Last month we were at Overstrand Garden Centre on some UPM (urgent purchasing mission), to buy a pot probably. It was their Autumn Market where they have special craft stands and live music. We've generally try to avoid them, as the Summer event last year had an over-amped lounge singer drunkenly slurring his way through songs from the sixties Summer of Love. It was so in your face as to be unpleasant to stay around, so we quickly exited stage left chased by a bear. For this Autumn event, however, they'd booked in an all female Ukulele Band, but not a ukulele band as you'd normally conceive it. It consisted of ten ladies of 'matured middle age' shall we say, with bright golden hair rinses, who strummed lightly and gaily through a much darker music catalogue than there appearance might suggest. Playing tunes with murderous bad-ass subject matter such as The House of The Rising Son and Bad Moon Arising. The conjunction felt so utterly incongruous, we giggled with delight at it all the way home. Only in Norfolk.

When you've worked around people whose mental grasp of reality is unstable or obsessive, you can unconsciously assume they no longer possess the ordinary feelings and desires of a human being.  The need for independence and intimacy for example. Both of these hard to get in a mental health care home. I wasn't a member of staff, but I was a male in a largely female environment, and I couldn't fail to notice how some residents looked at me 'through different eyes' shall we say.

Feelings of desire weren't limited just to the female residents though. There was Fred for instance, a very local Norfolk born and bread chap, who I'd estimate is in his seventies. He's always been chatty and friendly, briefly talking about the weather, news or local events. Still fit enough to do regular voluntary work for a local farm. In the Spring, whilst I was still wearing work overalls he pointedly asked ' Will you be wearing shorts in the Summer' as if this might be something to look forward to. By mid way through the Summer I am indeed wearing shorts, and he remarked 'Oh, yu got quite a good taan on your legs, does it go all over?' I said 'No' and thought it best to leave it there. Since then I've regularly caught his eyes giving my legs a sly oggle.

Julie is, like Fred, a resident who is relatively free to come and go as she pleases. Originally from King's Lynn, where according to Irish Moira she was a drug dealer. I've no way of confirming this, so like most information I receive via a resident, it has a question mark over it. However, at least a third of the residents in the home are 'drug casualties'. Excessive drug use having welded the synapses in their brain according to an entirely different configuration than in the original operators manual. So it is possible Julie was once one a drug queen. In my last week she said something strange that possibly hinted at this seedier side. She asked me 'where you might buy a lie detector, because no one ever believes I'm a nice person'  which was immediately followed by a mumbled confession about a time 'when I was a teenager, I was put under a restraining order after stubbing out cigarette butts on someones face'

Julie is a gargantuan woman, shaped a bit like a Weeble. Similar to Queen Victoria, she's almost as large in circumference as she is tall. She carries out an elaborate early morning bathroom routine; painting kohl around her eyes; bright red varnish on her filed pointy nails, and platting and coiling her hair into side buns or pig tail. All surrounded by a sickly sweet aroma of musky strawberry. This has its uses, as it disguises the lingering poo smell from her toilet, which she rarely flushes. A regular job in her bathroom is to remove black splashes and scratchy scuffs of red from sink, bath and floor. I had to wait til all this bathroom palaver was over, before I could mop the floor, because her feet and shoes were so dirty they'd leave a record of her movements worthy of the artist Richard Long, otherwise.

Preliminaries completed and dressed in a black jumper with pink hearts all over it, she'd waddle downstairs for the next stage. Sitting outside in a plastic garden chair she can only just fit in, she looks at herself for hours in a petite round makeup mirror, arranging and rearranging the same hairs of her black fringe, over and over again. All down her puff pastry coloured arms are a series of names etched in blue tattooed capital letters, made up of spidery lines and dots. Starting at the top of her upper arm they go 'Julies loves Stuart' then 'Julie loves Pete' then 'Julie loves Mark'  then just above her wrist its 'Julie loves Dad'  concluding with a red heart. Sequentially it paints the suggestion of a storyline I'll never know the details of, that has always struck me as quintessentially sad.




My conversations with Julie have always been pleasant, but like with most residents, quite repetitive. We regularly swap our names, for instance. Whenever I'd be cleaning the resident's kitchen windows she'd inevitably sing the Mr Sheen jingle and say ' my Mum used Sparkle, do you remember Sparkle?', whilst her eyes would wander down to my crotch and she'd begin chuntering to herself, a noise similar to those that Muttley from the Wacky Races made.

Madame ASBO, I'd say is a woman in her late thirties. For weeks you'll hardly hear or see anything of her, then suddenly, without warning, she'll be repeatedly setting off the Fire Alarm, chanting loudly, singing out of tune, hoovering her room for hours, or playing rave music at extreme volume, all of these at any time of the day or night. She's recently been joined next door by Dave The Rave who currently competes with her for musical dominance of this rave culture. Both these people never appear to sleep, and neither does anyone else on that landing get much chance of shut eye either.

When I first started cleaning at the home Madame ASBO was the only resident I felt distinctly wary of. How she behaved seemed done knowingly, for the effect on others.  Now, I believe she was just testing me, like when she'd burst out of her room and shout expletives at me or bellow' what a fucking looser you are' right in my face, as I was casually hoovering her landing. She once stood talking incomprehensible tosh, head bent to face the reception floor as I'm mopping it, and after throwing lewd words and gestures to the workmen opposite, left. There was frequently a sexual undertow to what she does, though few people, I guess, find a shouting mad person alluring. There isn't a single resident who doesn't immediately vacate the room the moment she enters. Quite lonely and friendless, she has an thirteen year old son whom she occasionally meets up with. I feel for the boy, living with the knowledge of his Mother's mental condition, knowing you can never rely on her for emotional support, or for anything really.

Madame ASBO has, however, gradually warmed to me, and recently took to striking up friendly conversation with me. Trying to play matchmaker between myself and a lady who does night shifts, who I chat with in the mornings. There's a coy coquettish quality to the way Madame ASBO interacts with me. One day whilst I'm cleaning her door I heard her speaking from behind it 'Hello my name is Lucy, and I'm alone behind this door' followed by a slightly sinister girly giggle. Sometimes I've felt as though I've stumbled into some creepily camp Hammer Horror movie set.

Mr Ed, aka ~ the Talking Horse or Stinky Stuart, are a few of the names I've toyed with that fail to quite capture his essence in an epithet. He has a ground floor room in the L shaped corridor which, due to the nature of its residents, its proximity to a loo that forever gets blocked, and a general lack of ventilation, always pongs of horse dung.  Mr Ed is another Norfolk born man, but scrawny, dressed like a scarecrow, with a wildly unkempt bush of black corkscrew hair. He totters around at great speed with his zimmer frame, like a demented peg legged doll wearing trousers he's either peed or shat in. Its not just his cleanliness that's challenging, but also his language. His sentences are rambling and garbled, so you can rarely understand him, often working himself up into an angry tirade at staff. What comes over loud and clear are the swear words, that are never complementary about women. Even Irish Moira, a woman not averse to spitting out the odd poisoned invective, once said to me she thought he was evil.

For all her less appealing characteristics, I remain fond of Irish Moira, and will miss her. If only because she provided excellent source material to write about in this blog. Over the ten months I've worked in the home I've seen how her mental state has deteriorated as a result of a series of falls she's had and changes to her medication. Living opposite Madame ASBO and Dave The Rave, can't help either. She's often spun a melodramatic tale, such as the midnight police raid because five pounds has gone from her wallet. Mostly she's emotionally manipulative, trying to get me to clean her room because she says it hasn't been done for weeks, or to fetch her a member of staff, because she's not feeling well or at the point of death. I've had to learn to turn a deaf ear to this or I'd never get my job done. In the last few weeks she's become obsessed with cleaning the resident's kitchen. Well, it has to be said, its more the idea of cleaning, what she does is lightly brush the tea counter with paper towels whilst aggressively and repeatedly banging cupboard doors. She's become defensive and proprietorial about this activity, declaring the moment I appear ' It's clean' or trying to convince me that a visibly filthy floor is fine to leave as it is. That polish is good for nothing.

Her mood is changeable, one morning she's quite the sweet old lady, the next she's uttering 'and you can piss off' as soon as she sees you. The more I clean the more uptight she gets - 'just go away, cunt'.  then she'll goes outside, sucking insistently on a long dead roll up as if trying to breathe new life into it, trying to calm herself down with a ciggy. Popping back in to see if I've finished yet, and if I haven't crying despairingly 'Oh, for fuck sake' and slamming the door behind her. Once, whilst I was diligently cleaning porcelain in a toilet, she flung 'and you can go fuck yourself'  as she tottered by, to which I responded by blowing her a raspberry. Half muffled through a door closing behind her I could hear her shouting 'that's not funny'. The care home Manager said to think of her as like a frog. Baffled at first, it occurred to me later that indeed these are instinctual utterances similar to those of a croaking frog. Instead of 'rib beeb' out will pop a pungent swear word. Expletives turning into abrasive affirmations of presence, rough signs of her affection, or perhaps a mistranslated appeal for love.

SHERINGHAM DIARY 18 ~ Before & After Dad Died

Dad and I in Southwold

The Sleeping Prelude

Dad fell again, breaking his hip this time, dispatched to Scunthorpe General Hospital to have it replaced. The second fall in a year. Yet another long car journey up north to see how he was. We visited him three times in hospital that weekend, but each time he was sound asleep. One could have been forgiven for thinking he was already at the final precipice of death, as he drifted in and out of blurred wakefulness. When the nurses tried to stir him to eat, drink or take medications he'd wildly gesture them away, sometimes swearing as if in a drunken stupor.

However, all we got was one croaky 'hello' on our second visit after a bit of jokey cajoling from me. He was still there, but buried beneath what felt like a wilful blanket of slumber, a dogged refusal to come back into full wakefulness. A few weeks later his condition was much the same even though he'd returned to St Mary's Care Home. Experienced carers recognised the nature of what was taking place, what this state of almost perpetual sleep was a prelude of. So the nature of his care regime was consciously moved from being palliative to end of life. When that end might be was anywhere between a few days to a week, in fact that point was reached a day and a half later. Dad passing away during the early hours of the 27th July 2018.

Dad always had this streak of passive resistance in him, that manifested when he felt he was being pressured to do something he didn't want to. Were any family member to have the unenviable task of trying to persuade him to act on an issue, you'd see the familiar 'I'm shutting down now' look pass over his face. He would be doing no such thing. With hindsight, I'd say Dad had on some level 'shut down' on living much longer, at least as long ago as last year. He'd deliberately stopped taking his medications then, which within a few months did lead to his heart attack and first fall.  After each fall and hospitalisation he fought off anyone attempting to comfort or make him better. Even if these were partly symptoms of his Alzheimer's, Dad's existential will was still being pitted against those of the medical staff's best efforts.

After some dithering on my part I decided not to do the final dash to the death bed thing. Every visit lately had already felt like the last. The personality I'd known had dwindled away. Each time I'd said goodbye with the intuition I might not see him again. After his heart attack last year I'd had a conversation with Dad that trod gently upon spiritual earth. Though befuddled around the edges by the pain relief drugs he was on, his conversation nonetheless contained beads of clarity. He spoke of seeing people he'd not seen for decades, 'As if they've just walked in from around the corner in the corridor, and they leave the same way, They've never been that far away apparently, just around the corner'. He then did an unheard of thing, for my Dad, he held my hand affectionately, whilst he told me of  how 'its so lovely standing at the top and look down the Hebden Valley and the sun rising on the horizon, its so bright'. Those were the sort of parting words that I could treasure.

The House That Dad Built

Even before he died it was clear Dad would never return to his home. In the early 1980's he'd spent two years designing and building it, using every ounce of his spare time. He'd have been in his mid fifties then and it was the only time I saw him close to complete exhaustion. But he was driven by a lifetimes dream to build his own home. Dad could have these flights of fancy, that my Mum would sometimes have to bear the consequences of. Mostly these weren't of the scale of building a family house, but smaller enthusiasms, such as a new job, or things to do, to collect, the fresh skills he wanted to learn. Dad was the ambitious amateur, not put off by lack of precedence in talent or expertise, he took the attitude that things couldn't be that hard to do, he'd just give it a go. So the house became filled with the detritus of numerous past projects, plus the collections he'd begun but subsequently lost interest in. When I looked around the house with a more acquisitive eye I was left wondering what, if anything, of these possessions I'd want. Just a few tools that either I don't have or are better quality, and a few odd bits and bobs, not really much else.  I didn't share many enthusiasms in common with my Dad, apart from a love of history.

The house is structurally sound, though some of the woodwork in the eaves need attention. Internally it has an older person's aesthetic. Designed to meet their domestic needs, this was the house of Mum and Dad. Potential buyers will need to factor in the expense of altering all of that. Now he's died the disposal of his former possessions stepped up another gear. My Sister, Brother in law and their family because they live closer than I, have borne the lions share of this great task of clearance. I travelled up the Monday following his death to do what I could in the seemingly never ending chucking out of a life times collection of junk and clutter.

Dad in 1999

Knowing Dad Through The Stuff He Kept

As a Joiner by trade, my Dad accumulated racks full of wood, shelf after shelf of half rusted tins and jars containing half corroded nails, screws and fittings. Not to mention all manner of things that he put aside because they might prove useful someday. Going through endless amounts of tat, sorting out recyclable items, is rarely rewarding work. Behind it the emotional thrall of throwing away the symbolic remains of your parent exacts its own particular psycho-physical toll of weary lifelessness There is so little room for sentimentality here, or ecological concerns about how much stuff you are consigning to landfill. You just need to get shot of things, keep your head down, and at some point you'll emerge out the other end and be able to move on.

Clearing a parents house draws you closer to them, by virtue of entering into their private world. Glimpsing what they thought important and how they chose to document it. Dad's approach was, as ever, all his own. My Sister unearthed over twenty plastic folders stuffed with family photos that I went through selecting out what I wanted. Though things were well labelled and filed, the way he arranged the contents within wouldn't always conform completely to logic. As Alzheimer's began to alter his ability to organise, arrangements became more random, prone to following the whim of the moment. Interspersing random newspaper clippings and plant catalogue extracts with family photographs, each moving freely in and out of sequence, backwards and forwards through time. The effect of flicking through these files was like viewing life through a kaleidoscope.

A typical man of his generation, Dad was self-contained, with a secret emotional life, but with an easy going manner and a lovely helpful man to encounter. As my Uncle Trevor put it, 'though a quiet man, he was good, honest and true.'  To me he will forever remain a bit of a mystery. One of the challenges in being his son was trying to understand what moved and made him tick. He'd never proffer spontaneous utterances about what he thought or felt. This made it hard to emotionally identify with him, keeping any desire I had for a better connection at a distance. Being demonstrative or tactile wasn't in the lexicon of his behaviour, his parental feelings for you tended to become manifested through practical tasks. If you wanted a gauge how much he loved and cared for you, you'd have to read between the lines of the jobs he did for you, what he made for you, or by what things of yours he kept. He could be inflexibly opinionated if you didn't manage to avoid 'certain subjects', though he was at base extremely kind, infinitely patient and caring, for whom nothing was too much bother for those he loved or appreciated.

After repainting the entrance door, and clearing, pruning and tidying up the garden as much as I could, I was ready to approach that seemingly disordered pile of stuff scattered across the desks in Dad's den. His den was his bolt hole, a place of retreat. Often he'd spend hours up there, whenever he wanted a bit of peace and quiet, away from the infinite spontaneity of Mum's conversational drift. Emotionally I was holding it together quite well, until I stumbled across a small white plastic bag. Inside this was a small black cap for St Augustine's Primary School, with its school crest of a book, cross quills and a crown above a heart surrounded by flames, The symbolism of which appears to me now to be prescient of the sort of qualities I've tried to develop in myself. This was my first school cap, that I can be seen proudly wearing in early photos.  Such a little thing, to touch so deeply.

The Crest of St Augustine's C of E School, Halifax, Yorkshire

The Heart - the symbol of St Augustine of Hippo
The Sun - part of West Riding of Yorkshire's Coat of Arms
The Black - represents the black cassocks of Augustinian Monks.
The Crown -from the See of Wakefield's Coat of Arms.
The Pens - represents Learning
The Book - represents the Augustinian Rule.
The Crown - represents the Highest Thoughts
The Silver - represents Truth
The Flaming Heart - represents Love
The Blue - represents Loyalty.

Me in 1963

A Gathering Of Those Who Remain 

When you die in your nineties most of your contemporaries have already pre-deceased you, or like two of his remaining sisters, are in Residential Care Homes. So apart from my Auntie Joan, herself 89, but still able to drive across country to a funeral all the way from Chesterfield, and Dad's remaining brother Uncle Trevor, forever mischievous and lively even at 86, it was largely a gathering of my cousins and my Sisters family. Though a handful of people from the Scunthorpe Male Voice Choir that Dad had been a member of, and Natalie his main carer from St Mary's Care Home also turned up.

After a brief committal service at Woodlands Crematorium, it was back to Crowle Methodist Chapel for a remembrance service followed by a buffet at the 7 Lakes close by. A good turn out of people from the Methodist Chapel congregation was handy as most of my family would know none of the hymns Dad had chosen. Yet hymns do have a power to them, no doubt originally composed with the aim of stirring up responses from out of the intransigent mud of faithfilled depths. I certainly started feeling emotionally wobbly whilst singing them. They felt a fitting musical salute to Dad, a bracing praise of vocal trumpeting for his life. You could always find where my Dad was beavering away at a task, by locating the sound of him humming to himself. The tune he was humming was usually well nigh impossible to identify, it more resembled the hum of a contented bee at work collecting pollen.

Parental Influences

The best of my parental influences have served me well, a mostly happy childhood brought up in a peaceful home where I felt loved and appreciated, fed, housed, educated and nurtured. Giving me an ethical basis for getting on in life. There are always less helpful traits you pick up from them along the way; in my case it was being overly self-conscious, anxious, struggling with my self-esteem and confidence. These have proved testing to find ways to overcome, bypass, or at least learn to be less angsty about them.

Throughout childhood a repeated refrain was how much like my Mum I was, mostly it was in physical resemblance, but inferred to be in personal and emotional character too. This became like a family cliche, tending to disguise my own sense of agency and ignoring where I was actually very like my Dad. Though over the years I've discovered for myself what I inherited and learnt from him. I'm clearly an imperfect melange of both my parents personalities, with things that are all my very own mixed in. A bit of a dreamer like my Dad, but one who has been known to cramp the flourishing of those dreams behind an anxious fence of practicalities, that is quintessentially my Mum. Learning how to be more laid back about such things, as Dad seemed always to be, has been a job of work.

I've turned out to have a mix of practical and creative talents. The practical tending to dominate if I let it, doing the logical, responsible thing to which creative fulfilment, artistic endeavour and aesthetics will always play second fiddle. 'Its all very well you day dreaming Stephen, but you have to earn a living.'  says the Northern puritan work ethic hard wired from my upbringing. However, not pursuing dreams, to stifle them rather than actively get behind creative urges has often swamped the joie de vivre in a jungle of melancholy that I had to learn how to hack my way out of. How best to keep practical and creative impulses in a healthier, sympathetic relationship, is still my work in progress.

Moving On

They say we inherit from our parents all that is resolved and fully realised in them, and the rest, though perhaps stuffed into the corners of a battered old holdall, is where all their unresolved unrealised desires fester. The task for any son or daughter is to unpick yourself from the complicated tapestry of what your parents psychologically bequeath  you.  To find what is of value to you, to either cast aside the rest, or set about with a passion to resolve the unresolved, to realise the unrealised, through your own life.  Inheritances don't need to be treated as fate, with an awareness of other possibilities, we can take our parental legacies as a gift that you can either welcome, refuse or exchange.

As only the psychological and photographic archive of my Mum and Dad are now left, it remains to be seen what will flourish in the currently self-transforming perspective, where only their dual absence tangibly remains in reality.