Fujifilm Finepix J210

A while ago Lisi lent her camera, on permanent loan, to Alice.  For her research work Lisi now needs a simple camera to make photographic copies of old documents.  For several weeks she has been borrowing my Samsung NV10 so I have made a permanent loan of that camera to her and brought a new Fujifilm Finepix J210 for myself.  I look forward to taking some snapshots with it in due course.  Today I am laid low with a chest cold so the 'trial run' will have to wait a day or two.

Mother III

Yesterday evening I was housebound. For the better part of the day wet snow had been falling here, driven by gale force winds. A few miles along the road to Perth the landscape is once again blanketed with snow. I long to be home in Messinia. My daughter, Annabelle, had been here for the weekend together with her partner, Ben, and their two toddler daughters who we took this morning to visit their great-grandmother at Ashley House. Although she had no idea of who the children were, their being there brought a rare smile to mother's face. The visit had brought her some pleasure so was worthwhile. I can not know what the children, Lara three and Poppy twenty months, made of the frail old lady they know as 'Nan' and wonder what, if any, picturess of her and of Ashley House may have been implanted into the childrens' minds; I wonder if, for those who suffer dementia towards the end of long lives, such misty images latent from very early childhood, restore to become part of a kaleidoscope of shadowy thoughts , floating in time and space, that seem to be all that the condition permits to be in their daily experience of life.

The 'New' VW Beetle

My sister has lent me her car to use while I am here in Dollar. It is a VW Beetle, one of the new Beetles which, having been launched in 1999 and revamped in 1995, are hardly 'new' any more. I could never understand, back in the 1970s, how the original Beetle earned such a cult following. Sluggish, noisy, fuel inefficent and quite a handful to drive when sidewinds prevailed, the rear-engined Beetles seemed to me to have little to commend them. The beetle I have been driving for the past month is something very different; it is a delight to drive and, apart from something vagely familiar about its lines, has no obvious relationship to its ancestor. It is amazingly well balanced and light to drive and, for a car of its size and purpose, has more than adequate performance. It is also a very comfortable car with exellent all round vision. I shall miss this car when I leave here.

Mother II

Yesterday morning I made a visit to Ashley House Care Home to visit my mother. My sister and I have been concerned that too much visiting at this early stage might not help mother to settle into her new home so yesterday's visit was my first since last Friday. Mum was much calmer than she had been during my last visit but seemed very weary. She lay almost corpse like on her bed with closed eyes deeply sunk into darkened sockets but she roused herself well enough to shuffle along to the dining room for lunch. She was quite unaware that I had not visited since Friday or that my sister, who had visited on Sunday, had visited at all. To know that many people are ending their lives in this way disturbs me; to see my own mother in this condition is particularly distressing. I think I know what would make her happy but can do nothing to give it to her. I believe she dreams of going home to a place, filled with long dead friends and family, somewhere between where she lived with her parents and siblings and the place in which she lived with our father when my sister and I were children.

Menstrie

Menstrie, the second of the 'Hillfoots' villages along the road from Stirling to Perth, is dominated today by a huge whisky plant, acres of bonded warehouses and regimented rows of barrack like housing. There is little at Menstrie to encourage a visitor to linger but the village is not entirely devoid of attractions, first among which is the stunning scenic walking to be had in the hills to the north of the town. I spent this afternoon strolling paths following the west side of Menstrie glen to the Lossburn Reservoir, 900' above the village. From there I descended on paths to the east of Menstrie Burn. On the slopes a number of ruined buildings and clearly visible remains of long forgotten fields and their boundaries are evidence of comparatively intensive mixed farming having been practised there in the past. By the mid 18th century there were about 22 farms being worked along the glen but thereafter the farms were enclosed and the land returned to sheep grazing.
The paths were good as were the footbridges over several tributary burns that cascade down the hillside into Menstrie burn. There were spectacular views to the south, over the Forth valley towards the Kincardine and, in the far distance, the Forth bridges.
Late 16th century Menstrie Castle, (A large house rather than a castle.) birthplace of Sir William Alexander, founder of Nova Scotia, is another of Menstrie's attractions.

Mother

Last Thursday my mother was transferred from Alloa Community Hospital to Ashley House Care Home at Milnathort. When I visited her there yesterday she said nothing about the move; she could remember nothing. Nor did she say anything about how she liked or disliked her new surroundings. She knew only that she did not want to be where she was; she wanted to be back in her own home. Dementia, I now understand, manifests in many different ways. In my mother's case it began to develop a longish while ago, perhaps two years or more, but the earliest symptoms were either ignored or taken as the kind of odd behavioural quirks to which most of us are occasionally subject. Although she continued to live alone, keeping herself and her home in good order her behaviour became increasingly odd and out of character. Last December she fell either off of or from her bed. The following morning my sister, who lives nearby and called daily on our mother, could get neither response to her calls nor entry into the house so was obliged to call the police to force entry. They found mum on her bedroom floor not seriously injured, she had fractured bones in an arm and in her shoulder, but apparently not in pain and quite unaware of her predicament; she was immediately transferred by ambulance to a local hospital.
The incident marked a rapid acceleration of her mental condition to one that the health service considered inappropriate to living alone. Since then she has been held in the dementia wing at the Alloa Community Hospital pending a place being found for her at an appropriate care home.
Alloa Community Hospital is, if a touch NHS spartan, pleasant and comfortable but it was a great shock to me to see my mother there. When I had last seen her, in December, she was behaving quite strangely and saying odd things but seemed to know what was going on around her. When I next saw her, two months later, her conversation made little sense at all and she looked so very frail and weak. I was also shocked to realise that she was but one of a dozen or more folk in her ward in similar circumstances albeit of various ages. For the first time in my life I was aware of the colossal scale of the problem of looking after people who are no longer able to look after themselves. This has caused me to consider, again for the first time in my life, what the future might be holding in store for me!
'Ashley House' is also pleasant and comfortable and far from spartan; it has the ambience of a multi-starred hotel. The residents are more of a mixed bag, most seemingly suffering from no more than physical frailty. With time perhaps mother will settle to enjoying, as far as she is able, her life at 'Ashley House; I hope so. As I was typing that I was increasingly aware of the hypocrisy of even thinking it. To live in such a place with its nauseous niceness, its entertainments and organised outings would, for me, be hell on earth. Why should it be any different for my mother?

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin......

While browsing Lloyd Khan's excellent blog I discovered this facility to blog through 'Google'. I enjoy the process of getting ideas into communicable forms and people close to me have for a long while tried to persuade me to express myself on the web; so here I be.
The name I have given to my blog, “Wanderings of a Sensate Man”, has been inspired by words in a recent e-mail from my friend and mentor Barry Williamson (www.magbaztravels.com) in which he referred to me as, “the epitome of the sensate man”. I am not sure what this means and am never quite sure whether Barry is being complimentary or amusing himself at my expense but the phrase has an erudite ring to it, a foil perhaps to most of what will follow.