Are you from the real world – or not?

Are you real? Do you live in the real world? In order that we might all be able to judge – what paper do you read?

I’m only asking because, on 7 May, just after the various elections across England, Scotland and Wales, I found myself deep in Twitterworld.

There, one (on the surface) quite coherent contributor was asking why, in the Hartlepool by-election, Labour had “put up a Remainer in a Brexit town?”

 

That was a coherent question and I was drawn in – more fool me, perhaps.

 

But then they continued: “Did they do that deliberately so Starmer could pin the blame for any defeat on the candidate rather than him? It was a gross error of judgement. But the fact is that the Lab party only represent Guardian readers, not real people.”

 

Oh dear. To which I responded by positing the obvious question (if you have a brain): “What are ‘real people’?”

 

Since I read the Guardian, does that make me ‘unreal’ – or is such ‘unrealness’ balanced out by my not only reading the Guardian, but a wide variety of other media too? After all, I still sometimes look at the Telegraph culture sections for the opera!

 

“If there is such a concept [as real people] and it isn’t ALL people, then what are ‘unreal people’?” I asked. “What would that actually mean?”

 

But then I found myself getting rather engaged. So I mused that it would be fun to try the concept “based on newspaper readership: what paper would the most ‘real people’ read ...? The Times? The Sun? The Mail? The Mirror? What newspaper makes you most ‘real’?

“What about FT readers? How real or unreal would they be? And as for the Express ...”

 

I have a subscription for Private Eye – where does that put me on the spectrum of real to unreal? Honestly, I’m wondering if I and Ian Hislop are about to fade away into unrealness.

 

The poster in question has still not responded.

 

The thing is, this all sounds like a bit of a laugh. But it isn’t. Earlier today, I looked back at the account that had tweeted this nonsense and discovered that it is currently lauding anti-lockdown demonstrators and similar idiots.

 

Such phrases have become a regular riposte from people with no actual argument. I’ll go further: it is almost a boast that they have no logical argument – and let’s face it, to have a proper argument would risk making them a “girly swot” and we know where that doesn’t get you.

 

At the most basic level, it ‘others’: it says that some people are not “real”. It promotes a sense that, if some people don’t share the same views as you do, then they are not as good as you. And it is widespread in social media.

 

It’s all part of – or at least connected to – a deeply anti-intellectual, anti-fact, anti-democratic and anti-free speech conspiracy culture. 

 

It’s also no distance from the similar comment heard for years of: ‘in the real world’.

 

Let’s ask the same questions: if there is a ‘real world’, then what is ‘the unreal world’?

 

Does ‘the real world’ include a favella in Brazil? Does it include astronauts in outer space? Does it include Trump’s gold lift? Does it include children scouring waste dumps for things to salvage and sell to survive? Does it include those with the dosh to live on board luxury private ships all year round, cruising the globe? Does it include people trying to flee persecution for whatever reason? Does it include the nurse using a food bank to help feed her children?

 

Of course, we all know what it means: select from the following word salad – ‘metropolitan, liberal, lefty, artsy, luvvie, elite’.

 

Whatevs.

 

But let’s take just one – that ‘luvvies’ tag. Actors and performers, who seem to be mostly quite politically/socially progressive – possibly because the trade actually demands an ability to empathise/put yourself in someone else’s shoes, though are rarely anywhere near as far left as, say, Vanessa Redgrave – come in for huge stick. And they are most certainly not of the ‘real world’.

 

One assumes that those in ‘the real world’ never watch any sort of thing that involves dodgy presenters – that’s Match of the Day out, then, given Gary ‘woke’ Lineker, but obviously not Top Gear, given the general views of petrolhead star and conservative media columnist Jeremy Clarkson – or almost all films and TV drama and sit-coms.

 

But then again, consistency has nothing to do with this.

 

In the last year of his life, I remember my father ranting that he couldn’t ‘respect anyone who doesn’t have the same beliefs I do!’

 

Having no knowledge at that stage of how it’s best to simply agree with those with dementia, I bridled and rasped back: “So, you don’t respect me, then?”

 

That confused him. Somehow, it’s different with family. Yet of course, that excludes logic, which goes down the toilet – victim to simplistic gammon-faced ranting.

 

The simplistic gammon-faced ranting wouldn’t be important – except that in recent years it has had, and continues to have – a massive influence over the public and political life of this country: across the UK as a whole, but particularly in England, where it seems to be endemic.

 

My parents, Brexit voters both, were not uneducated. My father in particular achieved way more than most of those with whom he grew up with in a tiny, rural Cornish outpost. Little more than a Cornish peasant, he became an ordained Methodist minister and spent his working life moving around England – an incredible achievement.

 

But as with my mother, who came from far less humble a background in east Lancashire, his education was very England-centric. And both maintained a lack of enquiry into anything outside the UK as a whole.

 

I recall, in my late thirties, my mother seeing me reading a book and asking what it was. Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, I replied. My father had never heard of it – my mother seemed almost to blanch in fear.

 

After my father retired, they travelled a little on the Continent – and actually enjoyed it, though it often, in their reports, seemed to have been a revelation that, for instance, Germany was so clean and the Germans so ... friendly.

 

The first time they went was just after my father retired. It was a retirement present from his congregations, a trip to see the 2000 the Oberammergau Passion Play. He was almost terrified beforehand – it was, after all, the land of “the Nazis”.

 

They were neither stupid nor uneducated – but they were ill-served by a very limited and limiting education that severely constrained their horizons. They could list kings and queens of England, but knew almost nothing of the world outside the UK, except where that involved the wonderfulness of the British (English) Empire. And note – that was the what they could cling to as the ‘good bits’.

 

I strongly suspect that, in terms of Brexit and where we are now on a wider scale, this is a situation that was not limited to two people, on an individual level, growing up and being educated at almost opposite ends of England and in quite different socio-economic situations.

 

The English, with their long-term distrust of ‘intellectualism’, have allowed a culture to grow where we now ‘have no more need of experts’. Add to that a sense among (largely) older generations of not knowing what their identity is in a context of devolution and the end of empire, and you have fertile ground for opportunists, nationalists and populists.

‘The real world’ is simply a psychologically monochrome world view, where everyone ‘real’ is a mental mirror image of oneself.

It cannot, therefore, allow for free speech, political plurality and democracy, and any kind of diversity.

 

And that is why ‘real people’ and ‘the real world’ are not simply jokes, but are symptomatic of the problems we face in the UK as a whole – and most particularly in England – and why they need challenging at every turn.

Hold my pint: Mentioning the 'B' word

It has been strictly avoided. A bit like the plague. Or COVID-19 (fingers crossed, until now at least, on a personal level). But there comes a time when the word must be spoken, when the reality must be faced. And that word is ... Brexit.

That’s right, people. Brexit. BREXIT. The absolute bloody clusterfuck that is Brexit.

 

‘Why now?’ you ask – perhaps warily, if you yourself are familiar with the shambles, and are aware that I have avoided it on this blog, choosing indeed to tread lightly because of the divisiveness of the issue.

I made no mention of it at the beginning of this year. I have not said a word here about the UK government having screwed UK fishing communities – and now preparing to screw UK farming communities (and the irony that both these are traditional parts of the constituency of the Conservative Party).

 

That avoidance has been five years in the making – not least because I have also spent a lot of that time trying to understand it through the prism of my Brexit-voting parents (who then died in 2017 and 2018, without hanging around to see the godawful mess that their votes had helped to create) and finding that my attempts to understand them (and myself) is still, even now, largely bound up in trying to understand Brexit and English exceptionalism.

 

So why now ... why today?

 

Because Tim ‘Not-Very-Nice-But-Definitely-Very-Dim’ Martin has decided that, in spite of having been one of businesses’ few high priests for the cult that is Brexit, he now needs EU economic migrants to pull the pints in Wetherspoons, the chain of pubs that he founded, and wants regulations ‘liberalised’ in order to allow that.

 

To be fair, he has a BA in law from the University of Nottingham and qualified as a barrister in 1979 (though has never practiced) so is clearly a Brain of Britain candidate.

 

Not.

 

In 2018, on Brexit, he said that his pubs would stop selling EU-sourced products ... because, well ... The EU! Nose, spite, fucking face.

 

But honestly, this is from an individual who was reported in The Guardian on 30 March this year as having recommitted to a massive, 10-year expansion of ’Spoons, including 75 projects, made up of 18 new pubs and 57 major extensions to existing venues, creating 20,000 jobs.

Oops ... what if you can't fill those jobs, Mr Martin?

 

So it’s hardly difficult to see why he’s suddenly had a change of heart about immigration – okay, less a “change of heart” and more an ‘OMG! My personal pocket!’ religious conversion.

 

And this, girls and boys, is just part of why Brexit is a clusterfuck – because it has been guided by imbeciles and private profiteers who aren’t even intelligent and/or self-aware enough to recognise the impact on their own businesses and profits. Never mind on anyone else. They can't even managed enlightened self interest!.

This is not written from a position ofsnobbery. ’Spoons often do really good cooked breakfasts at a really great price (I’ve enjoyed them before a match in Manchester more than once and in Cardiff during Millennium Magic). And the beer they sell isn’t just dross, such as that 'brewed' by Interbrew.

 

But Martin’s comments illustrate that, while Wetherspoons is essentially a (socially) working class brand, he doesn’t give a toss about that group of people (however you would categorise the working class) and only about his own pocket.

As is clear, given that this is an employer who refuses to pay his own staff extra for working on bank holidays or allow them to have a soft drink while working on really hot days (like today).

 

Brexit in a fucking nutshell.

Sign a petition too get Wetherspoons to pay its workforce for bank holidays

 

A Secret Garden for our age

In 2019 BC (Before COVID) when The Other Half and I were still regularly visiting the cinema on our way home from work on a Friday, we had already seen, more than once, the trailer for a new adaptation of Frances Hodgson’s Burnett’s classic children’s novel, The Secret Garden.

Trailers are teasers, of course  but this one provoked optimism and indeed prompted me, in February this year (still just about BC) to re-read the book.

 

The copy had been my mother’s, which I had brought home when I cleared my parents' home after their deaths. 

It was a new edition from 1942, with colour plates, a tattered dust jacket and inside, a loose, unfilled bookplate from the token with which she had almost certainly bought it for her eleventh birthday.

On the bookplate was a picture of a giant tulip growing up from bombed urban ruins.

I hadn't seen the bookplate for years but, while I remembered it visually, it was only this year that I felt a sense of what it was about.

 

On 3 May the year, CE (COVID Era), on the third anniversary of my mother’s death, the book and plate found itself in a poem I wrote about her.

 

Today, I finally caught up with the new film, released in a hodgepodge of ways, given the pandemic, including via Sky Cinema.

 

The novel was written in 1911, but Burnett's work avoided any of the cloying sentimentality that might have been left over from the Victorian era. Both Mary Lennox and her cousin Colin are unpleasant children: as we discover, that is a direct result of their respective upbringings, and redemption and reform is possible.

 

Mary has been orphaned; Colin has lost his mother and been confined to a room in the family manor by, in effect, his father’s utter terror that his son is weak and will die like his mother before him.

 

Here, the film has been updated to 1947. And it suits a version of the story that reflects today’s far greater awareness and understanding of psychology, of mental health and ill health, of grief, loss and much more.

 

It also chimes with our growing understanding of the restorative – and indeed, redemptive – nature of nature. This is a film that, without doing so clunkily, acknowledges the benefits of nature for mental health, and thereby presents a subtle but strong environmental message too.

 

Nature needs to be healthy for us to be healthy. We cannot exist separately.

 

Jack Thorne’s script is to be applauded for all this – and for its eschewing of an easy sentimentalisation of the story; for making Mary and Colin both initially unpleasant, but also understandable and redeemable. It’s a fine line, and one that the film charts well.

 

Director Marc Munden lends the story a sense of the magical that is far more pronounced that in the novel, but it works – again feeding into that environmental theme.

 

This is a small cast, but Dixie Egerickx as Mary, Edan Hayhurst as Colin and Amir Wilson as Dickon are excellent as the children upon whose shoulders any sense of believability in this fable rests.

 

As the adults, Colin Firth as Lord Craven and Julie Walters as housekeeper Mrs Medlock are … well, precisely what you’d expect from a pair of such fine actors.

 

If I have a criticism, it’s primarily that Dickon and his sister (Isis Davis) are not seen as fully as they are in the novel and that we don’t get as full a sense of the Yorkshire moors in the film as we do in the novel.

 

But this is probably a bit whiny – and I have to say that I do love the giant rhubarb!

 

Lockdown's creative surge continues

The lockdown brings with it plenty of difficulties, but there can also be opportunities – not least to think about things. 

I’ve already explained briefly here that for me, it has produced an entirely unexpected creative burst, as I have found myself writing poetry for the first time in decades.

In the last couple of days, remembering old family photographs uncovered when clearing my parents’ home two years ago this summer, I found that a couple of the pictures made me want to talk about them.

Or to put another way, I felt that I wanted to write about some of them, to build a picture in a different way. The photographs themselves will be included, because this is – hopefully – one thing complimenting another.

Before

Snow-dumped fells blur

Into snow-filled skies;

Drifts arc up from the road

Like a pitted bobsleigh track.

She stands in the middle distance,

To the bottom left.

Perspective,

deceptive,

has a black hedge tower over her,

Drawing the eye

and accidentally lending the shot

                        good composition.

The slide was colour but

Winter and time have leached that.

Blow it up and there is no trace

of a smile

in the smudge of a face.

Booted, with feet turned out

(Later, she’d say not to stand that way).

Stockings beneath a dress or skirt,

She relies for warmth on a big coat,

collar up

And hands hidden in gloves or overlong sleeves.  

Her hair is tucked away, queen-like, beneath a scarf.

Further off, two men in caps

            clear the road.

It was December ’62 and

The snow that had snowed

            would be followed by plenty more;

And, just a few days later,

            By me.

23 May 2020

Understandings

‘COVID is our Spanish flu’ is a cliché for our times, and                     

When I think of that

and I think of you        

I feel a guilty relief that I need not stew,                   

Sat here, two hours away,

Fretting about lockdown and Dad and you,

Worrying about just what to do

and how.

But each time I think like this, I start with a mistake.

I’m thinking of you in those last few weeks,

at your frailest;

Exhausted,

Even before sentence of death.

The frailty was not weakness.

You had the strength to demand: “How long?”

Shocking the nurse who’d been sent

to beat about the bush.

I’d warned her before that you were a little deaf.

Not gaga, I said,

And still with a core of steel.

After checking you really wanted to know

(You weren’t sure but told her to go on)

She gave you … “a few months”.

You took two weeks.

Dad was upstairs in another ward,

Raging after his missing razor and demanding

You stop everything to fetch it.

On trips to the house to check the mail and

firefight the finances,

I watered your Japanese maple.

Lying there, you asked me once,

Dryly and half rhetorical,

How long Dad would outlive you.

A creaking gate, he’d creak on a while

I tried to joke.

I wish you’d told me what you

Must have known or guessed.

But why would you have,

When your pride had stopped you before?

You’d had enough and

Slipped away with as little fuss as possible;

Not yet cold when I removed the gold studs

I’d bought in ’81 for your birthday.

In February just gone,

Before we got to know the new coronavirus,

I read your copy of The Secret Garden.

A new edition in June ’42,

Published just right for your 11^th birthday.

A plate inside shows a giant tulip

rising from a bomb site.

“Can spring be far behind?” it asks.

Your mother and father were in their teens in ’18,

Old enough to fear that year’s flu.

Spring’s grotesque and deathly climax,

blooming over the final months

Of the war grinding to a halt.

COVID-19 reminds me of that book plate

In moments when I fear the future too;

Of course there’s going to be a tomorrow:

the only question is …

What will it look like,

when finally it hoves into view?

Were you afraid that morning when you left us?

Gone so quietly, as if just stepping through a door;

Would you think my fears now out of all proportion,

Or is fear always a base note of our being,

Even if we have a steel core?

3 May 2020

On the third anniversary of Mother’s death

Walks of witness, steps free of shame

Placard protesting against the homophobic laws of the
Sultan of Brunei, Hassanal Bolkiah, who, in true
Freudian style, has ‘anal’ as part of his name

Last Friday was Whit Friday – a day that means little throughout most of the UK but which, in parts of the North West of England, has great cultural significance.

In the morning, members of local Christian churches march through their town in a walk of witness, usually with banners for each church (think a religious version of trade union banners) and sometimes with a brass band from, say, a local school.

In the afternoon – in Mossley at least – there’d be games at the local football ground. In the evening, there’d be the band contests, where brass bands would travel from town to town, à la Brassed Off, competing in each contest before travelling to the next one.

For eight years, when my family lived in the Tameside region, I would have the day off school. I’d march with my father’s church, enjoy the games and then hang around outside the church itself while the bands marched in and out of St Joseph’s school yard to perform.

Eight years was the longest we spent anywhere when I was growing up: the sound of brass bands is woven into my being.

Yours Truly

My last Whit walk was 40 years years ago on Friday 8 June, 1979.

This year, on 6 June, I took part in what was, in many ways, another walk of witness and my first such one: London Pride.

I’d thought about going to Pride before – only as a member of the crowd, mind – but then somehow just never got around to it.

With the benefit of hindsight, I think that I was afraid of being outed to the only two people I was in contact with whom I wasn’t out – my parents. My father had, back in those Mossley days, carefully nurtured an awareness in me that people who knew him would see me doing things and report.

Trafalgar Square

It happened at least once that I can specifically remember now, about something ridiculously innocuous, but it was an idea that lingered. I don’t think that such things leave you easily, even if you cease to be consciously aware of them.

I never told Mother and Dad that I was bisexual: by the time I’d come out to myself, I wondered what the point would be: wouldn’t it just risk seriously upsetting them, given their attitudes toward sexuality – and sin?

A few days before this year’s Pride, a work email newsletter arrived in my inbox, announcing that there were spare places with our organisation’s contingent for the parade itself. I took the opportunity. It seemed an apt moment too, as I work through some of the things that have risen to the surface in the tumult of dealing with both parents’ deaths since 2017, plus my own cancer diagnosis last year.

The day of Pride, I got to Portland Place in good time, but realising that, in olive linen trousers, walking shoes and a branded UNISON t-shirt, I was woefully underdressed. So I picked up a little rainbow clip-on bow tie. I was still underdressed, but not quite as much so.

Steampunky Gothy greetings

The atmosphere was almost overwhelming. As an old friend noted to me later on Facebook, you feel surrounded by warmth and good feelings. I have never experienced anything like it. It was extraordinary to have people reach out from the massive crowd (an estimated 1.5 million on the streets of London) to high five as they wished you the best.

There was plenty of outré behaviour and attire – and I like that: I adore the transgressive nature of drag, for instance.

And off course, it was less than a week into my One Million Steps Challenge, so perfectly suited.

Perfectly suited too, for being not simply a utilitarian walk.

Some ask why Pride is needed these days. Well, when you hear and read of rising homophobic and transphobic attacks, you realise why.

When you read of the protests against the No Outsiders programme being taught in Birmingham schools, you understand why Pride is necessary.

Indeed, just today, it’s been reported that the government has been accused of being “too slow” to tackle the issue – and support the school: accused by the woman tasked with tackling extremism.

‘God is love’

But now, it seems that the protests by some Muslim parents, on the grounds of their religious beliefs, against teaching children that all people are equal, are encouraging others.

According to this report, a group called Catholic Family Voice has been set up near Glasgow by a woman who describes herself as “excited” by what’s been happening in Birmingham. Another woman has been individually leafleting schools on the issue, ”aiming to disrupt, essentially,” while the founder of The Values Foundation makes it clear that she doesn’t ‘value’ equality.

“There’s no way that people of faith will teach it’s OK to be gay,” she said. “They won’t because the Bible tells us it isn’t OK to be gay.”

Yes. And the Bible tells us that we should do an awful lot of things that these people would not remotely suggest were appropriate these days.

It’s also worth noting at this juncture, that plenty of people of faith have no problem with the spectrum of sexuality, just as plenty of people of faith acknowledge that evolution is real.

But that’s as maybe. The point here is simple: it might seem that LGBT+ people have equality – in law, at least. But while they continue to be attacked, simply for being who they are and loving who they love, then the struggle is far from over.

I‘ll go with this

In many ways, in terms of a practical, day-to-day level, it’s not been particularly difficult for me: despite being out to people in my daily life, I’ve been in a relationship with a straight, male Other Half for 30 years (he knew before I recognised it myself), so people comfortably make assumptions and frankly, I’ve no interest in making my sexuality the subject of every first conversation with someone.

But almost four decades to the day since I last took a walk of witness – and now, not because I had no choice, but because I wanted to – I walked again.

In times like these, with the rise of the far-right revealing again the attitudes that gave rise to the pink triangle – the symbol stitched onto the concentration camp uniforms of LGBT+ inmates in Nazi Germany – witness is vital.

This year is also the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, with all that began. Our history is important.

So too is showing solidarity with those still being persecuted and even being killed: four LGBT refugees from Syria had finally arrived in the UK a couple of days before Pride. Finally, they could experience what it means to be out.

And it is also vital to say, as MP Angela Eagle recently did in a speech about the Birmingham schools protests: “We aren’t getting back in the closet”.

The NHS needs a whole team – and that has to include administrators

On an afternoon last spring, in the chaos of trying to clear hospital beds for new patients, a frail, elderly man was rushed back to his house the moment that a care package was in place. Behind him, at the opposite end of the hospital, his wife of almost 57 years lay dying. The hospital staff didn’t have the time to be able to let him see her before ferrying him away.

That was my father and that was my mother. She passed away just five days later. I shall never forget the kindness of Winson, a young male nurse who, as I sat beside her bed watching over her breathless body, gently wiped a single tear from my cheek and who, equally gently, encouraged me to remove her earrings – something that I quickly understood was close to the services for our dead that have, so much, been sanitised from the UK’s mainstream culture.

It was the beginning of May. The blossom was falling in the garden that had been her domain. Whatever the reality said, the chaotic state of the National Health Service was not the headline news that it is right now, when even the prime minister has felt the need to apologise as countless non-urgent operations are cancelled, accident and emergency department waiting times rise and people lie on hospital beds in corridors.

Good sources tell me that St Helier, which lies in Carshalton, at London’s southern reaches, closed a ward recently in an attempt to save money – only to have to reopen it a short while later.

Indeed, my father had been one of the patients transferred into another ward in order to enable that closure, though I didn’t realise it at the time.

At the beginning of November, suffering serious abdominal pain in the night, he used his safety watch to summon help. A scan revealed gallstones and elective surgery was proposed, with the aim of building him up beforehand.

Then his major organs got stroppy. Early on a Monday morning, I was summoned to the hospital as a matter of urgency.

It’s approximately a two-hour trip. Scrambling out of the most convenient railway station and into a minicab, the phone rang again. They were prepping him for emergency surgery. I got there in time to sign the consent form and be told he would die without the operation – and probably with it. The anaesthetist then assured me that, since he would “be asleep,” there would be no trauma. She later told me that she had not expected him to survive the introduction of the anaesthesia.

His Methodist minister, the seriously wonderful Rosemary, was there too and we joked away with him until he was wheeled away. I was grateful that I had, for some reason, I had thought to put sunglasses in my bag.

Rosemary took me to the coffee shop and stayed with me. She didn’t try to be ‘religious’ to me’ but bought me sweet tea and let me burble away.

Ninety minutes later, the surgeon rang to say that Dad was back in the high dependency unit.

He’s a stubborn old sod.

The surgery had discovered nothing. They had expected to find that part of his bowel had died, but instead, realised that he had sepsis. Once stitched up, they started nuking him with antibiotics and, after hours of stabilising has blood pressure, the improvement increased. Within a day or so, he was off dialysis. After a week, he was fully conscious and able to start eating and drinking properly. It is possible that nobody has relished a Fortisip more – he asked for seconds and the look on the face of the nurse was priceless. She was as delighted as she was stunned.

Then Andrew, an Antipodean physiotherapist who walks around the place in shorts, noticed that his right arm wasn’t working. Lots of scans revealed he’d had a minor stroke – and also that he has a touch of vascular dementia. The stroke had only seriously affected his right shoulder and elbow – he can still grip and he still has feeling in his arm. His ability speak and swallow was unaffected.

Because of what the year had already been like, The Other Half and I had planned a short break in Vienna for a combination of culture vulturey and Christmas markets, and a raft of people (including medical staff) insisted I go. Out of medical danger, he asked me to bring him back a CD of Strauss. Johan II, that is. Richard might be more to my liking, but The Waltz King is Dad’s favourite.

While I was away, a team rallied around to make sure he had regular visits and I returned with a six-CD set of Strauss by the incomparable Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Willi Boskovsky, plus a personal CD player and soft over-ear headphones so that he didn’t have to wait to go home to listen.

He lay in bed, air conducting.

The day I gave him these presents, I waited for over three hours to see a doctor. In the event, it was a physiotherapist who sat down with me to discuss the situation. Sure enough, Dad was going to need to have a bed downstairs at home, with a commode and other aids to help him. He would have lots of physio in the hospital before he went home, including being taught how to use some of these new aids, and then an intensive period of physio at home to help him adjust.

When occupational therapists visited his house to see the situation, they even told me that he would be taken into a kitchen before coming home to see how he could cope with, for instance, a toaster – would it be safe for him, given the dementia diagnosis? He was “top of the waiting list” to be transferred to the stroke ward and he would be home for Christmas.

They’d already told him all this too.

That was the last week of November. He never made it to the stroke ward. As far as I am aware, he made it to any kitchen either – and I have heard nothing to say whether or not he and a toaster are safe together.

He was discharged on 28 December. The 10 days beforehand had enjoyed all the tone of a Kafkaesque nightmare.

Having been told that he would ‘be home for Christmas’ he had focused so totally on that he was distraught.

He talked of throwing his Christmas dinner on the floor in protest at “The Bureaucrats” and how they were keeping him “In Prison”.

He has dementia, remember, and this just bolsters the conspiracy paranoia he’s enjoyed developing in recent years. Thanks, Daily Mail.

As quickly as possible, I had done a part-clearance on the house so that a bed could be brought downstairs – and here’s a chance to publicly thank Jacky from Carshalton Methodist Church for getting people around to do that shifting. I could not have done it on my own.

The process had revealed that my mother had been incapable of throwing anything away or of letting anyone help or move anything. There were empty biscuit tins under a dresser; a carrier bag of empty tablet bottles dating back to at least 2002 were stacked in a corner that was full of other carrier bags that were also stacked full of stuff. If any more floor space had been filled with bags, nobody would have been able to walk around the house at all. I spent my birthday up to my ankles in the mouse poop that was hiding beneath the endless, slowly-decaying bags, but it was done as quickly as I could get people to take away the furniture we needed to shift.

Then, just over a week before Christmas itself, a social worker rang me to see how things were going on. In conversation, it emerged that nobody from the hospital had bothered to contact social services about a care package and that she had simply rung up to get an update on the general situation.

Later that day, at the hospital, the occupational and physiotherapy teams panicked.

They told me that they couldn’t contact social services until all the new aids for him had been delivered to the house. But I had facilitated that at the earliest possible opportunity – and it still wouldn’t have been enough time.

They panicked.

They told me that care packages can be set up and put in place with 72 hours notice.

In an ideal world, perhaps – but not in the one that currently exists. As our own experience in April 2017 had shown and, indeed, as several people who work in the care industry have told me, this is not something that anyone would sensibly assume.

Two social workers have told me since that the 72 hours claim is nonsense and that even if a particular form can only be triggered by devices being delivered to a property, you talk to social services before that so that they can start the assessment process.

The occupational and physiotherapy teams continued to panic.

I’m afraid I got particularly ratty – I have been rather stressed of late, oddly enough – when a physio tried to blame nurses for not having sent a form to social services that they had (it was claimed) been told to send. A doctor told me that this was bollocks – that the form in question is sent by occupational therapy. A professional carer told me the same.

I managed a (surprisingly polite) sotto voce rant.

In the preceding weeks, Dad had been on wards where there was just a single nurse on duty at some points. He did not, from what I have been able to ascertain, receive therapy on a daily basis. He was shuffled between five different wards during his stay, including a final move on Christmas Day itself, when he was weeping and calling out to his dead wife that she should have taken him with her.

All those wards – yet not the stroke one we’d been told he was top of the waiting list for.

As I mentioned eaerlier, he got home just after Christmas. My niece had been down for the week to give me some respite, but she went home on New Year’s Eve.

In the early hours of New Year’s Day, trying to get from his bed to the commode, he fell and lay in his own shit for hours before a carer arrived. Fine whatever reason, his personal alarm didn’t trigger. He spent most of New Year’s Day in A&E before being sent home again.

The following day, he had home visits from two physios, plus a podiatrist. Everyone needed to go through chunks of his medical history each time for their own records. Thankfully, I was there, because he cannot remember everything or simply isn’t always aware of what would be relevant.

Today, he spent the day once more in A&E after a carer realised he was feeling rather poorly. He was dehydrated and probably has a viral infection.

Once again, the staff were fabulous.

Yet so stretched is the system that meals on wheels were not contacted, as they expect to be in such circumstances. They rang me direct concerned that he must have been taken to a different hospital.

There are recurring problems here.

One can ask why so much information has to be gathered so many different times. Is there really no central, complete record that can be accessed by any professional dealing with a patient?

Vast amounts of time are being wasted this way – and there is also the issue of someone such as my father not actually remembering all the correct answers, as happened the other day. If there was time, why not contact family – possibly by email – rather than ringing in the middle of a working day and expecting them to stop everything there and then?

It’s so chaotic that we have had one situation where the new ward he’d been moved to didn’t have any mention on his notes of the dementia diagnosis.

This, of course, requires administration – and we all know, because we have been repeatedly told, that there are too many ‘pen pushers’ in the health service and that they can easily be scrapped.

But that doesn’t make the paperwork go away. This is the paperwork – and if there’s no one to dedicatedly handle it, then it will either eat into the work time of medical staff … or get forgotten.

Communication falls into the same category. For instance, who contacts families to tell them a patient has been moved? In my experience over the past year – nobody.

Last April, when my father was in hospital following his heart attack, he was taken to another hospital for “a procedure”. Nobody told the family. We found out because my niece had come down from the north to visit him – and discovered that he wasn’t where he was supposed to be. I rang the hospital he’d been taken to, but every day for almost a week, I was told he was going to have the procedure that day and then be returned to the first hospital, only to later discover it had been put off until the following day. We could not organise visiting, because we had no idea where he was going to be at any given time.

This time around, Dad’s local pharmacy left a note at the house in November asking someone to contact them, since they hadn’t been able to deliver his medication.

I rang and, having explained the situation, was told that, when he was discharged, the hospital would let the pharmacy know about his medication so that they could organise and then deliver it. This was something else that slipped through the hospital’s net – and I was called by a physiotherapist and told that it was up to me to sort it out. The pharmacy were able to get the new prescription filled and then deliver it to the house – but they had not been notified as they should have been and had had to chase down his GP.

When Dad was admitted to hospital in November, I took a wallet in for him, with a little cash, a note of telephone numbers for close family, a few family snaps and a small prayer on a laminated card that had a tiny cross on it.

On his move to the high dependency unit, it got mislaid. I have asked about it several times – and been back to the original ward too, where details were noted down. I’ve heard nothing. But when staff hardly have the time to do their basic work – I have witnessed nurses almost running around to get key tasks done – how are they supposed to find the time to deal with things like this?

For the avoidance of any doubt: the staff I have dealt with and seen in action have been incredible – patient, caring and utterly committed to the task in front of them.

And my thanks not just to them, but also to the support team – so often forgotten. During his stay, it really helped my father when, for instance, whoever was on the tea trolley remembered him and how he liked his tea, and tried to make sure he got biscuits instead of cake.

Everyone knows the NHS is woefully understaffed and that it’s getting worse. But what I’ve attempted to do here is list here is a series of issues that relate not only to staffing levels – but also to administration.

Too many administrators in the NHS?

No. Not nearly enough.

And the idea that administration is somehow just meaningless ‘stuff’ that will disappear if there is nobody to do it is nothing other than a fantasy that is totally removed from reality.

I very much doubt that this is a unique set of circumstances that add to the difficulties currently facing the NHS. I do not, for one moment, think that what I’ve touched on here is unique to St Helier – and nor do I blame the hospital for what has happened, though it has been incredibly frustrating and has added to stress levels.

But that is why, rather than making a complaint to the hospital in question, I have decided that it is more important to put this in the public domain, where it can add to the swell of evidence on the current state of our health service and to the public debate about what sort of a health service we want and how we get that.

Please feel free to add any experiences of your own below and to pass this post on.