Remember my old mate Bert? He was 87 years old on November 24th. Of course he had a fall in his house back in early July and was then in hospital for almost a month. He had broken his hip - an injury which required surgery.
For four and a half months Bert has been housebound. He has a walking frame and he cannot get upstairs. His bedroom is now in the front room of his terraced house and he uses a commode for his daily "discharges". Fortunately, his 55 year old son Philip is able to act as his live-in carer.
However, Philip is a football safety steward and every two weeks he spends five hours at Sheffield United's football ground - Bramall Lane. He was there today as United were playing Brentford in a Premier League fixture. I knew that Bert would be on his own all afternoon so I went over to see him and stayed in his house for a couple of hours.
I was able to make him a mug of coffee and a snack. I had also brought over a couple of bottles of beer for him, a banana, a chocolate roll and a bag of cheese and onion crisps (American: chips).
Bert's house
He finds it very difficult to use the TV remote even though his son has helpfully made a big drawing of it with arrows pointing to the vital buttons. I played around with it and was able to get "YouTube" on screen. Then I searched for a couple of Bert's favourite songs that he used to sing in our local pub.
I was able to locate "Whispering Grass" by The Ink Spots, "We'll Meet Again" by Vera Lynn and his most favourite of favourites - "Hev Yew Gotta Loight, Boy?" by Allan Smethurst - a.k.a. The Singing Postman.
It's a novelty song that was a hit in this country in 1966. Sung in a Norfolk dialect, it concerns a relationship in which the need to light cigarettes seemed to be ever-present. The object of the postman's affections was one Molly Windley, his "little nicotine girl". It's got to be one of the weirdest songs ever by one of the most unlikely pop stars and if you are not English you may struggle to understand it. But it's a song that always brightened Bert's face.
I left him after five o' clock watching "Crocodile Dundee" but here's "Hev Yew Gotta Loight, Boy?" Don't have nightmares.
Stewart prepared a special Easter Sunday dinner. The Lamb of God was on the menu with roasted potatoes, Yorkshire puddings, leeks, carrots, parsnips and peas. For dessert, Shirley had followed the vegan sticky toffee pudding recipe in the first "Bosh!" cook book and all was good. Earlier there had been an Easter egg hunt for the little ones and then we all went off to a Sheffield museum that I had not visited in many years - The Emergency Services Museum at West Bar. Greatly improved and still run by volunteers, it was a perfect excursion for all of us and we finished up in the museum's little cafe enjoying a light lunch. We had seen police cars, ambulances, fire engines and even a redundant lifeboat called "City of Sheffield". We all enjoyed the visit. As you might imagine, I will be coming back to this museum in a future post. On the way there, the roads had been blocked off near Sheffield Children's Hospital as 750 motorcyclists arrived at Weston P...
The view from Simon's back yard. It takes an hour and a half to travel to the village where I was born and raised. Today, Shirley came with me and saw my brother Simon for the first time since August 2019. As a nurse for more than forty years, she was not daunted by his changed appearance. With the cancer and everything he has become a bag of bones. So painfully thin - like a malnourished prisoner working on the Burma railway under Japanese supervision. Wasting away. We stayed all afternoon. Shirley had his washing machine on and we changed his bedding. I had bought a new fitted sheet, duvet cover and pillowcases from Tesco. Shirley said that his old bedding was "disgusting". We brought tins of mushroom soup and cans of "Fanta" and "Coke" and some pots of chocolate mousse plus a couple of pints of milk. They were received with zero gratitude. In fact, he insisted that six cans of soup was far too many. I encouraged him to have a bath while...
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