Going to the seaside

I have fond memories of going to the seaside when I was a kid. These were day trips at the weekend. Mum’d prepare a picnic and steaming hot flasks of tea, pack spades and pails, blow up rings, travel blankets and large towels, and we'd all pile into a car and head for the coast. Prestwick or Ayr were the usual destinations involving a drive through the countryside over the Eaglesham Road. These days there’s a motorway all the way there if you go via Glasgow. But in those days the only way to go was over the moors to the coast. There was always great excitement in the car on route. Who would see the sea first? There is a long straight road and you come over a hill and there is the sea in all its glory. “There’s the sea,” we’d all scream from the back of the car. We only actually lived about an hour away from the sea but in those days it seemed to be an expedition to go on these trips. Now,  I do not remember the cold. But it must have been freezing.  I do remember running around in a swimsuit in and out of the sea (in Scotland??) with my brothers. And racing over the dunes, building sandcastles with moats, watching the holes fill up with water and then disappear and then refill with another wave. And when it must have been too cold even for us hardened Scots, we just ran about in the sand fully clothed,  collecting shells, getting our shoes wet when we didn’t run away from the waves fast enough and poking about in the rock pools to see what we could find.  

Food and drink always tasted so much better by the sea. We would have ham sandwiches (before I became vegetarian),  juicy salmon sandwiches with lots of mayonnaise, and lots of tea to warm us up. We’d even have hot Heinz tomato soup sometimes. In fact I can remember fighting with the windbreak to keep it upright as we all huddled behind it protected from the cold gales drinking tomato soup out of mugs. This was summer in Scotland.

These days though in Sri Lanka I am far away from the west coast of Scotland. We still go to the seaside.  I’m fortunate enough to have ‘a seaside’ at the bottom of the road from the house in Unawatuna. The beach there is one of the best in the world. We don’t though spend a lot of time on it because of the difficulty of walking on the sand. We do though spend time at the beach restaurants and will sometimes walk down the road and sit on the beach at sunset, then phone for Chaminda to come  and pick us up in the tuk tuk as the hill back up is a bit of a challenge.  

Where we do go most weekends is the Fortress. This is a lovely hotel in Koggala about a ten minute drive from my house in Unawatuna. It is right on the coast. Turtles come in to the shallow waters caused by the reef in front of the hotel.  It has large grounds and even when it is full it nearly feels that full. There is always plenty of space for everyone. There is a 50 metre pool which must be one of the best in the country for swimming.  And you often have it all to yourself. The pool boys can organise a shady space for me and mum either poolside or under the trees. I can swim and read and mum can watch the ships out at sea, the squirrels racing around,  and the people and their antics or she can doze on the lounger. Lunches are good. We share margarita pizza cooked in their pizza oven which is great. Or if we are just there for the afternoon then she has pots of tea and I have ginger beer.  She gets looked after. The pool boys and the waiters spoil her. She is probably the oldest person in the place and the only one to keep her clothes on.  We do tours of the grounds to keep up her walking.  When I am swimming they check on her periodically.  When I have visitors I always ask permission to bring them to the hotel. We are members and it’s not a hotel where you can sign people in or buy pool tickets.  They have always let me bring people in. We spend days there and have lunch and she can feel part of a larger family. The pre-dementia her would have loved the place and been really impressed by its grandeur.  As it is, she just likes the peace and quiet by the waves and the tankers in the distance. It’s not picnics at Prestwick but it suits the pair of us at the moment.

A Way with Words

 

Mum was a master crossword solver. The books tell you that crossword puzzles and other word and number games help stave off alzheimers.  Perhaps if mum hadn’t been such an avid crossword addict she would have succumbed to alzheimers earlier than she did. When she retired  her day would start with the crossword. She might finish it quickly in which case there were other word games and Sudoku in the same newspaper; or you might find her at midday still puzzling over one of the clues surrounded by thesaurus, dictionary and encyclopaedia.  She always got there in the end .

And even when she first arrived in Sri Lanka  and I was doing crossword puzzles by the beach, she could still have a go and get the odd one or two. These days though she doesn’t try.   Working in the field of English language teaching I am on one level professionally interested in what is happening to her language. On a personal level it is very sad. She always had a range and depth of vocabulary to be envied. These days though there are a lot of signs that her language ability is not just diminishing but disappearing.

Every three months she has an appointment with the neurologist,  a calm Indian gentleman with a lovely friendly manner. We visited him last week. He tests her memory .  Her visual ability is fine. She can still copy diagrams quite successfully.  Reality is a puzzle though. She has no clue as to day,  month or time.  Thankfully he didn’t ask her where she was as I’m sure she would have said Wishaw or Edinburgh.  She scored really badly on two areas: naming things in a group and remembering  4 simple words 5 minutes after being given them. Asked to name as many animals as she could in a minute, with serious prompting she managed cat and dog.  Remembering  4 words even when she had said them a few times with the neurologist was almost impossible. Even with serious prompting she only got 1 out of 4.

She loves language; but increasingly she has issues.  She forgets the names of things; so squirrels become wriggly things; the BBC news on tv becomes the newspaper;  sky and sea become blue stuff. Things that have specific names become  generic, collective or more high frequency things. For example, lorries become cars, glasses , cups.  Pool and pond become confused. “Were you in that pond?” She says of the Fortress pool.  She is losing pronoun use. This manifests itself in gender confusion where kids are concerned. Himashi down south who is a little three year old girl, is invariably talked about as “he”. Arran, the baby in Colombo, is mostly referred to as “she”.  I suppose it’s not a surprise as neither of them really wear gender specific clothes. Himashi prefers to run about in as little as possible – although when going out visiting with the family can be clearly seen in a dress. Arran is usually in a one piece. So perhaps the pronoun confusion is understandable.

She is though almost desperately hanging on to language and she still gets enjoyment out of it. She names things all the time.  “’Flying fish,” she declares at the start of the drive south last Friday. I’m not sure how I am meant to reply to that. She had seen it on a shop. “Cow” she’ll exclaim as one crosses the road in front of us. “Dog,” as one is spotted in the middle of the highway. This usually produces a conversation of “Dead dog?”, (referring to a time when there were lots of dead dogs on the highway), “No, I think it’s sleeping.”  “Don’t drive down the hole,” she says quite a lot. This refers to the drainage ditches alongside most roads in Sri Lanka.  “Caravan – that’s not a caravan,” she says, referring to the brand name of the van in front of us. She reads everything, the ticker tape across  the BBC news, TV programme names at the bottom of the tv screen (though she has no hope of following the actual programme) , the Ceylinco Insurance sign on top of a building outside the apartment window in Colombo, any and all shops signs, license numbers of vehicles in front of us she takes particular delight in reciting especially if they have double numbers, the places on the buses (that can be tricky – Ambalangoda, Karapitiya -  but she’ll have a go). Her ability to read certainly is not deteriorating. Her ability to remember and use language accurately certainly is.

Shoes or Slippers

At this late stage in my life finding myself in charge of clothing another person is to be honest a bit of a burden. I’ve never been fussed about clothes. As long as they were comfortable that was fine.  And I’ve never been responsible for another person’s clothes. Now I am.

When mum was a teenager her Aunt Ann made her clothes and she was always immaculate in lovely dresses for her tennis match teas and her Scottish country dancing. I’ve seen the photos.   She refused for years to throw away gowns and other untouched clothes until me and my friend Anne took her in hand one day and went through her wardrobe (cos you couldn’t find anything in it and couldn’t get anything else in it) and threw out anything that she hadn’t worn in the last 10 years and wasn’t likely to wear.  By that stage in the Alzheimer’s she was ok with it.

Clothes have a special significance for mum. When she was sectioned in hospital they took away all her clothes and only brought out for her what she had to wear that day. All her clothes were locked away in a walk-in-cupboard in another part of the hospital. The reason for this was to prevent her from walking out of the hospital.  The rationale being that if she didn’t have outside shoes and a coat she wouldn’t walk out of the main door. Needless to say it didn’t work. The main door was meant to be locked; but if you waited long enough someone would open it and it didn’t close very quickly. Also the nurses would sneak out to have a smoke leaving another door open.  With nothing else to do all day mum must have just watched the doors.  She could frequently be found wandering in the grounds or the car park or trying to get into other wards. Her piece de resistance was when she had got out, walked all the way in her slippers and jumper over to a friend’s house on the other side of the town -a good one hour walk. Her friend was most perturbed to see her and phoned my friend who used to take her up to the hospital to visit her and asked her why Chris was there. Had she been let out? My friend told her to keep her there, phoned the hospital (nobody had noticed she had gone missing) and rushed over in her car to pick her up and return her to the hospital.

So the point is she doesn’t like being separated from her clothes. She has to know where they are and where they are going. This makes washing them a bit tricky and means she likes to keep them on if she can.  She is also always saying that she has no clothes. A quick pull out of the drawers in Colombo or a pointing to the clothes rack down south alleviates this concern.  She packs constantly. (In fact she has to be watched when out at restaurants as the napkins frequently end up neatly packed and shoved into her bag.) She only has a small Barefoot cloth bag but she manages to squeeze into it her nightie, a t shirt, her hankies, her comb, cards from her friends and family, and her purse containing lots of Sri Lankan coins. ‘The bag’ itself must never be lost. It goes everywhere with her. Since she continually puts it places and then forgets where she’s put it, hours are spent searching for ‘the bag’. On one level this attention to her clothes is a reaction against the hospital experience; on another level they are one of the few things that are actually hers here. She has some photographs but her house has been rented and her furniture now is in my flat. So clothes are precious.

Getting dressed is a challenge for both of us.  I wash and dress her.  Her trousers have to be turned down just so. I presume this was because at one point in the not so distant past a pair of trousers were too long and so she just turned them over at the top rather than turned up a hem on them.  Now all  of them have to be turned down regardless of their length. Trousers must have pockets for her innumerable bits of tissues. If they don’t, tissues will be found secreted about her person. And when going to bed, she calls nighties “ridiculous things!” and exclaims “Is that another one from Robert?” My brother brought over quite a few the last time he came. Socks must be whipped off quickly before she realizes they have gone.  Finding trousers for her to wear is a definite challenge. She has worn out the seat in a few because getting the right ones is difficult. They must be beige, brown or grey, elastic waisted (no buttons or clasps) and have pockets.  Also because we are in Sri Lanka they must be light weight.

 “Slippers” and “shoes” cause endless confusion.  She never understands why she has to wear one to go outside and one to stay inside.  Or why she has to keep changing them. I do try to remember to check before we go anywhere.  But it doesn’t always work.  At one point I only noticed that she still had her slippers on when we arrived at the restaurant on the beach – too late to do anything about it. Luckily it was dark and nobody noticed. Once though when we left the house in the car to go to the Fortress, we had to turn back because she had on her slippers, not her shoes.  It was broad daylight and someone would have noticed.  They are most definitely slipper looking – Marks and Spencer style.

I have tried to simplify the whole clothes scenario by keeping some clothes in Colombo and some in Unawatuna. And this works to an extent. However her habit of stuffing her bag with clothes has meant that tops that should be down south end up in Colombo and vice versa.  It continues to be a challenge.