The Mess

My mum is quiet now as we pass the house on the corner of the hill up to my house down south.  When she first came she used to proclaim in an exasperated tone as we passed the house, “What a mess! They need to clean that garden.” Recently this statement had been truncated to, “Mess,” with still an element of disgust.  Now though she is quiet.  Both she and the garden have changed; she very gradually, the garden rather dramatically. The garden which covers a fair amount of ground, was overgrown for years and seemed to be the dumping ground for all sorts of garbage. Every so often someone would cut back the bushes and trees that began to block the lane but that was as much as I had ever known anyone to do. As well as being on the corner of my lane, the house has the additional personal significance of being the one that my car ended up in the back of during the tsunami. When we got round to looking inside it we discovered the petrol had been stolen and all the documents in it had disappeared.

On the way home from dinner last weekend Whisky Galore flashed into my mind. Whisky Galore is a film I remember from years ago. Classic Scottish true story of a ship that goes aground off the coast of a small Scottish island. The locals quickly learn of its whisky cargo, but since it is a Sunday and therefore not a working day, they must wait till midnight before they can set to sea and secure the goods without exposing themselves to the increasingly suspicious local customs officer. They eventually get the goods and hide bottles and whisky everywhere round the island while the customs officer does his best to track it down.

What made me think of Whisky Galore coming home from dinner the other night? Well, Sri Lankans seem to share a particularly Scottish characteristic of never looking a gift horse in the mouth and exploiting situations to their own advantage. An example of this from tsunami days took place in a tsunami camp, lots of which had sprung up everywhere inland from the coast. The tsunami attracted thousands of very young foreign volunteers on ‘gap’ years. Some genuinely wanted to ‘do good’; others just loved the beaches and the night life. One group of young ladies in their late teens got some voluntary work building tents in the camps. They would turn up every morning at one camp and get to work in their short shorts and multi coloured vests and build the tents. Along the wall watching them sat numerous local lads. The ladies were amazed that every morning the tents would be flat on the ground again. And so they would build again.  How the lads loved the show! I don’t know how long it took the ladies to realize the tents were being taken down every morning by the lads before they arrived because the show was just too good.

Anyway to get back to the house on the corner.  This particular weekend I had watched as every time I drove past the house on the corner, the garden was becoming more and more under control, constant fires were lit of rubbish, and the ground appeared from a place where I had never seen it before. Maybe someone had bought the property. Maybe someone was thinking of selling the property. Maybe the uncle who owned the house and was working in Dubai was coming back. There was so much activity. Clearly, something was up.

I don’t know if you are familiar with the series Good Karma Hospital, a British TV series shown on ITV recently. Despite the series claiming to be set in south India, it was actually filmed mostly in Unawatuna.  It uses the local teacher training college as the venue for the hospital exterior scenes.  The local college got a beautiful coat of white paint in return. They are about to start the filming of series two. Recently friends of mine who have a guest house down the road agreed to rent the whole house to people working on the series for a few months. Their guest house doesn’t have parking so a deal was struck that the house on the corner would clear their land and provide parking for the inhabitants of the guest house, no doubt at a small cost.

Water Water Everywhere....

 “Water…. Water…. Water…. Water….”my mum continually exclaimed relatively excitedly (for her), as we proceeded south in our tiny Maruti Suzuki along the expressway on Friday afternoon heading to Unawatuna for the weekend. The highway, usually surrounded by lush paddy fields and trees of all kinds, had turned into a causeway. My mum’s language is now rather limited and very often inaccurate but that day she was 100% correct! And as the water continued and we continued along the causeway, I started to think about foundations. The previous week in Wellawatta in Colombo an apartment building in the late stages of construction had collapsed injuring quite a few. I started to wonder about whether the road construction workers had put a lot of effort into getting the right mix for the foundations. I tried to forget about the stories at the time of the road construction of people stealing the materials for the highway in the night and replacing them with cheaper ones or not replacing them at all. But that’s me. I worry. In the end we made it safely to Unawatuna. No storms, no flooding. All fine.

Saturday I tried to get to Matara to visit a friend for dinner. Got to the turning onto the road for the highway and read the signage, “ Rahula junction closed because of flooding.” Was pleased with the correct English (not always the case in these signs). Not pleased with the message. You could get to Matara on the highway but you couldn’t get from the exit to Matara town because the road was flooded. So that put a stop to that. The next day tried to get back to Colombo on the highway. Got as far as Aluthgama – halfway – then all vehicles had to exit. I asked the toll guy if the road between the exit and Aluthgama town was ok. He must have been asked this in various languages all morning by everyone coming off the highway. But he had kept his sense of humour. ‘Yes yes’ he said emphatically and ‘you can swim, no?’ I thought but didn’t say, “Well I possibly can but I don’t think my 89 year old mother with dementia has a hope in hell of swimming anywhere never mind in a flood.” Despite my dad’s best efforts to teach her over the years she never really got beyond a breadth of the local baths. Not a water lover my mother at the best of times. We eventually got back to Colombo – it just took a bit longer.

Over 500,000 affected by the flooding. Over 200 dead and 100 still missing. Sri Lanka doesn’t have much luck with water. 

Thoughts from the Jambu Tree

Thoughts from the Jambu Tree (or how to maintain sanity in 2017)

There’s not often you get a distinctly bad year. In recent history some stand out. 1845 saw the start of the Irish potato famine. 1914 and 1939 brought years of war.  1918 was the flu pandemic, 1859 the Chinese famine, 1981 the African drought, 1995 the North Korean famine and floods, 2004 the South Asian tsunami.  2016 was a particularly bad year. I think most people would agree. Perhaps not in the scale of the above so far, but certainly the signs are there. In politics we had Brexit and Donald Trump. Celebrities died in droves  – David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Terry Wogan, Prince, Muhammad Ali, Gene Wilder, Jean Alexander, Ronnie Corbett, Carrie Fisher and her mum and George Michael to name a few.  Terrorists were getting more impactful in the West – the Nice attack, the Istanbul airport attack, the Brussels attack. Natural disasters were making the news – Hurricane Matthew, the Zika virus. The refugee crisis was getting worse every month.  2016 is never going to go down in history as a cheery year. Too many omens point to it continuing.

By December 2016 I had had a number of reactions to this (1) go into hiding – a caravan in the wilds of Scotland with a small dog, an electric heater, lots of good fiction, quality DVDs and a supply of cider  – still a very strong pull; (2) buy a gun or lots of drugs, lock the door, curl into a small ball and end it all – another statistic for 2017; (3) go with the flow, believe Brexit will bring prosperity (especially for Scotland), nod when Sean Spicer, Trump’s White House press secretary, states Hitler did not use chemical weapons, cheer when the US boasts about firing missiles at Syria and dropping the biggest non-nuclear bomb on Afghanistan – that would require a complete brain transplant; (4) embrace the day when the Orwellian 1984 is complete, the Ministry of Truth and Love take over and Newspeak is the new norm – not that far off ; or (5) search for, identify, note down and focus on the things that still make life worth living – even if it may not be for very long. 

For those of you who know me, I am not a renowned optimist. I am, being Scottish, a realist. A cynic and pessimist by default.  Before I resign myself to the caravan in the wilds with the small dog, I have to have a go at number 5. Is it possible to change from a negative pessimist to a positive optimist? Or at least move the dial more from one to the other.  The question often is, “Are you cup half full or cup half empty?’ Being a realist and interested in the concept of and capacity for change (be it personal, institutional, national or global), I claim to be neither. I would rather see myself as the person with the jug of water next to the cup.

When I was about 19 I used to say ‘amazing’ all the time. Everything was ‘amazing’. The park was ‘amazing’, the food was ‘amazing’, the outfit was ‘amazing’, the joke was ‘amazing’. Everything was just ‘amazing’. And I meant it. I was constantly amazed by everything and this was when I was pickling gherkins in a factory in Lubeck in Germany wearing huge blue mechanic style overalls and ginormous green wellies and at one point had the worst ever toothache so there was nothing inherently amazing about my average day! I just had a positive outlook.

Where did that go? How did I become a person who, despite living in one of the most beautiful countries in the world, can only see the black side to everything? What happened? From an external point of view, I have not suffered great hardships, I have my health. I am working, I have a lovely apartment and house. There is no logical reason for me not to be upbeat and if not see everything as amazing, at least see some potential in it. Now you can blame the outside world, you can blame people around you, or you can just accept that you do, as an individual, actually have some power and responsibility to change.

I started this blog in 2012 when I first brought my mum, who has Alzheimer’s, out to Sri Lanka to live with me. It helped me to come to terms with the changes in her and in our relationship and helped me to cope. She is still with me, oblivious to the challenges and complexities in today’s world. She has enough of her own. Her comments though are often hilarious, sound and perceptive, although unconsciously so.  She is still with me and will be drawn on for commentary relevant or not in future blogs. I would like this blog now to help me do (5) and explore  being the person who can fill the cup.

Whose reality is it anyway?

My mum used to be one of the most practical, down to earth people I knew. She now lives in a completely different world to the rest of us. This manifests itself in many different ways. At a very basic everyday level she is completely baffled as to the whereabouts of toilets. She will ask quietly, “Is there a toilet I can use here?” This happens in both the flat and the house we have been living in for two years now.  Once pointed in the right direction, she is fine.  That is her reality. 

The TV and the DVD merge in her world in rather bizarre ways.  She has no clue about their differences.  Despite carrying around the DVD South Pacific in her bag everywhere, when I ask her if she wants to watch it, she will invariably say, “Oh, is it on the TV now?” The sailors in HMS Pinafore, which she watches on DVD as she loves the music of Gilbert and Sullivan, reappear a day later when she spots a tanker out at sea in Galle and remarks, “Oh that’ll be where the men sing and dance at night.”  

If characters on TV can be transferred to the real world, it also works the other way round.  The sprawling mansion and grounds of the family house in the series Revenge becomes the Fortress. “There’s that place we go,” she exclaims when she sees it on TV.  When Wimbledon was on last summer, there was a clip of the Queen at a previous event shown repeatedly throughout the week of tennis.  This was proof to my mum that the Queen was in attendance throughout the tournament.  She always remarks on how well my Aunt Margaret (in reality someone who looks like her)  looks  in the audience of one of the Viennese Andre Rieu concert’s  even though part of her knows she passed away a while back.  

Then there’s confusion of place and time. The outskirts of Colombo are pretty consistently Motherwell and Wishaw. She often wants to get on a bus and go and see Flora in Edinburgh.  All high apartment blocks are the JAIC Hilton which I went up one day for a work meeting. This obviously impressed her as she comments on them all by asking me if I was up that one.  Then there’s the neon sign that you can see from my apartment window in the evening. It says “Pearl Hotel”. She remarks, “Oh that’s that garage over there.” This confuses me because I’m not aware she has ever lived anywhere where you could see a garage from the window and certainly not one called the Pearl Hotel.  Then there’s the ‘tennis courts’ in Galle Fort. Every time we are in Galle Fort she will remark on how we are about to see the tennis courts where people play. She is right in that they do look like they have been tennis courts at some point in their history but never have I seen anyone actually playing there. 

Then there’s the things she sees but I just don’t. In the morning we look out over the balcony in Colombo and I see a few buildings, the sea and the some birds soaring over the trees. My mum sees a classroom of children on a rooftop being taught, she presumes, by (these days) two men in black. There was only one for a time but now there seems to be two. She worries about the kids when it rains. The only thing I can see that could remotely be interpreted in this way is a rooftop with a couple of large black water tanks and the tops of some smaller ones.  When we are down south just off the highway and facing the sea just before turning left for Unawatuna, she invariably sees three boats on the horizon regardless of how many boats there actually are. These are three rock formations to the right. This prompted me when she first came over to get her eyes tested but even with the right glasses she still sees the three rocks as boats.

Then there’s her possessiveness, her insecurity and paranoia. A napkin in a restaurant belongs to her, not the restaurant. We now have quite a collection.  Her bag is a constant source of worry as are her watch and glasses. They must never be left anywhere unsafe. This translates into anywhere that is not on her body or in her bag. Everyone (even when nobody is anywhere near) wants to steal her bag, glasses and watch. They must be protected at all costs and hidden frequently.  Even when she is going for a shower every morning, the glasses and watch must be placed hidden on her bed side cabinet just in case someone steals them. I have given up telling her there is no one else in the apartment apart from us. Then of course she does not remember where she put them and then they do become lost (or stolen in her reality).  

It’s a bit of a steep learning curve. You need to know which reality you are in to keep up with her. Otherwise you could get dreadfully confused.

Lost and Found

When I was growing up I don’t remember hiding things. The only time I remember things being hidden was at Christmas when mum (and dad when he was there) would hide the Christmas presents somewhere in the house.  Either because I spent a long time sharing a room with my mum or because I was naturally curious, I would invariably be the one to find the presents long before Christmas. I don’t ever remember believing in Santa though I guess I must have done at some point.  I never really got the point of leaving sherry and shortbread out for him on Christmas Eve.  My brothers would sometimes take to hiding things from each other, but I don’t remember doing it at all.

Now I live in a world of continually vanishing things which later turn up in the most unexpected places.  Why? I share an apartment with a toddler and an octagenerian with dementia.  The toddler is less problematic than the octagenerian. This is because he is fairly predictable.  Although saying that as he gets bigger his range of possible targets expands.  I’ve given up having an apartment with everything in its place. I did try for a while but I surrender to the endless energy and tenacity of the toddler.  Now all low tables are bare, reachable shelves are empty, plant pots are up high, the dining room table has nothing near the edge, the bin is on the kitchen top, my car keys and sunglasses no longer live on the chair by the door, and the plungers are no longer on the floor but on a shelf in the bathroom. When I can’t find something, I look up high for it. This works only if the little person has been the cause of the item’s disappearance.

The octagenerian is more difficult to predict.  Things vanish either due to her ‘packing’ mania or because she is ‘tidying up’. Some things are easy to find though. Her green cloth bag (that goes everywhere with her) ends up with the strangest of contents.  The cloth bag is the first place to look for a missing item.  Packs of cards, TV remotes, nighties, socks, t-shirts, slippers, pens, wrapped up pieces of cake, hotel napkins, tissues, money, keys, letters and cards all end up in the bag. If the item is not in the bag then the drawers in her room are the second most likely hiding place. Scissors, packs of cards, shoes, cakes, coasters, toothbrushes, all end up hidden in the bottom of the drawers.  Sometimes though it takes ages to find things. Shamalee and myself will search high and low for something that was there an hour or so before.  It might turn up under the mattress (which is pretty difficult to move), under the cushions on the couch, in the bin, or in a kitchen drawer or it might never turn up at all.

The result of all this is that you need to have safe places for essential items that neither the toddler nor the octagenerian can reach or see.  One pack of cards has disappeared completely; the other now lives on top of the bookshelf. Remotes move hiding place frequently. Keys live with the cards.  Another result is that you always need to check out what is in the green bag. You never know what you might find! This is difficult to do though as she is never without it and rummaging through it in front of her would be a definite 'no no'.  

These days I can usually take the knowledge of the missing items in my stride. But sometimes when you’ve had a crappy day the last thing you need is to discover you can’t find the TV remote when you come in.  Asking her produces no satisfactory response. She will claim no knowledge of the item – which is true in her world as her short term memory barely functions.  Then begins the usual frustrating search round the apartment for the missing item – sometimes found; sometimes not.

The Pond

We moved a lot when I was growing up. But we were always near to water, whether it was the River Calder in Tannochside, the River Clyde in Bothwell or the loch at Strathclyde Park. Me and the boys went to one of the many primary schools we attended in Tannochside where my mum was also a teacher.  We stayed in a scheme across from the River Calder. I remember being sent out to play with the other kids in the neighbourhood and ending up down at the river’s edge playing on the rope swing, scrambling across a tree trunk which had fallen across the river and become a challenging bridge, or chasing after each other in the mud on the banks of the river.  I can’t imagine kids these days being allowed to do the things we did.

I had a Cindy doll complete with wardrobe and boyfriend who instead of getting all dressed up in outfits to go out with the boyfriend, turned her wardrobe into a jeep and went shooting down the river bank getting caked in mud in the process. She enjoyed all sorts of adventures!  My mum coped with all the mud and the eternal washing of mucky kids, dolls and clothes (this was pre automatic washing machines), and was ready with refreshments (diluting orange and sausage rolls) before chucking us out of doors and back to the river. My memories of those days are all sunny and warm though the mud and the geography would suggest otherwise.

These days my main stretches of water are the sea and the pond. The pond provides a mini stage for all sorts of drama and stunning beauty.  It is right next to the porch in the house down south so provides a natural television when you are sitting have your meals. It is small but teeming with all sorts of wildlife and attractive to all sorts of other wildlife.  It’s one of the best birthday presents I’ve ever had.

Like the regular appearance of the monkeys, mum takes the pond drama in her stride.  We’ve had a baby mongoose who got into the garden, was chased by the three dogs and was so traumatised that it panicked, ran straight into the pond and drowned.  We have a water snake who during times of drought adopts the pond as its home and freaks out everyone in the vicinity.  Mum watches oblivious to danger.  Then we have the sneaky birds. The kingfisher who sits on the gate or the tree overlooking the pond then swoops down in a flash of blue and scoops up an innocent fish and swallows it. A wading bird appeared one day. We sat and watched while the bird stood on the side of the pond, seemingly mesmerised by the water, gracefully stretched out its neck into the pond and picked out a fish. It then flew onto the wall and swallowed it whole.  Mum was put on lookout to scare that one away; to no avail. She forgot the instruction and just sat and watched as one fish after another got eaten.  

Then there’s the frogs! They were the bane of my life for over a year.  I tried all sorts to keep them out of the house. The living room window was covered by mesh half way. I watched as one frog lept over the mesh. I put the mesh higher; the frog climbed up the mesh and then over.  When the mesh went higher still they came in the front or back doors.  I had to install cupboards in the kitchen as I kept finding them in the back on the shelves with the pots behind the curtains. These days there is one that has taken to sleeping behind the trunk that the TV sits on. Mum watches TV and tells me of ‘the thing’ that is crossing the floor. She can’t always remember the word ‘frog’.  Nothing bothers her though – which is just as well.

She loves the beautiful water lilies in the pond. She watches them opening and closing. She anticipates the emergence of others.  She is perplexed when they are not there at the end of the day.  It’s not exactly the River Calder or Clyde or any of the Scottish lochs but it does have its own drama and charm and you don’t have to go anywhere to appreciate it.

 

Locks

Mum is a bit paranoid about doors.  She doesn’t like doors left open at night so she is not too happy down south when the outside door is left open in the evening to allow the cool area to circulate. There are three dogs (one looks like a scary alsation who of course isn’t) so if a stranger was to come into the garden and up the path, you would certainly know about it.

 

Towards the end of her stay in her own house in Scotland she had an extremely complicated way of locking the front door at night which involved numerous elastic bands and 4 separate locks (it was so complicated I worried about being able to get out quickly in a fire when I stayed there – especially when I was on crutches!)  This was because of ‘the boys’. She had a thing about ‘the boys’ breaking into her house, stealing from her and using her shower. (‘The boys’ was the term she used to use for my brothers when they were small but these boys were not my brothers).  

She would get herself into a state because she had to cook for ‘the boys’. She frequently called the local police to report ‘the boys’ banging on her door or wandering around the house. The police would dutifully come out, visit, check the premises and declare there to be no boys in the neighbourhood.  One time the police arrived and she had the gas rings on the cooker all on because she was cooking for ‘the boys’.  Consequently social work came and did something to the cooker so that she couldn’t operate it. The police must have got a bit fed up of being called out. This figment of her imagination was one of the symptoms of her Alzheimer’s.

The outside door in the apartment in Colombo needs to be locked (and the key hidden) to prevent mum’s escape if she is in one of those moods. The internal doors though definitely do not need to be locked. The problem with them is that if mum locks them there is no guarantee she can unlock them so in the flat Shamalee has stuffed most of the locks with wads of paper to prevent the locks working.  Unfortunately mum’s bedroom door slammed the other day because the balcony door in the bedroom was open and there was a gale blowing.  After this, the handle turned on the door but the snib did not react. It just stayed put.

This happened in the afternoon. By evening I had completely forgotten about it. I put mum to bed and went to watch some comedy on the TV. She got up to check I was still in the apartment and then went back to bed. I pulled the door to and instead of it being a bit stiff and stopping before it shut, like it usually did, it just pulled shut. Then of course I tried to open it. And then I remembered what had happened in the afternoon.  The handle just turned and nothing happened. 

I didn’t want to make a big deal of it as if she had realised she was locked in a room and I couldn’t open the door, she could have panicked.  Luckily I have a very understanding and practical landlord. He answered the phone on his road home from work and he must have heard the panic in my voice. He said he would go home, get his toolbox and come right over. By the time he came over an hour later I was a nervous wreck and mum was fast asleep. I had managed to remove two screws from the top of the handle but couldn’t budge the one at the bottom.  He and his helper managed to get the handle off easily. But they still couldn’t open the door. He fiddled about inside the lock and pulled out lots of little bits of it – it was all smashed inside – eventually the door opened.  Mum woke up to find me and two strange men in her bedroom taking the lock and handle off the door. She asked what we were doing, I told her, and she went back to sleep.  She now has neither lock nor handle on that door.

Strangely, when we came south that weekend and I went to give her a shower, I pushed her bedroom door shut – it is usually very stiff to close. It shut too and locked and I couldn’t get it open from the inside. Luckily someone was in the house and could get it opened from the outside.

I’m now waiting to lock her in the car as these things do tend to happen in threes.