claytoncast

So we finally made it. Mum's 90th birthday. I've been planning a surprise party for about the last five or six months. It's taken quite a bit of cunning and skill to get all the people I needed to be in one room on one night in November……….. in Rotherham! And yet we managed it. I drove up on Friday to check into the hotel, Rotherham's finest, and find out what our suite was like. Of course when I say Rotherham's finest, as Rich pointed out on Twitter last week, that's a little like saying the best table at a Harvester. It's all comparative. The room turned out to be a nice two room suite on the top floor, and mercifully Rotherham is so backward in the hospitality stakes that it was a smoking suite which meant that I was able to sit in the living room watching the television on Friday evening and indulge in a cigarette. Downstairs all hell broke loose as Friday night was the first night of the Rotherham Christmas party season, and the Carlton Park

It's been a busy busy week. Some aspects of which I have enjoyed enormously and others which have been an absolute nightmare. My mother seems to have picked up. A combination of a change in medication and several visits to hospital seems to have done the trick. I'm not going into all the details here because it will become boring, but suffice it to say we have had some truly horrendous experiences. Not in terms of the care we received, but in the way that care is managed and all the cliches that it's the managers in the NHS who are ruining things sadly would seem to be true. I'm not afraid of speaking up for myself and I'm certainly not afraid of speaking up on behalf of my mother, loudly and forcibly when necessary. I've had to do this on too many occasions. It becomes boring to me. I've spoken to directors of social services, directors of adult care, social workers, directors and social workers who don't turn up, directors of negligent social wo

I notice that next weekend, Friday night brings us the annual  conscience  salving marathon that is “Children in Need" Mercifully we'll be out of the country in Budapest. As individuals in this country we are great givers. We raise millions and that is to our credit. Yet as a nation from my recent experiences I can't but help think that we have ceased to care. I have spent a lot of time in Yorkshire recently. My mother as had two admissions to hospital. Both were nightmares in their own way. On one occasion she was discharged without anyone bothering to inform me, so she was sat by her bed fully dressed waiting to go home and yet no one knew she was expecting to be collected. On the second occasion although there was a bed waiting for her from 4.30 in the afternoon in the admissions ward, we were shunted into A&E  and delayed there for almost 3 hours.  Believe me they didn't get away with it quietly. And yet, as my other half pointed out in his ex

It's been quite a week - incident packed and full of action. My mother who has been in one of her lows for the last two weeks and been fighting off a cold went into sudden decline over the weekend. While we were mixing with the heart of Middle England at the Watermill Theatre watching our friend Kazia Pelka being brilliant as Miss Havisham, Mum took a turn for the worse and started asking for me. Rich, made up with cold and feeling terrible, gave up his Sunday to accompany me on the drive up to Yorkshire where we found her very low indeed. She doesn't eat- or rather has the appetite of a bird. She has been told - and has now been told  in no uncertain terms - that she has to eat to stay alive. She just doesn't have the strength to fight off infections, and yet when not ill she remains remarkably active, fighting both arthritis and sciatica to get out most days for a bus journey and a walk to get a daily paper and have coffee with friends. But when this cycle of exh