Across The Miles

I'll be giving Mum a ring a bit later tonight. She doesn't welcome any kind of activity in the morning (it's only around noon in the UK at the moment) as she's not really warmed up and needs time to recover from getting up, so I try to make sure it's around one or two o'clock before I ring.

I'm expecting a fairly downbeat conversation. She's not been feeling even close to tickety-boo of late and things are not likely to improve given her age. The main problem is her back which now seems to radiate pain or, at least, considerable discomfort during most of the day, even when she's seated. But there are a number of other subsidiary problems, any one of which would be difficult to deal with for a much younger person. It's a measure of how difficult she's finding things that what had been her favourite source of complaint earlier this year - her inability to work the tv recorder - has vanished as a topic of discussion.

Remarkably she is dealing with all this with extraordinary stoicism. If anything she's more aware of my feelings as a listener than ever before and sounds apologetic when relating her problems. When I rang her at the weekend she was more concerned with how the play at school had gone than the fact that she was obviously in considerable discomfort.

Frankly December can't come quickly enough for me just to get the chance to be around her and at least feel I'm doing something useful, even if I'm not.