DEMENTIA CARE: STORMY WEATHER.

The replacement door arrived just in time for storm after storm after storm. Most of the weather slid to the side. Clouds to the north of me. Rain to the south. Stuck in the mildness with you. One stormy patch hit, and I didn’t care.
   Why not? The new door stood fast. That old door would have struggled against the wind. Now and again it failed in its struggle, and there’d be a clang as the wind knocked the door open and right into the radiator. Not good.
   The new door has that hook engagement. You close the door and lift the handle. Hook engages. Door can’t blow open in the wind. This is fantastic. The door is left unlocked for all the carers and medical staff who turn up. It’s just more convenient that way. It is now kept closed against gusts of wind.
   Paradoxical. When someone is capable of concentrating, the door is locked. That’s how things were. You unlocked the door to answer the door, or to empty the bins, or to fix a thing outside, or to head off on a journey. Security kept the door locked. The sense of security that goes with having full concentration.
   Now that someone can’t concentrate, the door is left open. Yes, there’s an alarm that goes when people come in. For some reason, and it’s being a carer, the idea of the door blowing open in the wind is one of massive inconvenience. I’ll know if someone comes in by mistake, or with harmful intent.
   Of course the new door stood up against the weather. It’s NEW. I wouldn’t expect it to collapse at the first sight of unseen wind.
   Also, the old door would have deteriorated and not sealed against the weather in around another nine months – give or take. The idea of a door preventing Scottish summer rains from getting in is a good idea. A strong idea. This is true of any season. The door is new and does its job. Major headline. Not as huge a headline as new door fails spectacularly.
   Has the new door made the house safer? Yes. There’s more light in the hall. When I go to check the alarm, adjusting things if necessary, I don’t need to brace my hand against the door. That’s just in case anyone is trying to come in from the vast outside.
   With that larger door window, all frosted, if not currently frosty, I can see the approach of visitors. I also see car lights as vehicles move up and down the surrounding streets. For some reason, that has a very wintry feel. Adds to the atmosphere.
   Storms brought rain. From clouds. And kept the frost at bay. So far, that’s holding. Prolonged sessions of frost haven’t happened yet. Mild weather, barring that one gusty day. The whole nature and character of the main entrance to the building has changed.
   Delivery drivers now check the number they are delivering to. The old door number is gone, along with the old door. I have replacement numbers, but they’ll have to go at the side. Delivery drivers tend to shout out from the street. They wouldn’t see the new numbers from way over there.
   The hall is the same warm hall with minimal heating on. But with extra light it feels less forbidding. More welcoming. This was a big change. A short while in arriving. And a long while, let’s hope, before needing to be replaced again.
   I thought, once the new door was fitted, there’d be nothing else to that. It’s a door. Does its job. But the carers noticed the change in light when they closed the door on their way in. Most carers noticed. One carer didn’t even notice the new door until leaving.
   It’s easier to see when to clean the carpet. Time to run the vacuum cleaner over there. Refitting the carpet is a thing I hope never to have to do again. It was done to a standard of satisfaction I was happy with. In other words, I never messed that up. Didn’t have to tackle it again after botching a straightforward fiddly job.
   There are no straightforward jobs in caring. They are all fiddly. After adjusting the old doormat by making cuts here, there, to make it fit the new frame, I decided it wasn’t going to last another winter. So I added one more straightforward fiddly job to the list. I went in search of a non-standard doormat. Measure, measure, measure, curse a bit, measure some more. Realise you have a non-standard doorstep.
   Nothing will fit. All these doormats are the size of football pitches. The idea of a doormat directly in front of the door, on the step, appears to have died off. It has been replaced by the idea of a football field of a mat placed below the step, filling your entire garden and much of the road outside your property.
   Luckily, some manufacturers realised the problem of having a tiny step. They sold mats you couldn’t cut up. But they also sold mats you could slash merrily away at. I narrowed my search, closing in on the source of the Nile or the start of the Amazon. Yes, this was an epic search.
   Eventually I closed in on a mat that was broad enough to cover most of the space. Chunky. Durable. Heavy enough to stay in place during gusty weather. Most important: holes. A mat made of holes.
   Basically, I was paying for the holes and the material was thrown in for nothing. Durable. Wearing. Robust. Cuttable. I measured and measured and measured. Right. If I go two holes deep and cut along there, everything will be fine.
   I ordered that one mat. The one that would do. I felt as though I’d pulled this mat from the internet the way Arthur slid the sword from the stone – with great amazement. Then, one day, with little to no fanfare, the mat arrived.
   It was left behind the bin, in the garden, by a delivery driver who never knocked. I’ve caught two of them at it, not knocking, as I was in the kitchen. Who is that guy, walking away down the path? Oh, he’s a delivery guy. Never knocked. I’m feet away from him. The hall door is open. Heard nothing.
   If a delivery driver falls over in the woods, would anyone hear anything? No. That delivery driver never knocks. Also, unless he’s delivering to a gnome who lives under a toadstool, his satellite navigation is a bit off if he’s carrying parcels into the woods.
   I’d check those parcels for bloodstains.
   After spying the thin floppy parcel, left by the bins, I retrieved the package. Time to measure the real thing, and not the specifications listed online. You can never truly go by those. I had to return a bath rail once that lied to me, lied to me, on the internet.
   After measuring a lot, I came to the conclusion that the safest way to cut the mat would be through the use of a pair of electric branch cutters. Secateurs, I guess. I bought those for safety. Yes, they bring their own dangers.
   One test cut, to see how we go. That worked, rather surprisingly. And so I set to it, cutting away two layers of holes (and the free material) so the mat wouldn’t overhang the step. And the result? With the cut section facing in the way, the mat fit the space. No overhang. And no worries.
   The mat faced hefty weather. It took my shoes with no difficulty. And the carers never slipped up on the newness of it all. Sycamore seeds whirled in and landed in the holes. Rain pounded down one day and didn’t bother the arrangement.
   It was important to have a new mat. Not a solid one. When I ditched the old one, I had to batter it on one side to knock out an army of slaters who’d moved in on the underside. Those are woodlice, or pill bugs.
   They’d sheltered in the hollows under the old mat, where they wouldn’t be crushed by the impact of feet on the top. I expected them to be there, which is why I shook the old mat out before binning it. Now they have nowhere to hide. A cruel eviction. But the new mat is safer than the old mat was. I realised that, when I compared them before ditching the old one. So the nature of the hall, the character, changed thanks to the new door.
   And the nature, the character, of the way in, went completely unnoticed by some. If the carers had to use the keysafe to get in, they’d have noticed the shiny newness of the key. The one I binned was weathered from living in its hidey-hole, season by season.
   When I went to chuck that old key, I opened the keysafe to find a fly living in there. Another eviction. Strangely, I’d expected a spider. With the new door being so new, it took a while for spiders to move in and web the upper corners. I was waiting for spiders to arrive. They’ve done their webbing, now. One carer shuddered as she walked into a line of web on the way in. New doors don’t stay shiny and clean for long.

 

DEMENTIA CARE: MAINTENANCE WORKERS.

All of the maintenance was arranged for October. Even the maintenance conducted in September. The community alert was going to receive its annual maintenance on the same day as the new door went in.
   But that was a clerical error, and the alarm guy turned up in September to explain a mistake was made in the office. October appointments were really September appointments in disguise. Knowing the power would be off in October for some gas and electricity maintenance work, I mentioned this to the alarm guy. He gave me a number to call on the day.
   That way, the alarm guy wouldn’t show up at the door to check out the loss of signal. If I phoned the office and explained why the power was off, it saved him a journey. Reorganisation of the job would also save his making a return maintenance trip in a year. Annual alarm maintenance is now going to be every eighteen months.
   I did a fair spot of maintenance myself over the past week as I anticipated the arrival of various technical bods. Hardly a day went by without my adjustment of a door, a drawer, something under the sink, a thing that pinged off the fridge, or, sometimes, even the tools themselves.
   First to arrive was the gas guy. He’d have the electric guy come in as well. Gas and electricity meters will now be upgraded every decade. We were overdue for an overhaul. Each meter took an hour to remove and replace.
   The machines may be standardised, and many houses are supposedly the same, but every locale is different. I’d made the phone call. When the electricity was switched off, we could all hear the alert telling us the power supply was disrupted. Then restored. And then disrupted again. Finally, restored. No one came out to ask why, so the phone call to the office worked.
   I wandered the upstairs portions of the house with a torch in my hand as I went about various daily duties. Just like a murder mystery in a mansion during a storm. Without the storm. And no mansion, it’s true. Also, no one died.
   The electricity guy decided to be cautious and he switched the electricity off a second time. Better safe than sorry. That was me to him. He agreed wholeheartedly. There were a few glitches based on the standardised house not being as standardised as you’d expect…which is something you should totally expect.
   Then they were done. Two hours of disruption. Good for ten years. I had a new gadget, reading off gas and electricity in the kitchen. It would take a few days to filter through the readings. Now the meters provide even more regular data straight to the alien mothership on the dark side of the moon.
   While casually reading about smart meters I discovered the Smart Meter Conspiracy Enthusiasts. Like Flat Earthers, they don’t trouble my sleep. Aren’t Flat Earthers great? I love a well-rounded conspiracy as much as the next person.
   You have to be careful not to disrespect Flat Earthers, though. They do have a global reach. Flat Earthers come from all around the world to attend the big conventions. Even so, that view of theirs still falls into a niche sphere. Don’t enter into debate with them. You’ll just end up revolving around circular arguments.
   Can’t be bothered with those Flat Mooners. They are the worst.
   With the alert well out of the way and the gas and electricity seen to, al I had to do was discover loads of things in need of fixing around the house. I’d do this very scientifically by opening a door or reaching for a utensil, only to be disappointed with the end results.
   Now I was the maintenance worker. Part of the maintenance was all about the new door. I had to clear the hall. For safety, I took away the pictures hanging there. This was the memory gallery for my mother. She would have a carer escort her through the hall to the kitchen and around to the stairs.
   This longer route up to the bath offered her the chance to talk about places she’d been to. And she did talk. Mobility, loss of strength in the knees, put paid to that taxing trek. But the pictures remained. I moved a few from the kitchen through to the main room, to keep the talking-points going.
   Taking pictures out of the hall reminded me of the difficulty I had in putting them up in the first place. Endless measurements. First, find a poster service that would handle the photos. Easy. Next, match the poster to a clear frame. Focus attention on the pictures. Easy.
   Print them up, frame them up…easy. Hang them up. Fucking hell. Fiddly. I created a themed walk. And it worked. This time around, hanging them didn’t involve measuring the walls up and knocking nails in. But I wasn’t looking forward to the prospect.
   I uncovered webbing. No spiders. They hadn’t lingered. I dismantled the mat alarm and I undid the wiring. Motion-sensor lights had to come out of the way. I switched the radiator off. It wasn’t on. But it had to go fully off at the dial.
   Carpet runners. Ancient. Beyond time. Difficult to remove. Then I folded the carpet up and around the corner. This seemed to take all day and all night. Stop. Check a thing. No damage. Carry on.
   I’d placed a sign on the door, to say where you are going before leaving the house. That was there when there was no door alarm. Immobility brings its own challenges. But it takes away the business of wandering off into the streets when you have no concentration.
   So. I finally removed the sign on the inside of the door. The blue goo holding it there was soft. It just wouldn’t come away clean. I had to use older harder blue goo to attract it. Eventually, I removed all traces of the blue goo from that door. (If not entirely from my fingers.)
   With the carers gone at night, I locked the door for the last time. I’d set the alarm early so I’d have my coffee well before the arrival of the workman. Next morning, I unlocked the door for the last time.
   A van arrived and dropped the new door off. The delivery guy sat it out of the way, over there. There’s a mat on the step. I moved that out of the way, over there. Exactly where the door would end up, of course.
   Then the workman arrived. He checks to see if you are home so that he can start. The door does need to be open for that. We covered a few fine details, and I left him to it. Later, he let the care team in. They weren’t used to coming in to silence. There was no mat to give off the jangled alarm of the bells.
   So they shouted out to me when they were finished. And away they went. After just over three hours, the door was in place. It looked very clean. I was warned not to wash any of the plastic surround. Just let the glue set. Okay.
   I was given a tour of the mechanism. The old door had a proper keyhole. You could see through it to the outside. No more. There wasn’t even a keyhole. Just a thumb latch. You don’t scramble for your keys in a fire. Instead, you just turn the latch to unlock from the inside.
   So I really had locked and unlocked the door from inside the hall, with a key, for the last time. This has changed morning routine. I start caring with pills I carry through from the kitchen. On the way, I jangle the keys out and unlock the door. That’s one thing I need never do again.
   What else changed? There is light. The old door had two tiny windows high up. Monks in their cells had access to greater illumination. Now, from the kitchen, it looks as though the door must be open with all the light streaming through. When you reach the corner, you see the door is shut.
   Takes a bit of getting used to. Did I change anything? Yes. The carpet runners and the carpet are more or less the same. Radiator still radiates. But I took this chance to rearrange the wiring for the mat and the alarm.
   The wire goes from the mat up the wall, over the toilet door, and across the hall ceiling, down the wall, and to the socket there. I tidied up the cabling a bit. This was long and involved. But the door, which is very snug and shiny and new, shouldn’t be replaced for an absolute age. So I won’t be rewiring every few weeks.
   It took a few days for the first cobweb to span the door. And not at the top. Maybe the freshness is keeping the last of the feisty spiders at bay. There is no number on the outside of the door. It is textured. So I won’t be adding stickers to the surface, the way I did with the bins. Delivery drivers are almost always on satellite navigation. Or they have it and make educated guesses. These guys never read the instruction manual.
   I was handed three keys. One is now inside the keysafe on the outside wall. Another is in my pocket. The third is spare. In a drawer for now.
  The front door has a handle that lifts up the way. Now, finally, the back door operates in the same fashion. This places a hook inside the frame, keeping the door secure against severe winds. I’ve just received the door in time for worsening weather. There was a chance I’d have to wait until mid-January for this replacement.
   With the door in place and the workman away, I set to business installing the mat. At the very bottom of the whole assembly, the new door frame reduced the area of step available. I set to work with a measuring tape and a ruler. Cut a bit here. Trim a bit there. We were back in business.
   You wouldn’t care about any of this if you weren’t a carer. Being a carer, though, you plan a lot around the event. You work out which team is going to be in on that day. The door guy is there in the morning or the afternoon.
   The morning squad is told in advance. Leading up to the day itself, I clear the front hall in case the carers knock at the front door. I’d put all the pictures from the back hall into the front hall, and realised that might cause an obstruction. The front door is hardly used, so it didn’t bother me. But it could have bothered the carers coming in.
   Carpets. Doors. Fittings. Fixtures. Tools. Keep them available. Not inside the cupboard that’s going to be blocked off by the raised carpet. It’s all easy stuff. But it comes with that extra layer of…wait, will this interrupt caring routine? Answer. Of course it will. And that’s why I planned ahead. The whole thing went smoothly.
   And the door? Well. It is just a door. What did I expect? I expect…the door to last a long time. It keeps the weather out. And it lets the sunlight in, warming the hall. Taking the chill off autumn. I imagine the hall will be like an oven in summer.

DEMENTIA CARE: THE RANDOMNESS OF CARING.

Every routine has its own self-destruct button. You apply a level of routine to the randomness of dementia care. That application is a coat of varnish specially designed to evaporate on contact with the world.
   You dive back into randomness when you are forced to hit the self-destruct button. You were doing something, and it was computerised. Very important. But now, at an odd time, the bell chimes to let you know someone walked in through the door.
   There are no odd times for the care team to walk in. Unless one of them got up at 3.00 in the morning, sleepwalked to your house, and triggered the alarm. This has yet to happen.
   Nurse visits are almost always by appointment. The appointment occurs from 9.00 in the morning until 5.00 in the afternoon. Recently, there was an unannounced nursing visit, to take blood samples, at 9.00 in the morning.
   At least I didn’t have to wait in all day for it. This vampire only worked in the mornings. So it was a 9.00 through to 12.00 visit. That’s how the vampires get you. They tell you they work mornings so you believe they are alive.
   “We humans like to get up early in the morning.”
   Always treat that sort of talk with suspicion. This is how the aliens infiltrate. They pretend to be vampires pretending to be humans. No one suspects the real conspiracy hidden inside the other real conspiracy.
   My morning routine involves a bit of start-up caring followed immediately by a coffee. This coffee happens between 8.30 and 9.00 when almost no one can interrupt me. Occasionally, maintenance work will happen from 8.00 onward. But I get word of that, well in advance.
   There I was, coffee over, arranging computer-based caring, when the bell tolled and told me an intruder had just entered the property. The care team rarely reaches me at 9.30. Couldn’t reach me any earlier, without a special request going through.
   Those special requests were in the pre-Covid days. Be ready for Patient Transport to a hospital. Or have everything out of the way for the Daycare mini-bus. Those routines faded. Who would walk in at 9.00 in the morning?
   The blood sampler. This cheery chatty vampire never phones ahead. On a different system. Or marches to the beat of a different drum. Most likely a tuba. Comes from another planet. Fills in for the regulars.
   We engaged in slow arm-wrestling with the cared-for, and failed to get any blood out. I moved around to the other side of the bed and engaged in even more arm-wrestling, while the vampire attacked the problem from a new angle.
   Blood flowed freely. We marched in a roundabout way to the bin, the one that didn’t contain recyclable items, and our parade signalled the end of the matter. Either there’d be results in a week, or the results wouldn’t show any change and there’d be no need to send results.
   Somewhere along the way I received text messages telling me all the doctors are off sick and could I please not be ill today. This day, specifically. Fuck this day, in particular. Luckily, I am not ill. I don’t know how ill the doctors are.
   A lot of physicians, healing themselves that day, I guess. Other unexpected notes arrive, with deliveries of pills. A receipt is attached to the bag. The pharmacy has run out of milkshakes. Again. They owe us milkshakes. And they’ve owed us milkshakes for two months, now.
   I bought a batch of spares off Amazon. Sometimes, when supply issues hit…the company making the milkshakes gets replaced. And suddenly you have all the milkshakes again. Just in a slight variation of the standard flavouring. My problem is wondering how long to wait for non-existent milkshakes.
   Do I wait? Two weeks, and the pharmacy catches up and makes a delivery. Maybe the pharmacy never catches up. So it’s a month without. We made it through without milkshakes for a month. Other milk products are in the bag, and they provide sustenance. The extra calories are available.
   But as soon as a second note came, attached to a new bag of pills, that was it. Time to abandon routine, hit the self-destruct, and buy the identical milkshakes from Amazon. They weren’t short of milkshakes.
   Once in eternity Amazon will cancel an order. The third-party vendor ran away with the fiver and is now on the run for the rest of his life. Amazon carries the can for that. Your money is refunded. Then you are forced to make alternative arrangements.
   Never mind all that. Amazon had identical milkshakes and milkshakes arrived. Soon enough, it’ll be time to order another receipt for missing milkshakes. I mean…soon enough it’ll be time to order more milkshakes from the pharmacy.
   I hope if they don’t have them that they don’t have them in strawberry. See if they don’t have them in chocolate, we’ll all be sorely disappointed.
   I am still waiting for the repair to happen to that door. This involves removing the entire door. Bits are falling off the underside, and I don’t see the winter weather doing it any favours. As long as I keep it maintained, using the temporary fix of detergent, I’ll be okay.
   Not that I distrust the door. I’m sure that one slug made it to the kitchen counter by other means. Used the key, like a normal slug would. Didn’t come through the disintegrating underside of the door. Jangled the keys then avoided the pressure plate for the bell.
   Wildlife randomly alters your routine, pressing the self-destruct on your behalf. It’s been a long time since I had to escort a wasp from the premises, with the warning not to come back or its kneecaps would never play the piano again. No wasp action, this time.
   The tap-tap-tapping of a tiny moth, playing a drum routine on a light, loud enough to rival John Bonham at his most feverish, plays havoc with whatever the fuck you were doing at the time. The cure is the Spider Glass. Yes, I catch spiders in that, and send them to the garden.
   I’ve also caught moths in it. And the other day, I trapped a particularly angry buzzy fly. Slugs go out on a scrap of cardboard. No glass for them. I haven’t had a mass of ants in here since I cordoned the kitchen with vinegar on the floor. Ants learned to look elsewhere for snacks.
   For weeks I knew there was a tiny spider in here somewhere. One of those almost non-existent fuckers. They leave a motorway made of webbing behind them, trailing back three hundred miles. You always work from the middle of the web to the wrong end…the start. You find nothing.
   Well, I was looking for something else entirely and found the wee bastard taking a break from it all. Hiding down low, clinging to the underside of a shelf. The wee fucker moved fast when I sprang the trap, but I moved faster.
   All the beasties went back to the garden and I returned to shattered routines. Discovering a loose cable over where the carers went back and forth, I rescued the hammer from a life of tedium and went to work adding more fixings to the wall. Once I found the box full of those fixings, of course. That was a detour within a side-mission.
   Animal rescue. Household maintenance. The unannounced arrival of a vampire. And the announced lack of arrival of those milkshakes. These things wrecked routines. Luckily, I had routines in place to fix broken moments.
   And I consumed a great deal of coffee. So much coffee that I’ve laid on an extra coffee supply run just for that and some more toilet roll. At least it is all lightweight. August evaporated. The weather finally turned.
   Night suddenly falls hours earlier, doing away with all those fake night skies at midnight. There are hints of the chill to come on the odd wind gust. I have salt supplies in for frost. And I’ll have cans of stew in the kitchen before long.
   Goodbye August. Farewell meteorological summer.
   Here’s September, instantly, after a year that blinked itself away just to reach this point. True, September can turn on the heat. We’ll see. But it is a month known for its charm, and its charm lies in cooling.
   I’m pretty much done trimming the tree for the year. A last burst of leafery before slowing down. The tree, not me. This blog post wasn’t about anything, except arranging a blog post on the first of the month. Mission accomplished.
   Interrupted by text messages. The coffee supply run is on. It is happening. Confirmed. Also confirmed, for mid-October, the new door. At any old time, on the day, from 8.00 in the morning at the earliest. At least it’ll be done before December. And I’ll have coffee laid on for the occasion.
   I walked into the garden to bring the bin in. Gentle autumn rain fell from welcoming grey skies. The searing blue of summer is done.