TWO CARERS WALK INTO A BAR.

Every day, two carers walk in here in the morning. Two walk in at night. Sometimes, one of those carers is pulling in extra work. That carer comes in twice a day. Rare, but it happens. Carers wish me good morning at night and good night in the morning.
   They work on a four-day cycle, and can almost always tell you which day it is. Day One. But they struggle to know that it is Tuesday. Days blur. Four on and four off. Barring illness, holidays, or nonsensical last-minute redeployment to another part of the system, that is.
   You meet everyone in the system eventually. Regulars are regulars until everything changes. Now and again, someone – who moved away through the different layers of the system – someone comes back. Not in an undead kind of way. Night of the Living Carers.
   Anyway. One familiar ex-regular comes back in. She’s known as the Poster Girl for Overtime. If she’s asked, she’ll do it. And, of course, she’s in the house to cover for someone else. Taking a bit of overtime. I once joked that she’d end up covering her own shift as overtime.
   Oh, how we laughed.
   And then she declared a holiday. Except that she turned up on her day off and covered her own shift. So my joke was a prediction just waiting to be fulfilled. Well, anyway, she turned up and just wanted to know. Someone gave her a book on dementia. She wondered if I’d written it, knowing that the book I’d written was done under another identity. To protect my mother’s privacy, you understand.
   I explained the situation. No. Okay, but could the carer have the details of my book? Just out of curiosity. Certainly. With the warning. Having met me, interacted with me, the carer is barred from reviewing the book. Other than that, we’re okay.
   Well now the news is travelling around the carer circuit. It wasn’t, before. Carers knew I’d written a book on dementia, but no one asked for the details. Some of them went looking for me on Amazon, generally, but I pointed out that bit about protecting the identity of someone who is at the most vulnerable state you can have in life.
   I have responsibilities way beyond ordering pills and grinding them.
   Now the thing about the book…and I had to explain this…is that it isn’t about dementia care. It’s about the last bus journey I take before I must become a carer. After that, I added blog posts to the text. And I’ve kept blogging since. The thing about blogging since is that I’ve discussed changes as they happened.
   The need for more mobility equipment. Changes to carer routines. Having a carer, one at a time, to get us through the day. The gradual shift in items of furniture. Back-up systems. More carers. Two carers at a time, twice a day. And, on occasion, when blogging, I end up talking vaguely about the care team and things we all have to deal with.
   What’s the upshot of that recent visit by the ex-regular? Now the carers are starting to talk about getting this book. Which will lead them to the blog. Some of them will start reading the blog: some won’t. It’s a monthly blog, and I write a brief piece on a topic…
   That book was from 2017. In the days since? Short blog chats. Twelve a year, mostly. And quite easy to wade through. Regular binge readers will know I repeat myself. December brings talk of Christmas trees. I get the flamethrower out for the weeds in the summer. And so on.
   Here and there, I mention the carers. So now I’ll have the carers reading these blog posts and recognising a hell of a lot. The actual Christmas tree, for example. Or the way the garden is laid out. One carer is reading the book. And told me about the fireplace and its annoying remote control. That’s from the start of the book.
   I could see the dusty remote out of the corner of my eye. So I dusted it down and showed it to the carer in a surreal moment. And the carer, eventually reading this blog post, will experience another surreal moment. It’s all very self-referential. Obviously, I had to blog about it.
   But I had to do more than that. I remembered a theme in the book: one of updating hyperlinks to the outside world. Time to go back in and check those hyperlinks again. I do this, from time to bleary time. And so I found a few dead links again. Totally utterly dead links.
   I typed my way around them, and republished the book today. Also, there was a glitch that crept into the blurb. A change in formatting smashed all of the separate paragraphs into one block of text.
   Amazon rarely tramples over those details. Circumstances beyond my control. I reached for the toolbox, and I knocked the rust off. At least fixing the glitch lies within my power.
   So there are blogs about having two fridges. Which the carers can see, when they go into the kitchen. I blog about the door chime that goes off when they walk in. This is the place where they can go to the toilet in comfort. You’d think a heated toilet in winter would be standard, in the world of caring for people.
   Apparently not. I provide a rare service. The carers come in and tell me I should charge admission to the toilet facilities. I’d add a coin slot, but these days we’re so used to the electronic transfer of funds that no one would be able to pay. So the toilet remains, mercifully, free at the point of use. Which is the whole point.
   I worked my way through the book, page by page, checking, double-checking, and treble-checking. I was advised of dozens of potential spelling errors. Amazon told me so. I should say that bit about potential spelling errors another way. Patenshul. For I scatter Scottish words and variant spellings throughout the book.
   When writing a book in that way, I end up adding Broad Scots™ to the internal dictionary. But I have to go round the houses a second time inside the Amazon Kindle system, backstage.
   The hyperlinks that failed? I removed them. And the ones that worked? Surprised me that they worked. Regional words were ticked on a list and I had zero errors by the end of it. Then, after confessing that I never used artificial intelligence – only my own, and that fuelled by coffee – I hit the button to update the publication.
   Long story short…the updated book is officially updated. I shouldn’t have to check it for hyperlinks…oh, for a long time. Here I am, blogging about blogging, writing about writing, giving you an update on updates. It’s all circling around the campfire, trying to find the best place to get a decent heat out of the blast without being fried.
   It’s been a time of checking internal hyperlinks that never give me bother, and scorching a few external hyperlinks that simply cannot be saved. Yes, I gave myself more work to do. And I thought many of those external pathways would fall to dust over time. But that didn’t bother me. It’s healthy to return to the work, periodically, and make sure it is still there. Accessible. Functioning.
   This time around, I had to drive a stake through several vampiric hyperlinks. There. I’m never coming back to them. They are done. Twitter links that were Twitter links when Twitter was still Twitter. It is still Twitter. And it is always going to be Twitter. But it has had the life knifed out of it.
   Some hyperlinks lead to these blog posts, and a few photographic images that might appeal to readers. Give them a visual hint or two, concerning the whole journey. One day the world will end. Maybe the hyperlinks will be out in the depths of space by then, and only robot astronauts will survive to read the blog through the book.
   I was going to write about the government, ripping off carers, or potentially ripping us off, but that can wait a month. Then, in July, I can look back and talk about the first half of the year. And of being ripped off by the government in that first half.
   Oh, we’re better off now. If you ignore the bit about being ripped off. There’s still hope. The government may pay out a compensatory fee in the second half of this caring game. I won’t hold my breath for a month. Something tells me I already know how the next blog post will go. Still, I could be pleasantly surprised.
   I won’t be, though.
   Two carers never walked into a bar. The blog title was misleading. If any carers walk into a bar, it’s off-duty. Doesn’t stop some of them putting in requests for alcoholic drinks while I’m mixing up frothy strawberry milkshakes. Oh, how we laugh.