My mother is currently in hospital having bits of her leg amputated in order to keep surgical staff off the streets. It’s a common side effect for diabetics in fairly old age that circulation in their feet and legs just isn’t up to muster any more and requires this kind of treatment.

The hospital appear to be treating her as having some kind of loyal customer status and recognizing that by replumbing her legs or lopping parts of them off completely on a weekly basis. All very necessary but a bit concerning for me, and I’m not even the one waking up to see how much of me is still remaining.

There is a positive to all this as well though. In her recovering status she mostly understands what is going on around her but is pretty drugged up with pain killers and not really able to maintain much of a conversation.  In order to avoid us both just sitting in silence, this has given me the 0ppurtunity to talk at her about things that only a captive audience would stay awake for.

Well, she doesn’t always stay awake in fact, but you take my general point.

My latest of these was reminding her of a sequence of deceits carried out by my father when I was a young child – with her tacit support since she never went out of her way to stop him. He had clearly reached the stage that many parents reach 0f being bombarded by too many stupid questions and just giving any quick, off the cuff answer that comes to mind. I was at an age that you tend to believe your parents fairly unquestioningly

For example, I asked why Cat’s Eyes are called that.   He told me they were for cats to see across the road.

The real reason wasn’t obvious to me then and even the fact that, to be useful for that purpose, they would have to run across the road rather than down the middle did not raise any questions in my mind

As another example, when watching a First World War film, I asked him how Germany army officers’ trousers – those padded jodhpur-like things with the extended sections to the outside of each thigh – kept their shape.

He told me it was because they were filled with concrete.

This one did seem a little unlikely at first, but thinking about it further, it did account for their stiff legged march. That one stayed with me for a number of years.

There are many more of these, but the reason I mentioned it to my mother was to let her know this disfunction has been passed subconsciously to me. For example, I convinced my daughter that she would be sleeping in a cupboard and even set up a bed in that would fit a seven year old successfully.

She believed that completely and told me years later that she was a bit upset by it, but mainly just when I told her the truth and she realised she wouldn’t be sleeping in there indefinitely.

I also used red food colouring to convince her that the red coloured Brussel Sprout existed and was in fact a sweeet variety best enjoyed with cream.
All very harmless in that case.

What was less harmlesss was one of my similar delusions on my son. I told him that Expresso coffee was made by boiling it down to such a consistency that it is eaten with a spoon and the cup could safely be inverted over someone’s head.

That example was one I probably should have thought through a bit more thoroughly.

They are now starting to pick these up much more easily, which has made me vulnerable to Boy who Cried Wolf situations.

People like me with Multiple Sclerosis  tend to fall over periodically, which has been pretty harmless so far on level ground, although it does tend to surprise passers by a bit, unless it happens in my normal drinking venues.  People seem to take it much more in their stride there.                                 

However, it has happened three times now at the top of my stairs and each time I fell down the full length of them, ending up on the floor having hit the wall at the bottom (facing backwards by a mechanism I can’t really understand).

It was fairly painful first time and I suspected I might have actually cracked a rib or something. Being badly winded, I could  only let out a very faint, and very high pitched whisper.

I couldn’t think of a really suitable phrase to summon assistance so just shouted ‘Help’, or more accurately just sort of twittered ‘Help’.  As I lay there, I could hear both children debating it upstairs and deciding I was just messing around again.

I finally heard them agreeing for one of them to come and check me out just in case, but my lesson was learned.

Mostly learned anyway.

I just came back from dinner, having written this Post beforehand and by the same compulsion, I found myself telling them that the Kidney Beans in their Chilli con Carne are actually the kidneys of a small animal and are so called as they resemble a bean.

Pointless and not even funny but I just can’t stop myself doing it.

I think I may need some professional help here if I can just get some guidance on what specialists deal with this kind of  thing.

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