August 2024: An Adventure Before Dementia pt 1

Any trip to the UK is a bit of an adventure for the reluctant traveller that I have become. This one was doubly so. Our mission, impossible to refuse – to stand in for my mother-in-law’s principal carer for two daunting weeks while she was on holiday in Norway– was cloaked in symbolic significance: we travelled out on the day that the Paris Olympics started and we travelled back on the day that they finished. Both times our Eurostar was cancelled. On the day of an opening ceremony that featured a resuscitated Céline Dion, sabotage made mayhem at the Gare du Nord. Though the slashed cables were duly repaired in good time for the closing ceremony, our train was cancelled for no evident reason. On both occasions, the staff pulled out all the stops to get us onto an earlier train. Thank heavens for the paranoia that dictates we turn up considerably earlier than the majority of travellers.

Since the train was re-routed on local lines, we arrived at St. Pancras over an hour later than our original, later train was due. But we still had half an hour before our ‘Azuma’ was due to speed us to Leeds. ‘See it, say it, sorted’, as they drum into UK rail passengers. From Leeds, the magnificent Settle/Carlisle line took us over the Yorkshire Dales and some of the most stunning scenery in England, this time – unlike our Yuletide trip to Skipton – the landscape was bathed in balmy sunshine.

At Garston station, a big colourful sign advertises the scenic splendours of a branch line that takes you to Morecambe Bay and on, if you’re daft enough, to Barrow-in-Furness. They call it the Bentham Line; maybe (I’m guessing) it has something to do with the philanthropic 19^th century industrialist. What you really need to know is that the Bentham Line is ‘dementia friendly’. Perhaps because we’d been up since 4am and/or had a surfeit of stress and travel-tension to release, this nugget of information caused us to giggle like school kids. Did this friendliness towards people with dementia suggest that other lines would refuse to transport them? Or did the line recruit them in the way that B&Q recruits people past retirement age? If the latter, it would be more a matter of ‘See it, say it, but just don’t expect our staff to sort it.’

On timely arrival at Appleby station, there was Jack from the Temple Sowerby garage with our hire car for the fortnight. My canny wife has been using them ever since she discovered that they’re half as expensive and offer twice the customer-care as the hire-car giants. We had a Mercedes saloon. ‘Oh Lord, won’t you rent me a Mer-ced-es Benz.’ I’ve never driven a Merc before – and very nice to drive it was, too, once I’d learnt to use a handbrake located just under the steering wheel. The first car, too, that I’d driven with a sixth gear. The trouble was that it was so brand-spanking-new and Cumbrian roads are so narrow and so full of blind bends that every sortie was a journey into fear.

Sleeping soundly in our small-but-somewhat-imperfectly formed Airbnb haven from Purgatory further up the road, little did we guess just how apt that dementia-friendly tag would prove. We were woken early the next morning by a call from a carer to say that the Outlaw had had another fall. Debs threw on her clothes to race up the road and speak to the ambulance crew. I arrived a little later, just before they departed, leaving the neighbours with plenty of food for speculation. In fact, the old dear wasn’t badly hurt. But both ambulance crew and a little later the community care doctor (masked and protected from head to foot by non-degradable plastic) agreed that this situation couldn’t go on. My mother-in-law needed full-time care and not just four visits from carers per day backed up by countless phone calls to her distant daughter. This was music to the ears of said daughter since Part 1 of our mission of mercy was to get an obdurate accident-prone nonagenarian into the Merc and off to Kirkby Stephen for a pre-arranged visit to a prospective care-home.

While the Good Wife administered daily care to a woman who would, as my mother used to tell us kids, ‘try the patience of a saint’, my support role was that of shopper, principal driver, cook, domestic and a shoulder to scream on. As the Outlaw’s favourite son-in-law (her only son-in-law), I could do no wrong. I’m a man, so someone to women of her generation to be served and revered. On presenting the meals I prepared with such care in her ill-equipped and insanitary kitchen, my aged fan would instantly shake salt and squeeze tomato ketchup all over my creations with the impatience of someone killing a fly that refused to die. I tried not to take it to heart.

The post-meridian became our golden time of day. Once our charge was settled and sleeping after lunch in her enormous all-singing all-dancing armchair, we could walk up the Fell-side if it wasn’t raining to gaze upon the Eden Valley in all its topographical glory. And we could feed a carrot to Tony the faux zebra, alone in his field. A shaggy black Fell pony festooned for some strange reason in a stripy jacket, Tony proved a most amiable creature. We could tell him our woes while he stood stoically, resting his head on the gate. On other days, we could head west in the Merc on the A66 to Penrith for some shopping for she-who-must-be-obeyed. After which I would be excused to go back to our lodgings to work on a commissioned article, do a spot of constricted yoga and prepare supper for my homecoming saint.

We had one whole day off. Despite the ominous sky, we took a trip through the glorious West Lakeland hills to the unremarkable Cumbrian coast. The wife needed some sea air and we had promised ourselves some freshly caught fish and chips. At Maryport, a drab little town that has seen better days, we came upon a white van bearing the legend ‘On an adventure before dementia’. We laughed our legs off, though subsequently discovered that it was old-hat, proof if needed that the expatriate’s lot is to be forever slightly out of touch. Further up the coast in Silloth, a broken coffee machine spared us an uncommonly expensive diversion at Mrs. Wilson’s Tea Room. We spent the money we saved on fish and chips – not the best in the county, but the seagulls enjoyed some of the oily undercooked chips. Wonderful the way the seasoned pros were able to swoop and catch a discarded chip in mid air.

Such is the dizzy entertainment to be found in Cumbria. While the rest of the country was focused on fascist riots in outposts of civilisation like Hartlepool, or on the Olympics in Paris, or Trump’s latest gaffs, or the war in Ukraine, the front page of the weekend Cumberland & Westmorland Herald was describing unprovoked attacks by seagulls in the centre of Penrith, while its cultural supplement carried an article about the Matterdale Paris(h) Olympics. Now that’s what I call real news.

Despite the goings-on in Purgatory, I found myself falling a little in love with Cumbria. The scenery is God’s own and the country people, for all their political proclivities and undoubted support for Brexit, are as kind and as helpful and friendly as their accents are musical. As an alien from France, however, my impression of Penrith, supposedly the gateway to the Lakes, was coloured by charity shops full of old Jim Reeves and Perry Como records and a town centre dominated by unsuitable young mothers, decaying old people on mobility scooters and a conglomerate of the heavily tattooed and shockingly overweight. There is, too, the metropolis of Carlisle at the end of the railway line and I was thinking of going there to check out the local record shops, but I decided that I needed more records like a hole in the head and that the city would probably depress me further. I need a nearby town in my life that I can learn to love and currently can accept no substitute for Brive.

The pace quickened after the disturbing reports of seagull bombardments. The Outlaw’s beloved cat, Omar, whom she took in just after COVID when he was at death’s door, became seriously ill one evening, fighting for his breath like an asthmatic. My wife, the therapist, calmed him with a drop or two of lavender essential oil, but when we took him in to the local vet for his monthly injection, the vet explained that his lungs had probably been permanently damaged by whatever virus had nearly killed him. Effectively, we were keeping him going from one month to the next by an injection of steroids and, in view of the likely upheaval to come and the extreme difficulty of finding someone to take him on willing to shell out £80 each month, maybe the most humane thing to do would be to put him to sleep. Debs told the vet that her mother had often said the same thing about herself. It was difficult to gauge how that one went down.

When we reported back to the Outlaw, it was as if the barrier to her moving had been suddenly lifted: We would put Omar to sleep, cremate him and scatter his ashes over her designated burial plot, and she would move to the care-home where she would receive 24-hour care and everything would be tickety-boo. But guess which cat-loving couple would have the task of escorting this beautiful cat to Death Row.

Find out more in the second part of this missive from Oop North. Learn how our intrepid pair of stand-in carers would deliver their charge to her ruinously expensive new home, breathe a collective sigh of relief and then bear the burden of guilt all the way back home to France…