This week I recieved a call from my Mum, she had the ear piece on an d the phone volume turned upto 11, shes getting deafer and deafer, and Dad is increasingly absent from idle chat any more on the telephone. Its pretty frustrating for me and i’m sure for them too. They don’t use the internet and emails barely, printing off reams and reams of email chains, destroying a Bruntingthorpe sized patch of rainforest as they go, the paper piling high, like a gigantic suggestion of paper cuts.

So Dad is having trouble having a piss and Mum has had diarrhoea, she’s never ill, my Mum, I think she’s shitting herself that Dad is sick. Christ what it must be to be mid to late 80’s, largely computer illiterate, a good hour and a half from your son (me) and unable to hear everything, and speak much without getting flustered. They’re trying to sort out a visit to a urologist at hospital, but to get this they have to see a GP, so as the GP can give them a referral letter. The queue for and appointment with the GP is 2 weeks. Dad could be ok by then, he’s already delighted in telling me he’s mowed the lawn, but he could het worse, and/or the problem could hide and then manifest itself again, further towards winter when judging by the amount of football matches with near full capacity crowds, and the Balearics coming into the green list of countries we are loud to infect, then I’d say we’re heading for another lockdown.

Today I was given a glimpse through the opaque, cracked strengthened glass window of the NHS and what Brexit and the Pandemic has done to it, and us. We are fucked, and no amount of “Why can’t we just walk into our small local surgery” from my 1980’s locked parents will cure anyones ills, let alone theirs. The NHS is underfunded, underpaid and in danger of folding in on itself, there’s a substantial minority of people who by virtue of their inability to use modern gadgets, hear, speak and live miles away from their kids, who can only do so much at the drop of a hat, who will suffer soon and into the near future. My mate N always said we’re fucked, and now i’m starting to believe him.

After spending several long times on the phone to various people at hospitals, surgeries and call centres we’ve sorted out an appointment next week for met Dad, and My Mum’s bottom has dried out, if only I could conjour up some sort of doppelgänger of my namesake to go and live in the attic at Tudor Towers then we could both keep an eye on them, from here and there. 

Thank Fuck for lovely hardworking people at the NHS, they are the lifeblood of the country who deserve to be lifted above bankers particularly and pretty much everyone else in importance and first to the dinner queue.