dementia flood

A call late last night from my father-in-law to inform us that "something had gone wrong" with one of his bath taps and that there had been "a bit of a flood". He is never one to exaggerate; in fact if there had been a thermonuclear explosion in his neighbourhood he would probably have described as "a bit of a bang". When we arrive, we find that half his parlour ceiling has fallen in and there is water everywhere. I find the stopcock and stem the flood, then call my tame builder who is blessedly in and arrives in a whipstitch to make the tap safe. Just how it came to break in the first place is not certain, but my F-i-L is not the best of witnesses.

The poor bugger has advancing Alzheimer's, and, slowly but surely he is losing his capacity to live at home by himself. As so often happens in cases like this, such is the desire for the victim to hang on to their independence that it takes some sort of disaster to provide the lever. And this isn't it. So we'll continue to sit and worry about what he is doing and what sort of scrapes he's getting himself into between our daily visits. It's funny really: I used to feel the same sense of impotent anxiety when my son was out on the streets doing heaven knows what.

Later in the afternoon we visit my mum. She lives alone too, and is two years older than the other party, but importantly has retained most of her faculties. I am given two puzzles to solve, however: first, how to make the DVD work (simple) and how to work the windscreen washer in her new car (slightly trickier, but I got there).

On the whole, then, a good visit.