Mothering Sunday titles

Step-daughter #2 earns a smile and brownie points for addressing a mother's day card to me like this. She appreciates how much work it is to stop people calling you Ms, or Mrs when your husband's surname isn't the same as the one you use and you've never told them to use Ms or Mrs so why do they think they should change your title to something they've not been told.

Maybe SD#2 'll get a doctorate too one day.

Hyaluronic Acid

Wandering round the local health food shop the assistants, whom I know because I'm often in there, asked me how I was. I had a little moan about the side effects of the aromatase inhibitor drug I have to take and then commented that my skin was also losing its elasticity, which it would do anyway at my age, but seems to have lost more quickly recently. The assistant recommended hyaluronic acid. This sounds wonderful - an anti-aging drug. But being as it's expensive, I thought I'd go and do some research on it first.

Googling just for hyaluronic acid tends to tell you about what it is, how it might work and some of its side effects but it wasn't until I searched for 'hyaluronic acid' and 'breast cancer' together that I got the scariest warning. Don't take hyaluronic acid if you have any cancer, but particularly if you have breast cancer. Hyalonic acid (HA) is recommended for creaky bones as well as for ageing skin - it seems to rejuvenate. BUT its ability to counter-act the side effects of Arimedix may be because it supports/ encourages breast cancer. There appears to be correlation between high HA and breast cancer - though cause is not yet proven. So I repeat:  

Don't take hyaluronic acid if you have any cancer, but particularly if you have breast cancer.

Crumbs and buns

Aged auntie has a support plan. Adult social care services review an old person's needs and sets up support to enable them to carry on living independently. Five years ago, I had nine octogenarian relatives but now only five of them stagger on. Those who died, died still living in their own homes, their own lives into their nineties, but aged auntie can't control her own life any more she forgets - like you all forget "what did I come in this room for?" but she forgets more and more often - like whether she's eaten today, or that she came into this room for her food, that anyone visited her this morning and even how to get home from the shops, and that is scary for her. She's not got Alzheimer's and she can still do the Telegraph cryptic cross word, so you can see how frustrating, demeaning and maddening it is for her to forget every day. If she forgets to eat, she dizzy. If she forgets her medicine, she's in trouble.

Recently, AA sat down with ASC, mental health services, two friends from the Saint Vincent de Paul Society and me and we all her eating, shopping, and other things. The SVP is an interesting organisation. Years ago, AA was an active member, visiting old people in their homes, care homes, sheltered housing or community centres, chatting with them, keeping them company, she threw them crumbs of company and solace, thus making a loved and respected member of her community.

Now her turn has come, and those who watched her as a role model, now watch for her and hence came the SVP members to her review meeting. These are people who deal practically with AA - what I can't do living 200 miles away, people who observe AA getting thinner, and when AA tells ASC that she does her own shopping, shake their heads, so ASC know the real story.
AA built up her relationship with these people years ago; now they respect and even love her. I cannot sing their praises enough. AA's breadcrumbs are floating back to her as currant buns.

Memories are made of stuff

This head scarf is the first present my father gave my mother circa 1947. Eventually she passed it to me with admonishments to look after it, that it was important.

These other photos are of stuff I found in Aged Auntie's flat.

'Stuff' sounds so deprecatory, as if of no importance. But to AA these things are what remind her. Her iron is a professional tailor's iron and extremely heavy and AA was a professional tailor. When I insisted that it had to go because having too much meant that stuff hid important things, she asked me where I'd be taking it. I ventured, 'an antique shop?' to be told that it wasn't an antique and that it was still used professionally and AA had a certain intelligent glint in her eye, so I remembered the Moroccan tailor in our town and said that I'd take it there.

Then AA looked at the old tools I'd pulled out. They were her father's tools. "Chop-chop", she remarked as she looked at his axe - another memory.

Memories are contained in stuff, stuff that brings back memories of other people, other times, lives lived and passed. Memories keep alive, and that's why you don't want to take away old people's stuff, because you take away their memories.

Two men and a car

Yesterday was an interesting day, not only because I spent most of it with two rather nice young men. What is a middle aged woman doing hanging out with two men in their twenties?

My son was searching for his first car and I was taken along as support and potential adviser - he flatters me because I've only once bought a car. Son's friend thought he knew something about cars, and indeed I was impressed that he turned up equipped for the adventure. His kit included:

• magna light
• plastic gloves
• i-phone

He used the light to peer at the car's dark places, under the bonnet, behind the boot, beneath the wheels. And his gloves kept his hands clean when he poked the wheels to find the brakes. This poking the brakes was helpful on the first car we looked at, a Ford Focus in Milton Keynes because he found a lip and suggested that the brakes might soon need to be replaced, and that comment initiated a conversation with the salesman who assured us that the cars his organisation sold did MOTs before they put them up for sale, so the brakes should be safe enough to pass the MOT - you assume. But the Ford Focus was a tad expensive, so we drove home to have some lunch and further perusal of car selling web sites before venturing out again to Luton, via Dunstable.

The Dunstable car site looked a bit dicey being a temporary office on an unmade up lot and the end of a very quiet road on a quiet industrial estate - we only found it because of the hand painted words on the gate-post "Car sales". We turned round and headed off for Luton.

Son's friend now used his smart phone to access Google map to get us to the Luton. Unfortunately, it wasn't a GPS that might have told us about the closed road and the detour and the detour took us down and up a local road with yellow lines each side and cars parked each side and on coming buses so driving life became a bit fraught. My car is on the small side, and if I see a space to pull in, I'll fit, but if on-coming bus decides to carry on on-coming then my car can't reach the space to pull in. I had to reverse down the main road until I reached a junction full of traffic and still no room for on-coming bully-bus. At this point, another driver suggested I reversed into a side-road on the right, which would have meant only two other cars would have to reverse. Fortunately, I realised that if I pulled onto the kerb on the right, then bus could squeeze between me and other parked cars - not sure why bus couldn't pull over more. Doing this meant that I couldn't get back out into the traffic stream until son's friend turned up sterling. He jumped out of the car, stopped the traffic to let me back into the flow and jumped back in. We decided that we weren't going to come home that route.

The delay meant it was nearly dusk by the time we arrived at the next car sales, a muddy lot tended by a bearded Muslim, with some others collecting and tipping barrels of sand into the muddy ruts. The car was a Nissan Almera and S'sF immediately noticed some damage to the rear bumper and a check revealed the car had been rear shunted. He peered at its engine - his torch now being essential as the light went, but every thing else seemed acceptable. Son, S'sF and Muslim salesman started negotiations over MOT, documents, price, means of payment, when to pay.

Suffice it to say, son has bought his first car and I expect to see more of him now he can drive over here without the hassle of a long slow bus journey at inconvenient hours. So maybe I won't have to drive him places again, but neither will I get the chance to drive his friends around too. End of another era, start of a new.

Learning when you're 60

It's a bit disturbing to a newly turned 60 year old to read that Brain function can start declining 'as early as age 45'

My first reaction was that they would get that result if they tested only on civil servants, British civil servants - which is a bit rude of me to imagine that civil servants might start losing brain function earlier than other working people. But then seriously, when I looked at the age cohort - 45-70 over ten years - I had to wonder if perhaps these people were stuck in the same job, still employed after ten years, so had no reason to use their brains, never learned anything new. If you're 55 say, and have secure employment and a pension to retire on at sixty, then what motivation do you have to learn new skills, memorise new material, practise something new, when you can carry on doing what you've been doing for perhaps thirty years. And if you don't use it, then you lose it.

If you haven't played netball for years, then do you imagine that you can still run around like you used to? If you haven't spoken French for years, then can you remember all the vocabulary you used to have? Is it then surprising that the muscles you used to use to play games no longer work? Is it surprising that you've forgotten how to learn a language? NO!

Five years ago I struggled to learn new moves in tae kwon do. Five years ago I struggled to understand new theories and concepts in business and social science. I struggled to write academic papers, and I struggled to make new physical patterns. I still struggle. BUT, I know that I can learn them. I realised this when I started to dance and found that some of the movements I'd practised at tae kwon do were transferable to dancing. Ergo, since I've done a lot of learning in the last five years, some of the academic skills I've learned must transfer to other contexts.

I recommend life-long learning.

New years' travelling plans

You don't want to spend a fortune on air tickets to another continent and then not stay for more than a couple of weeks. I have such a dilemma in that I haven't been to see my brother in the States for 16 years. I last went to visit brother and his wife in 1996 when they paid for us to spend Christmas with them after my husband had died in August. Christmas promised to be very bleak that year, and I was devastated, deep in mourning. Since brother & wife hadn't been able to fly over for the funeral, which would have been an utter waste of money to fly so far for a couple of days for the sake of someone dead, brother paid for daughter, son and me to fly to Vegas and to stay with them for three weeks. Son had three weeks holiday from his new school, and I just took daughter off for the last week of her school term without even asking permission.

I remember those weeks well, brother's very sensitive care for all of us, sister-in-law's welcome and companionship, and they kept us busy. They took us to visit the Vegas casinos (keep within the paths because we were with children), see the white lion, and the first time I saw Cirque du Soleil. I'd never heard of it then, but it was the most amazing circus, with no words, just acrobats, and clowns. They weren't nice clowns though. SiL told us that we weren't going to have seats near the front in case the clowns picked on us. And we watched one poor man following a clown who had his tickets and was showing him to his seat, along the aisle, along a row, over the back of some seats, along another row, over the back of some seats, then the clown tore up the tickets! The poor man was stranded.

But I haven't been to see brother & SiL since. They've come here several times, and
my son has visited them twice, but I've not been there. Mainly I've been engrossed in bringing up my children, first on my own, then I remarried, and have been building relationships with my new family, and husband had paid work too and didn't retire until 2008, by which time I was well into my PhD, so couldn't travel too much - except for that trip to India for the Navjote. I could travel to academic conferences for my studies, and even got the expenses covered, so I managed to get to a very eminent conference in Canada in 2010. This year I presented at a conference slightly closer to home, in Amsterdam. Now I have no academic affiliation that will support me at conferences, so I'll probably only go to a couple in Oxford, and might even gate-crash those, depending on how much they cost.

So I want to go and see brother & SiL in 2012. I've arranged my Open University tutoring so that I am free in September for two or three weeks, and husband's agreed to it, though he hasn't yet agreed to more than two weeks and we haven't yet booked our tickets. I expect we can do more than just stay with brother & SiL like I did last time, because now we don't have lots of children to look after. In 1996, SiL had three children and I had my two. I visited them earlier in 1988 when between us we had five children under school age, and we went nowhere but the supermarket, which was my excitement of the holiday - I'd never been in an American supermarket or anywhere in America for that matter. So my previous two trips to the States haven't been very good, and I've had little to entice me back, but this time husband and I might hire a car and go some other places too, like the Grand Canyon, or Zion National Park, and if we go in September, SiL says the temperature is good and we could go alpine hiking up Mt Charleston or visit their holiday hut.

Maybe husband and I will visit India in 2013, or I wonder when I could visit with daughter. When I was in India in 2008, I watched all those young women, and I missed my 17 year old daughter, and I watched them together and thought that she would get on with them. But daughter is finishing her first degree this year and may have a job without much leave in 2013, so she won't have the time to come with me. On the other hand, she loves linguistics, and has just spent a year studying maths in French in France before returning to Bristol to finish her maths degree, and is considering taking a masters in linguistics. At the moment she's looking at studying in Dublin or Wales, and she's job hunting. I wonder if she could study languages of India or linguistics in India. Then spending money to visit India with her in 2013 wouldn't seem like a waste of a fortune.