Sunday before Xmas

Husband has in the last week:

• made many batches of mince pies,
  
• boiled Xmas puddings,
  
• practised making vegetarian pies and soups for the vegetarian visitors,
  
• bought brandy butter (which is delicious on his home baked walnut and sultana bread)
• set up the Christmas tree
• wrapped Christmas presents
• written dozens of cards
  
• put lights on the stair window
• fixed a broken fuse
• explained the problem with the shower to the plumber.

Today I've:

• moved a double bed and two singles into different rooms
• made five beds
• shopped for a new duvet
• done three loads of laundry
• put lights up in the conservatory
• written a dozen Christmas cards
• wrapped some more presents
  

As sister-in-law used to say, "we've been diliging" - that is we've been very diligent and done lots of work.

Roll on Christmas! Let the visitors arrive!

Lost keys

Aunty's getting a new flat, but she's lost the keys already. I've been getting emails and phone calls asking which way we came back from looking at the flat because perhaps we dropped them on the way. Or

"have you put them in your handbag?"

I hope not - but I look anyway. I found a chocolate, which was nice, but no keys.

Where are the blessed keys?

Tight squeeze

My new car is a tighter squeeze into my garage than my old Volvo estate. The door handles and the wing mirrors have a tendency to scrap along the breeze block.

When son visits for a weekend during term time, he borrows a self service pay-as-you-go Golf from Streetcar, and he reverses it into my garage. Goodness knows how he does that. I'm amazed and admire his skill.

Growing old

My mother's loosing her sight. So's my father. She's got the dry type of macular degeneration. They can't do anything for it. My father needs a magnifying glass to read the computer, or any official papers - none of which are ever written big enough.

His sister remarked sadly how he always used to have a book in his hands.

My mother can't see the smudges on her own clothes, but depends on someone else to warn her. If someone comes up to her in the street to say hello she doesn't know from looking at them who it is, so she's asked people to say their name, but they forget she can't see. I forget.

My mother now can't comment on what I'm wearing, whether I look business-like or smart. I miss that. We forget she can't see us, so my father nods when she asks a question, or says things like, "I'm just putting this here" and she can't see what this is or where here is.

I mustn't come into the room silently because she may not hear me, either because she doesn't hear too well now, or because she's listening to tapes. My father has discovered BBC podcasts and is going to download some to burn to a CD for her to listen to on her mp3 player. You need a good friend like that when your facilities fail you and you get dependent on others.

Sheltered housing and councils

I've been visiting octogenarian relatives, partly because one, my auntie has seen a flat in a really nice set of sheltered housing, and wants to move in. This requires working with the district council that provides the housing. Neither relatives nor I have ever had to do that before, and I can't recommend the experience.

I turned up on Tuesday afternoon at two o'clock for a meeting with:

• the housing officer,
• two octogenarian relatives and
• a helpful friend who's done this before through his work with the St Vincent de Paul society.

The brief a relative had given me was that a bedsit was on offer, aunty had seen and liked it, and the meeting was about finance to decide how relative would pay. The council would tell us how much it would cost and we could work out what to do next.

However the housing officer had a different agenda. Apparently, she'd thought the friend who'd rung up to make the meeting had told her that relative was definitely taking the bedsit and would sign there and then.

We were all affronted because

1. the friend is a friend, so the officer had no authority given to her to assume the decision was made
2. at that stage none of us knew anything about the costs, not even how much the rent was.
   

The officer got louder and more agitated, announcing that it wasn't necessary to sign today, but that she had to go at three o'clock (it was a quarter past two). The meeting didn't get any better as we gradually elicited some information from her, but weren't allowed copies of the tenancy agreement to take away and read.

We all left at three without signing anything. We go back on Thursday.

Friend said he'd never been in such an awful meeting and he had some experience of meetings with the council. Aunty complained about the officer's loud voice. The council seemed to have no understanding of the needs of older people. Aunty can't think quickly enough to absorb the information yet this officer was reading the tenancy agreement very quickly. It seems the council expects aunty to sign on Wednesday and pay rent from next Monday. It's all very quick, and the meeting seemed as if aunty was being bulldozed, bludgeoned and bullied into making a decision and signing up to something without full information.

Fortunately, I'd got permission as soon as I'd arrived to record the meeting, so octogenarians could play it back later and listen to the information, ready for the Thursday meeting. In the meantime, I'll ask the CAB for advice on moving into council properties.

Ethical business

Nestle, that huge company that markets baby milk powder in the third world has succumbed to moral and competitive market pressures by announcing its first Fairtrade product - the four fingered Kitkat.

Its cocoa farms have been manned by child slave labour so it is the effort of organisations like StopTheTraffik that have persuaded customers, including school children to stop buying chocolate that comes from such unfair practices. As other companies such as Cadburys moved to Fairtrade, Nestle could only follow.

Stop the traffik's cheerleader, Ruth Darnley, was on my train this morning, delighted at Cadbury and Nestles moves. Despite being blond, petite and female, she and Stop the Traffik have taken on these giant organisations and through the power of the customer got them to change their behaviour and stop traffiking slave labour.

High fives to Stop the Traffik.

Fox on escalator

See http://twitter.com/RadioKate

What she met on the underground!

More working relatives

While I'm blogging about relatives to be pleased to know, I've realised at least two more whose activities may make a difference in the world. My various cousins have several children, two of whom are involved in a petition save the Mansour family from deportation. Here's what a Facebook page says:

Description:
At 7am on Wednesday 1st July neighbours in a Moss Side street watched in horror as the Mansour family were forcibly removed from their home by a large group of police and immigration officials.
Five years earlier, the family led a prosperous and successful life in Egypt. After months of harassment and serious threats to the family, Mr Mansour sought help from the police. Shortly after this he was arrested on false accusations of insulting Islam. He was detained in solitary confinement for seventeen days and tortured.

Having fled Egypt leaving all his possessions behind, he was then helped by the Bishop of the Christian Church he attended who gave him refuge and arranged and paid for his flight out of Egypt. After a short period in Dover, they came to Manchester where they have settled. The children have thrived at school and the family have formed good relationships in school, at church and the wider community.

How then, have we arrived at a situation where the family is in detention awaiting deportation?

After having twice been let down by law firms who despite being paid up front failed to represent the family at vital hearings, their status was downgraded from asylum seeker to illegal immigrant. This has put them in line for immediate deportation. The family fear for their lives if deported and Mr Mansour would almost certainly be arrested and tortured on his return.

What can you do to help?

• Sign the petition at http://www.gopetition.co.uk/online/29140.html
• Email Phil Woolas, Secretary of State for Immigration and Alan Johnson, Home Secretary at: Privateoffice.external@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk
• Pass this message on to as many people as possible to do the same

The Mansour children go to a school not far from where my family used to live, a school that my mother probably visited as part of her work, so they're in my kind of community. See this link to the Catholic Independent News on the campaign.

My cousins' children either work at the Mansour children's school in Whalley Range, or are providing legal representation for them.

Business woman

Looking for dancing costumes, I found my relative in the Times Online here under
How I made it: Anne Walker Founder of International Dance Supplies
My night at the ballet led to £7m dancewear empire

This year's she's won a business woman of the year award here

I'm glad to know we're related - wish I had business skills like hers. What's interesting to note is that she says her success is due to laziness - she has to find the easiest ways of doing things:

"That has been my strength.”

I can lay a claim to laziness too!