"You mean you have your hair cut by a girl?" My mother sounds shocked. There are so many aspects of the world since 1960 she has never taken in.
This week I am having to provide more trivial details of my life than ever to fill the silences in our conversations. She is reluctant to put down the phone. My sister is abroad on holiday for a week. My mother's voice is flat. She says she feels bereaved.
"The ordeal is half over" she told me tonight. Sis will be back on Saturday late.
Her psycho-dramatics make me angry - anger that I suppress. Maybe I'm a little bit jealous, too, that my sister is so important that her absence affects her so much. Yet when I was last abroad (for five days, 16 months ago, in France on Eurostar) she was badly ill the week before I went. Often she is ill before these traumatic events (her "children's" holidays). This time her reaction was limited to falling out with Maria, her carer.
My mother has been like this for years and years, but now she has so little else to do. She can't read for long at a time now, and her TV intake is not much more than Coronation Street, because of the strain reading the subtitles. Her radio listening mostly Radio 4 means she get obsessed about the news stories they keep repeating, however unimportant.
On the telephone I have so little to say.
