It was a comfort, the other day, to hear the actor who played Logan Roy in Succession say he is always forgetting what he has come to get as he moves from one room to another. But how on earth, I wondered, was he going to carry on in live theatre when so forgetful. Only a few days later, I happened to meet a mostly out-of-work actor who is quite often employed as a kind of super-prompter or horse-whisperer, able to feed an ageing actor his or her lines throughout a performance.
A full-time carer is, of course, the ideal answer when life becomes unmanageable and family is not at hand, but very few can afford this luxury and, when drawing up our wills, my solicitor warned against the phantom – he named her Agatha, for ease of reference – who might move in on my husband should I die before him. It seems widowers often take the Agatha route. The speed with which they re-marry is phenomenal. Does a decrepit eighty-five year old with a handsome pension really think it is him this sixty-year-old widow is in love with?
Be that as it may, most of us don’t have full-time carers and just have to make the best of it, treating the traipsing from one room to another – looking for we no longer remember what – as useful exercise, while we focus on finding new ways to do things.
In my own case, I have not yet found a way of opening a can which doesn’t have a ring to pull and was almost reduced to tears by a tin of rice pudding.
But though I was defeated by that, most problems prove to be solvable. For instance, bread can be defrosted on a radiator, and applying a bit of ink to the exact spot on my leg where there was a hole in my tracksuit made the hole disappear.
Less successful was hammering two frozen salmon fillets to try and separate them. Not only did the noise bring my lodger hurtling downstairs to see what was happening but the fillets, like an old married couple, would not be separated and were eventually cooked as one.
And then there were was the pack of sausages I had put in the freezer without separating them first. My friend Gill advised me not to be tempted to throw them at the kitchen floor, a method she had tried, breaking a floor tile but leaving the sausage sculpture intact.
It seems that I will just have to wait until I can face having sausages four nights running or, perhaps, a sausage party . . .
There isn’t, alas, an easy solution to all the problems of old age and, as I go from room to room (looking again for I no longer remember what), I often think of the Mary Feilding Guild residential home, now sold down the river, where my friend Mary Hobson lived happily in one room with everything she needed within easy reach.
