Here in Australia we are two days away from spring after a very wet winter. Monday is the first day of spring and I am going to celebrate but I’m not sure how yet. Perhaps I will buy another camellia tree like this one from which I take flowers in to Anthony every second day.
The other day I gave one each to the two women I play cards with during my volunteering hours. Gift-giving rules are very strict at the nursing home but I figure flowers can’t do anyone any harm, although Nat would prefer the chilli-garlic olives I used to bring in until reprimanded (risk of choking etc.)
And here is Ming with his little second-hand car, ‘Fran’. He has named her ‘Fran’ after the character in the comedy series Black Books, one of our favourites. As it happens, I am about to take this series into the nursing home to play on Anthony’s new DVD player. I took The IT Crowd in a couple of weeks ago and, even though Anthony slept through some of the two episodes I played, he woke up with a bit of a smile every time I guffawed, which was often.
The strange phenomenon in which Anthony sometimes thinks that what is happening on the television screen is happening in his room comes and goes. I only discovered this by accident one evening months ago when I rang him and he asked me to pick him up from Burekup (a nearby town) from an Aboriginal ceremony. At first I thought this was him hallucinating (a Parkinson’s disease symptom) but then I heard the background noise of his television which turned out to be a documentary about an Aboriginal ceremony; I could even hear the chanting! Now that we are watching Midsomer Murders every weekday afternoon from 3.30 – 5pm (another one of Anthony’s favourites, mainly because of the English countryside, the classic cars and the big old houses – not the murders), I sometimes worry that he will get scared. But seeing as this is probably the most benign ever of murder shows, it never happens and anyway he can no longer follow plots. I have gotten into the habit of checking the television guide before I leave every night and leaving the television on a channel that isn’t going to be showing a horror movie, or something like that. Ironically, this is usually the ABC news station.
Well, I better get going!
