Another late night…
It is late. It has been another busy day and it is not over yet. I have still to return my son whence he came… Hades comes to mind. Once, that is, he has finished wallowing in my carefully hoarded and steaming bath water. The very same for which I had plans tonight. Plans, I might add, that involved the delicious scent of lavender oil and rose, with perhaps a soupçon of dittany to aid the nice, relaxed dreams that were sure to follow. Instead, I am on taxi duty and by the time I get back home again it will be later still and I will probably not care about the bath.
I don’t exactly mind. I can sympathise with his desire to wallow. A shower is all very well for getting clean but I wouldn’t swap his Italian chrome and travertine marble for my simple white tub, not for anything. Sometimes, wallowing is good for the soul. As well as all the other bits.
Even so, the thought of yet another drive into town tonight is less than appealing. There is something about the denizens of the road on a Friday night that I do not care for. People who have finished their working week seem intent on relaxing as hard as possible and their grim determination seems reflected in the way many of them drive … and the long, dark road is a fast one connecting the villages to the town. Not a road to drive when you are tired.
Every so often I ask my son if he’s trying to kill me. He generally grins and replies that he’s doing his best. It usually involves a requirement for something physically impossible for one of my diminutive stature. Like perching precariously on kitchen worktops or shifting his weights vest … which weighs about as much as me… or trying out a new piece of exercise equipment. Or worse still, installing it, then trying it out.
I have, on numerous occasions, pointed out that I am not insured and that my untimely demise would only leave him with a bill to foot for my obsequies but this does not seem to deter him at all. He appears to think the local council won’t leave me above ground too long if I snuff it. On that score, at least, he probably has a point.
This time, however, he has surpassed himself with the projected journey next Friday. He wants me to go to London. In the car.
Not, I hasten to add, the bit of London with all the nice museums and churches and history and stuff. No… the bit with traffic, airports and the M25 between me and it. On a Friday. Which, if it doesn’t finish me off for him, should at least ensure I end up a gibbering wreck. And as I will once again be on taxi duty, he will get to watch. At least he is no longer surprised by my command of gutter English, which is something to be thankful for…in his teens, he taught me pretty much all I know.
I don’t really mind the drive next week… it will, after all, take us through some lovely countryside and past the grandeur of Windsor Castle and Hampton Court Palace by way of Runneymede where the Magna Carta was signed. What bugs me about it is the necessity. We are going to a specialist orthotics appointment… which is good. What bugs me is that, like so much of my son’s recovery, it is a private appointment at his own expense, the health service having provided no rehabilitation for him since 2010, a year after the attack that left him unable to walk.
The report from that final official physio appointment… of which a copy was also sent to my son… stated that his goal of walking again was ‘unrealistic’. A word which has since become a byword and spur for his constant efforts to prove them wrong. It gets to me sometimes how any system can so easily dismiss hope and the power of the human spirit based on no more than statistics and economics. I can understand the need to apportion strained resources to where they are deemed to be of most use… but not the curt dismissal of hope.
For now, however, he is cooling down and drying off in my spare room, attended by a small dog ecstatic at having one of her boys to cuddle. He had, quite unrealistically, taken himself up the stairs on his own two feet. He will, equally unrealistically, get himself back down the stairs too. Soon, I will take him home to a place he walks around unrealistically on his own two feet and, where, late or not, I will apparently get to electrocute him… so it isn’t that bad an evening after all.
