Oh, Mother!

My Mum was 94 last Thursday: and yesterday she grabbed a towel instead of a grab handle (she'd had the most convenient one removed because she felt it was in her way) and fell over and broke her hip. So now she's in hospital in Warwick, having it mended - or possibly partially replaced - and she'll be there the next ten days. My Dad, who is something of a victim, apparently perked up as soon as they took Mum off in the ambulance, and has been much more lively and awake than usual, watching television and generally taking an interest. It worries me that Mum doesn't let him watch TV, she's blind so she can't see it and so she kept telling him to 'turn off that racket' until he stopped bothering to turn it on. And so, denied the only pleasures he has left, because he's pretty immobile and at present can't even be taken outside the house, he sits and dozes all day - but what else is there for him to do! Mum listens to talking books, but both of them must be pretty bored with the daylight hours when the carers aren't there. I think they'd be happier in a home, but Mum won't hear of it. It's a bit daft, though, when they build flats for old people where every door has a step up to it, and the main entrance is into a porch about three feet square with a right angled turn to get into the house - not the remotest possibility of wheelchair access.

Meanwhile they live in temperatures that would make a sauna seem cool, expending energy with gay abandon as if the planet had no tomorrow. And this, too, worries me: in a home they would at least be sharing the energy use with many others. Their electricity bill is over £80 per month, and that's not keeping pace with their useage - and that's in the summer! I want to get a room thermometer to see just how hot it is in there, but it won't make any difference: when my mother has decided she wants something, she decides everyone else wants it too and that is what will happen, and evidence to the contrary is just not welcomed. As a child, I never had to work out what I wanted, because Mum told me: it took me ages in later life to learn how to develop my own tastes, and even now I have problems over choosing what I want.

But I wonder, now, how far old people generally don't see green issues as relevant to them. Neither of my parents has much sense of taste left: fresh organic chicken to them tastes the same as frozen battery cardboard, and they can't really chew meat at all anyway. My mum always has an excuse - it's undercooked, it's overcooked, it's too dry or whatever: and she can't see what she's eating which must make it very hard for her. But the carer who shops for her has no idea at all about the Planet, and buys a curious mixture of 'the Best' expensive stuff which she can't appreciate and the cheap 'value' brand which is mostly factory produced food. When I'm there I transform their shopping and eating, and if I get moved down there I can do it all for them: but there must be millions of older people for whom the kind of issues even faint-hearted greenish people like me think are important just don't exist. And what, pray, do we all do about that, without abusing the elderly?