A Busy Week Beckons

We are off to St Andrews again on Saturday but we've got a pretty busy week in prospect before we head north. We brought Marion's mum back from her stay in a rest home this morning. The carers said that she coped quite well with the upheaval but she was keen to get back to her flat. So, after joining us for a bite to eat, she returned home in the afternoon. It was only a couple of hours before she telephoned and asked us to come round as she had forgotten how to turn her TV on. After a week relaxing in Kirkby Lonsdale in the safe knowledge that she was being looked after, we are now faced with more uncertainty. She's got a few medical appointments for us to take her to this week but we doubt that much can be done to improve her failing memory.

Memory loss is an early symptom of Alzhiemer's and on Tuesday we are heading to the Philharmonic  in Liverpool to see Glen Campbell (a sufferer of this awful disease) on his farewell tour. I hope that it is a joyful celebration of a life lived to the full rather than a depressing demonstration of the ravages of dementia.

As it is unlikely that we will be full of the joys of spring after going to the matinee performance of We Need To Talk About Kevin at FACT before we head to the Phil. The film is widely acclaimed as a thought provoking study of parenthood and we aren't expecting a barrel of laughs. 

The rest of the week will be taken up with a day trying to finish editing my novel, a day in London when we are visiting our investment advisors and meeting Paul and Josephine for a meal and running Marion's mum around for her appointments. The caravan in St Andrews will be a real oasis when we get there.

We went to see Contagion on Friday when we got back from Cumbria. It's a good, but not great, film about the onset of a deadly virus - a sort of bubonic plague for the twenty first century. It's quite predictable but well filmed, well acted and moves at a good pace. I have strangely found myself going almost OCD with washing my hands since we saw it.

If, like me, you are a bit fed up with all the criminality in the news, you'll be saddened to see that it's even spreading to those lovable and cute creatures - penguins.