The Night of the Space Alien

 

A space alien has made land-fall – or should that be planet-fall – at our house on the hill and she is not a pretty sight. She used to be a grumpy grandma but now she’s condemned to a breathing mask at night she looks, not to put too fine a point on it, ridiculous. Just as the knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone and the thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone, so is the breathing mask connected to a hose which is connected to a machine which is connected to a water reservoir and the whole box and dice helps me to breathe properly in the wee small hours.

As is frequently the case, when you’re diagnosed with some ailment or disease or the like, you immediately hear about lots of others who’d been suffering from the disease for years. Thus many of you out there will have correctly diagnosed Sleep Apnoea– in my case Severe Sleep Apnoea. It’s so new in my life I had to double-check how to spell it. Should the breathing apparatus work – and there’s every chance it will – I may regain some of my rapidly depleting memory as well as my good humour; the grandchildren will be happy about that. It may also help me lose weight (some chemical does something or another when you’re not getting enough oxygen overnight which leads to accumulating avoirdupois).

Back to grumpiness and the grandchildren for a moment. Most of you know that the schools in Sydney are closed. For I think it’s been five weeks now, I’ve been the principal of “Grandma School”; pupil numbers – one seven-year-old with ants in his pants. The more wriggly he gets the grumpier I am. There’s also, as I’ve mentioned before, the new words and ways in which children these days are taught. So when I write additions in the old-fashioned way with one number underneath another and a dear little plus sign to one side, I feel like I’m being very naughty. However, this too shall pass, although I think there’s a good chance there will be no more school this term.

“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” wrote T. S. Eliot in The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. For close to 50 years, I measured my life in speeding bullets. Now I've retired into full-time grandmotherhood, I still can't measure my life in slow, small spoonfulls. In some ways it's still hectic, but it is measured differently. For instance, my day could be broken up into the time between kitchen duties, largely washing up, the need for which occurs as regularly as a metronome's tick. Then there's the time, in happier days, between taking grandchildren to school in the morning and picking them up in the afternoon.

When some of the five grandchildren were still at kindie, these trips need to be planned with my daughter and daughter-in-law with military precision. For example, on Mondays I took one grandchild to school in the morning but picked up two in the afternoon. I took one small fellow to kindie in the morning, but most days he was picked up by mum. Alternatively, that mum sometimes picked up the middle child of the other mum (my daughter-in-law) as she passed HER kindie on the way back from work (before the era of work-from-home). Some days I looked after the smallest fellow and other days his older sister. Now with just one of the five not yet at school the permutations and combinations are likely to be endless if school and after-school activities ever return.

Another way my time is measured is the time between laundry loads. As most of you know, I live with my daughter, her partner and two of the grandchildren and the two boys generate an enormous amount of washing. But as Parkinson's Law has it, “work expands to fill the time available for its completion”. In these retirement days – well, retirement from paid employment – I have more time, so inevitably my washload increased. Pre COVID, I soaked the filthy school white shirts while pondering why schools insist on white shirts; black would surely be more reasonable. I spend a great deal of time folding the washing for both boys as they tend to put everything in the dirty washing basket including clothes they took from their wardrobes, changed their minds about wearing and threw into the basket.

However I’ve recently decided that the time between my current state of occasional forgetfulness and the final curtain is not going to be just housework. I’ve decided to write this blog, learn Italian, achieve an MPhil or a PhD and have a local gallery fancy my artwork. All of which has made me finally understand the marvellous words of the poet Dylan Thomas:

“Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Aristocratic old lady to police officer inquiring into the murder of Lord Lucan’s nanny, 1974.

“Oh dear, what a pity. Nannies are so hard to come by these days.”