A letter from Archie Norman, chairman of M&S, popped into my inbox after I complained that I had run over my foot with a changing room door.
It wasn’t a personal letter, rather a generic response, and this was a relief because I would not have liked the actual Archie Norman to have actually seen the complaint email I sent with a close-up picture of my bruised black, grazed and manky-looking foot.
When you complain to a chain store about their weirdly heavy and not-quite-coming-all-the-way-to-the-floor changing room doors, the last thing you want, really, is a reply from someone you once had lunch with when you were suited and booted as a political correspondent.
Dear me, the former MP would have thought, I never would have guessed this is what her feet look like.
But, as it turned out, Archie Norman writes to everyone who complains about M&S, and it’s a nice touch, even if it is automated. Many more emails from every kind of manager responding to my manky foot followed.
I didn’t have time for any of it, what with dealing with my father’s heart attack and my mother’s dementia, but I complained because it was one of those last straw moments. I had taken my poor mum to Marks & Sparks to cheer her up and, while flustered dealing with her, rushed out of this very cramped changing room with a huge door that didn’t quite meet the floor and dragged the door over my foot, all but mangling it.
I made clear in the email: nothing broken, no real harm done. But I thought I ought to say, especially as the staff member in the changing room at the time ignored me howling in pain and had a go at me for not giving her back all the hangers for the clothes my mum and I were about to buy.
M&S sent me so many apology emails about this, I lost count after seven. A couple of packs of knickers would have done just as well, but I’m not a freeloader so I didn’t ask.
It was also partly my fault for being in a state about my parents’ failing health. After my dad had his heart unblocked, I employed a full-time carer for my mother so I could fly back to Ireland for two days to try to put my imploding life back together: the plumbers were walking off the job with me not there to say ‘this shower here, that bath there’; the dog had inhaled dust from the drilling and had to be rushed by me to the vet for a lung X-ray; the BB couldn’t do it, he had been kicked in the back by my thoroughbred while leading her out to the field and was barely able to walk. With my mum crying on the phone to me in the night, disorientated without me, I then got on a flight back to Birmingham.
As I walked through arrivals, I tripped over the case of the man walking in front of me and fell over. I didn’t even feel the pain.
I took my mother’s blood pressure and it was fine, then I took mine because I felt strange and I was in stage two hypertension.
My dad was now recuperating from having these clots pushed through his arteries.
My mother was either weeping with fear when I left her for even five minutes, or yelling at me for daring to help her. I tried to arrange ongoing care, but she chased the carers away. They’re not much use anyway.
They come and look at the blister packs with her meds in and say: ‘I can’t give meds. We ain’t trained for it.’
The Alzheimer’s Society rang and said they needed to close a query raised by my father about attendance allowance. I said: ‘Oh God, can you help us?’ And the lady said: ‘I need to do data capture. Please put your mother on the phone.’
I said my mother had no data in her head to capture. ‘We need information about religion and ethnicity.’ I said she didn’t know what religion or ethnicity she was. This woman said: ‘But I need it.’ I said: ‘You can need it all you want, dear, you’re not getting it.’
And I put the phone down. The veins in my head were pounding. I’m also sure dementia is catching. I was starting to not know the day of the week. I was starting to not understand traffic lights.
They wouldn’t discharge my father until I said I would be there full time. So I said I would.
They judged that he can’t care for her or she him, but they don’t have a care package for them either.
I did everything I could for them, and when he got home he ripped a strip off me because he couldn’t find the wind-up key to the grandfather clock.
Then they started ripping strips off each other. The only thing they agreed on was that I should go. I don’t even know how to argue any more.
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