Jeremy Clarke Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 13 June 2019

There can’t be much wrong with the world with headlines like these

As usual I go downstairs at five o’clock in the morning and into the dining room, which now serves as my mother’s bedroom. She generally sleeps fitfully until about four, punctuated by visits to the lavatory, the door of which is beside her bed, on the side she sleeps on. These visits are undertaken with the deliberation and the creeping slowness of a two-toed sloth. One wonders how she manages it.

After she wakes she lies there, praying for everybody, I expect, until this zombie appears at five. I help her on with her dressing gown and day socks and assist her on the ten-yard expedition from the bed to the recliner chair in the adjoining sitting room. Finally I draw back the curtains on the surreal, pink-tinged clouds of another June dawn.

But this morning the bed is empty. The lavatory door is firmly closed, however, and it’s safe to assume she’s in there. I listen at the door but hear no movement. Perhaps she is concentrating. I won’t disturb the poor thing, I decide. Instead I go into the kitchen to make up her breakfast tray and count out the day’s tablets. Then I bear the tray in, expecting her by now to be either sitting on the bed or pushing her trolley ahead of her on her way to her recliner.

Still no sign of her in either room. (The rooms are divided by glass-panelled double doors, one of which is permanently open.) The lavatory door remains shut. I park myself in her recliner to wait for her to finish. The local paper is tucked under a cushion. While I wait, I read it.

The front-page headline is ‘Parking problems at superstore site — man’s penalty charge overturned on appeal’.

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