Another year on - Pete visiting B on 2nd April 2014

By chance, it happens to be a year since I last uploaded this blog. I guess that one of the reasons that it doesn't happen more often is that things haven't changed very much. As you can see from the photo of B above, she is still in good, rosy health, and is still intermittently in good form.

I am just in Edinburgh for a day, and I spent a few hours with her this afternoon. She seems to go off into a dwalm, saying strange gobbledegook loudly, like "Terres, Terres, Under The Bed, Underneath, Terres, The Eldest One".....and she doesn't really pay attention to what's going on around her when she's like that. So when I arrived, she was muttering away, then she seemed to see me suddenly, saying "How do I know you?". I said "It's Pete", and she said "Of course", becoming all emotional.

Then we had a coherent chat, with B occasionally going off on a random track of "Terres, Terres, Underneath etc". But whenever I said something to her, she'd snap back to reality, and we'd have some more conversation. Sometimes it's hard to know how much of what she says is "real" and how much is "dreamworld". She would say things like "I'm fading, you know", and  "I'm ready to go now", and such statements can sound very profound and meaningful, except that I am not quite sure that B means them in that way. But I took it as it was, and I found it reassuring.

For much of our chat, it really was like talking to the "old" B. I asked her if she realised she'd be 79 on Saturday, and she giggled, saying "Don't be ridiculous". I told her all our news, and she listened, smiling and taking it all in. She occasionally became emotional, but in a kind of happy way mostly.

We tried to phone Fenella and Bill on Skype, and it worked for a little bit - you can hold the speaker up to B's ear and she can talk into the microphone - but then it stopped working. Technology can be frustrating.

Eventually she said "I'm tired now, lovey", so I said my farewells, and I'm staying at Lennox St tonight. Z and myself are driving south in the morning - I have a veterinary conference in Birmingham and he is going on to the 700 year anniversary of Exeter College in Oxford.

It was a lovely trip to see B, and I'm looking forwards to the next one.