Growing Old Gracefully

So we drive 165 miles to visit a 92 year old woman who's lost what little English she had due to two recent strokes.

She can't see us as she's possibly blind in both eyes now, and although we are accompanied by a man who speaks her language, she doesn't acknowledge us. She is not making sense anyway. Her mother and Tito are still alive, if not living together. There is somebody in the home who won't stop singing in Serbo-Croat.

The man who took us to the home is 82. He's pretty sprightly. The only thing he's missing is a sense of direction, understandable when all this used to be fields but isn't any more by any stretch of the imagination. He knocks on three doors for directions as we wonder whether we'll reach the home before we're eligible to be residents there ourselves.

"Don't worry, you'll arrive home before dark," he says later over a calming cup of tea. We don't, thanks to the road-widening on the M1.

Meanwhile at the Masons do my mum's at, things are kicking off. The new generation of hand-shakers are getting pissed as newts, not taking it seriously. If anything they are taking the piss out of Masonry and its customs. Something I regularly do sober.

My widower uncle, a septuagenarian, slowly walks across the expanse of the dance floor to ask a young woman to dance the first dance. He picks her because she is showing a lot of cleavage. Her cups overfloweth. He holds her very close as they smooch. I'm not told what the song is. I'd like to think it's Fat Larry's Zoom. All that's visible of the young floozy is the back of her blonde and red striped straightened hair. The tart, leading him on like that!

And his best friend, who has a history of banter with my mum, decides that tonight is the night to really embarrass her. Instead of giving her a peck on the cheek, he bends her backwards and attempts to snog her. Not once, but twice. The second time he tells her she's got his juices going. They wrestle. She slaps him round the chops.

His wife says he was only getting his own back for previous mickey-taking. But this was going too far. She could have slipped a disc!