Before she broke her hip, my mother was going through old letters. She rang me and asked whether I wanted to keep my letters to her. “Nope,” I said, “I didn’t even know you still had them, throw them out.”

I’ve been spending a lot of time in my parents’ house since then and I found the big black bag of letters in the dining room waiting to be sent for recycling. I started to leaf through them. The first thing that astonished me was that there were so many of them. I wrote a lot of letters from airports. And then from when I lived in Brussels and before that in Rome. I seemed to spend every spare minute I had writing letters [and I know that I wrote to friends as well - I was clearly a writing machine]. They had, I regret to say, no great literary merit but thematically they seemed to cover: looking for jobs; asking for money and thanking my parents for money already received. I was certainly reminded of the extent to which my loving parents had bankrolled my early years in the work place. No wonder they were so relieved when I finally managed to get properly paid employment as opposed to my time doing traineeships and internships.

I let the letters go into the bin. I suppose they stopped when email got going, sometime between 1995 and 1998. Imagine, I am from the last generation of people who routinely putting pen to paper to share news. Who would have thought?

This event is likely to send me to an early grave. I was trapped into joining the organising committee and I am just not cut out for this kind of thing. It’s like a continuation of work by other means. At the lengthy meetings we usually fail to reach conclusions and all of the real work seems to be done elsewhere [how much have I enjoyed dropping in requests for funding, cakes and spot prizes to struggling local businesses?]. The parish priest keeps coming in and being anxious about insurance. We can’t have a stage, lest someone should fall. We will have to know the provenance of all cakes for insurance reasons. I can’t for the life of me see why. He says we can take names and phone numbers of the little old ladies who make cakes and if anyone gets ill we can show we made reasonable efforts. The parish priest and I had words on this point. I was tempted to say that this will make us “data controllers” but wiser counsels prevailed. He also insisted that no unaccompanied children under 18 should be allowed to attend. How we are supposed to police this is beyond me.

Worst of all though, I had to make an announcement at mass about the forthcoming excitement. This did not seem particularly challenging. Doesn’t my 10 year old daughter go on to the altar every Sunday and read a prayer of the faithful? Am I not used to making presentations at work? All I had to do was read out the printed text in front of me. I am good at reading. I bounded up on to the altar and surveyed the church. Do you know what, those Victoian gothic churches are built on massive lines. It was the largest space I had ever addressed. And although congregations are falling I thought, as I surveyed the large numbers looking up at me, they could do with falling a bit further. I started to read. I was quavery and short of breath. It was terrifying. I returned to my pew, absolutely mortified. Herself hissed at me, “You were terrible!” Worse, the little old lady beside me said, “You did fine.” After mass, I said to Mr. Waffle, “Tell me honestly, how bad was it?” “Well,” he said, “remember everyone has forgotten about it now except you.” Pause. “It was just the way you sounded like you were going to cry and that the announcement was really sad when you were talking about a party; that was a bit unfortunate.” Oh the mortification. And, of course, I have to go back and see the same people every Sunday forever. Oh horrors. I think I will cry now.

We have been in the new house for ages now. It still seems extraordinary that it belongs to us. It is so lovely. The Princess and I went back to inspect the old house, the other day and she shed a few tears. It is hard to move and it still feels a little bit strange.

But I hope that we will all settle in well in our new house. The neighbours have been in with wine, champagne and scented candles and have children of appropriate ages who are company for our lot. The mirror has been hung up over the fireplace. The cat is settled. She has managed to lose her collar and magnetic yoke to open the cat flap. We have taped over the magnetic bits of the cat flap so that she can come in anyhow. A strange cat has taken advantage of these new arrangements and wandered up to the landing to have a look around. Michael spotted the strange cat and shouted loudly, and unhelpfully, “Cat!” Nevertheless, cat collar difficulties aside, all seems very promising.

My mother had her operation yesterday and it all seems to have gone well. I do think Irish hospitals are good at operating and treating people, it’s just the ancillaries that seem to be sadly lacking. Anyhow, her recovery will be slow enough and she won’t be discharged until next week and then probably to somewhere they can do rehabilitation but the prospects look reasonably rosy. Thanks for the good wishes.

Keep your fingers crossed for her please or pray to your gods, if appropriate.

I have not blogged for a while. This is largely because I have moved house and my evenings are taken up with finding places to put everything and wondering why on earth we own so many pictures.

I have taken a break from stashing old CDs in drawers and come to Cork this weekend. This was an unplanned trip. My mother fell and broke her hip on Saturday. This is a bank holiday weekend in Ireland. My father broke his hip on St. Patrick’s weekend which was also a bank holiday weekend. He is recovering well at this stage so, I suppose, it was time for some additional bank holiday drama.

My sister went into the hospital with my mother at 3 pm. She and my brother stayed with her in rotation to midnight. At about 9 pm she got an x-ray and got moved from a seat to a trolley (triumph!). I got the train from Dublin and arrived in A&E about midnight (last train which featured engineering works at Mallow and a bus transfer from there to Cork – what’s not to love?). I spent from midnight to 4 am sitting beside my mother’s trolley in the corridor. About 6 or 7 other people were in the corridor on trolleys. Chances of sleeping were close to zero given the bright lights and people rushing around and chatting away loudly (clearly, all that money spent on health insurance was money well spent – thank you VHI).

There were no call bells in the corridor (obviously) and the staff were running around, so the chance of an older, softly spoken woman getting a glass of water or a trip to the toilet without a mouthy relative to hand were low.

About 1 am an exhausted young doctor with a large spot on one cheek (sympathy) turned up. She said in almost one breath (delivery entirely flat) “I’m the orthopaedic doctor on duty. Is this your mother? Sorry, no one should have to be on a trolley and no one should suffer with a broken hip for more than 24 hours. It will probably be Tuesday or Wednesday before she is operated on.” Then she drifted off into the night. We had had our 2 minutes of bank holiday doctor.

At 3 am the nurse on duty said to me, “It’s quieter now, do you want to go home?” I decided to give it another half hour. At 3.30 am I went to the desk to tell the nurse that I was leaving. “She’s on her break, she’ll be back in half an hour.” I decided to stay until she came back and about 4 am two people came and started moving my mother’s trolley. The excitement, a bed had become available. How does that work? Did someone die? Did someone move? Did someone new come on duty? They were, presumably, not discharging patients in the middle of the night. A mystery. After 13 hours in A&E, a bed on a ward with a call bell and curtains and the possibility of turning off the light seemed really fantastic. I wasn’t even particularly resentful as I gave the nurse the details of Mum’s drug regime for other conditions. This was the third time that evening – we had already given the information twice in A&E. The first time we gave them our printed sheet but they lost that, second time I gave it from the list on my phone. The nurse noted it but the file didn’t seem to have travelled to the ward. How does it work for patients whose families aren’t there? I saw an elderly gentleman who was clearly confused sitting on a trolley, opening and closing his mouth. I wonder how they will sort out his drug regime?

I was disappointed but not entirely surprised when the hospital called in the morning to ask us to bring in Mum’s medicines as their pharmacy wouldn’t open until Tuesday. My brother and I spent most of today in the hospital trying (largely unsuccessfully) to persuade my mother to eat the rather unappetising hospital food and supplements we brought in ourselves (to be fair, equally unpopular). She was to fast from midnight with a view to having her operation tomorrow – but I recalled the words of the tired doctor and didn’t believe that they really would operate on Monday. That didn’t make me or the patient any less disappointed when, at 10 this evening, we were told that the operation wouldn’t be tomorrow.

I have to go back to Dublin tomorrow afternoon and my sister is in Spain for work for the week so I think my brother is going to have a tough week.

With one thing and another, my father is often called upon to visit hospitals. The Bons Secours hospital presents particular difficulties, as he pointed out to me, because when he phones for a taxi to go to out patients, he gives the name the full French flourish and the dispatcher is baffled and then goes, “Oh you mean the BONS!”

My father has returned from hospital to the bosom of his family. They were kind to him in the hospital; fixing his hip, giving him birthday cake and delivering newspapers to his room between 8 and 8.30 (ah private healthcare). My sister phoned me the day of the operation and she was in his room and she said to me, “Do you want to talk to him?” “Not unless he wants to talk to me,” I said and I could hear him in the background saying, “Not unless she has something particular to say.” Later, I said to her, “You know, I was worried, he is not as young as he once was and he could have died under a general anaesthetic.” “Well then,” she said, “you would have had the comfort of knowing that your last interaction with him was utterly typical.”

All the same, I am very relieved that he is at home and on the road to recovery.