Driving home for Christmas and the conditions were not too bad on the whole. Some of the surrounding fields had a covering of snow, but the M4 was ice free and the traffic was not as bad as I had feared. I only saw the aftermath of one accident. It didn't look too serious, though the car that I passed was being lifted on to a truck and had a serious scrunch around its rear passenger side wheel. No one would have got hurt, but it wouldn't have been a great start to the holiday for the driver.
Towards Bristol there was thick traffic and fog and I managed to check my phone to discover that my family were all heading out to Wells already to see my 98 year old Grandma who now lives in a home. I had considered leaving my sat nav at home as I know the way to Cheddar, but thank God I had brought it along as I would never have found the place without it. As it was my dad gave me the wrong postcode (which he says he got off the Home's website), but I was able to find the correct one on what looked like the Home's website. Maybe a competitor has set up a rival website designed to stop people getting to the place if they have a sat nav.
Grandma looked pretty well as she munched on some chocolate cake and drank some tea, though as has been the case for quite a few years now she had no idea who I was. I gave her a kiss anyway and hope that the sight of this corpulent, long-haired lunk didn't scare her too much. She made a good show of covering her lost memory, but it was clear that she didn't really know who any of us were. She even told me that we had never met before. The only option is to laugh at the cruelty of nature. And yet when she was told that my niece (her great granddaughter) was half French, Grandma managed to instantaneously recall a couple of French phrases, as well as requesting that Emily might teach her more.
The echo of the grandma that I adore and who stayed fit and active and sharp as a tack well into her late 80s is still hidden in there somewhere, but ultimately I could only hope that I would not end up in this position, surrounded by people I didn't recognise, trying to bluff my way through, saying and doing things that would be forgotten themselves in a matter of moments.
"It's Christmas tomorrow," said my mum as a member of staff wheeled my gran back to her room.
"It's Christmas every day for Doris," I chipped in, not with any deliberate meanness. I was just trying to make the point that one day is the same as the next for her. She shot me an angry glance. Perhaps for a second being perceptive enough to recognise an unintended slight. For that second perhaps she hated this scruffy forty something who had claimed to be her grandson, but who clearly could not be. The only compensation is that the next second she would have forgotten all about it.
