Australia Through The Looking Glass

England is making me feel I have gone through the looking glass. Here, for all Tony Blair’s troubles, the Labour Party is well entrenched in government; gay issues are just news stories in the mainstream media like any others – at least in the quality media; television programs on commercial stations are watchable and not interrupted by ads more than once every 15 minutes; the national broadcaster is well-funded and creative; the national TV news really is national (and international) and not just local parish pump stuff – even the “I took a dive,” says Beckham story remains in the sport section; television presenters (and checkout operators) are all colours of the rainbow, including grey; and stories about loony god-bothering would-be moral arbiters, censors and general holier-than-thouery is confined to the quirky pages.

Gay politicians, actors, TV presenters, radio commentators, characters in soaps and dramas and comedies are unremarkable – indeed it almost seems as if you want preselection as an MP you have to be gay nowadays.

How different from the home life of our own dear Aussie queens!

Say Hello to Dementia

All of which has only a glancing impact on my mother. Doctors, relatives, carers all use words like “memory loss”, “confusion”, as if an anodyne label on what is happening to her makes it somehow less horrid than it is. It wasn’t until I opened her Care Plan that I suddenly met the word DEMENTIA spelled out in capital letters.

This “confusion” over what exactly is wrong with her allows people to pigeonhole her actions and behaviour according to their own needs rather than hers. For example, the care plan shows that her carer, who is supposed to drop in before ten each morning to make sure she has eaten breakfast and taken her meds, has been arriving later and later, until now she doesn’t show up till after 11.30. It clearly states, in the comment column some weeks back, “visits must commence before ten.” Yet when I challenge the carer on this, she tells me she can’t come earlier as she has another client at that time, and she OK’d the change with Mum. Whose care plan clearly states DEMENTIA.

Mum, of course, has no memory of this event, if indeed it ever happened. She resents having strangers in her house and doesn’t listen to anything the carer says – she just makes the appropriate responses while she waits for her to leave.

There can be nothing new in Mum’s world. Her television broke down after 20 years, yet each time she uses her new one, which she’s now had for over a month, she cannot remember how it works. Ditto the washing machine – each day she stares at it as if willing it to work, but cannot remember how it works, and when she finally presses the right button, is convinced the machine is broken, because it takes longer than the old one, and sounds different.

Yet when I suggest she write down the instructions and tape them to the TV and the washer to remind her, she goes silent. My sister says she did exactly that for her, but they vanished within a day. In one of the lucid intervals, I press Mum again, “Write things down. Remember what the doctor said, write things down. Keep a diary with you and write down who comes and when, when your appointments are – and keep simple instructions on the washer and the telly.

“But folk’ll think I’m going daft!!”

Sorry Mum, but you are – and they all know it anyway.

Some days, some hours, are better than others, and it’s possible to have something resembling a normal conversation. These are times to watch for, because you can press her to accept a greater level of care. And these conversations she remembers, for the most part.

The house shows evidence of neglect. It isn’t particularly clean. A drain in the back yard was blocked and flooding the patio over which mother must walk to fill the dustbin. And a freezing winter is forecast. I clean the drain, but it seems to have been that way for a long time. Mother hasn’t noticed, and my sister, who usually comes only after dark, hasn’t either.

All the kitchen appliances are grubby and fingermarked, and the floor is sticky. There are cobwebs in all the corners of the rooms. The belt driving the brushes on the vacuum cleaner is broken, making it nearly useless, but no-one has noticed that, either. But mother doesn’t want ‘just anybody’ messing with her things, she’s ‘managed all right up to now’, she ‘doesn’t like some of the things you’re trying to make me do’, she ‘wishes I’d go home and leave her alone.’ She says she’ll be alright when she gets over her cold, stop fussing,

At other times she says, “It was alright when you were looking after me,” even though I haven’t been here for four years, and have never looked after her. When the psychiatrist at the local hospital, assessing the progress of her memory loss, asked her if she lived with my sister, she said yes.

Much of the time our conversation goes round small loops. You have to imagine short pause – no more than a minute or so – between each exchange. It’s like a Pinter play, minus the meaning.

My carer didn’t come this morning.

Yes she did Mum – I was here – and look, it’s in the book.

When’s that woman coming?

She’s been.

No she hasn’t. I haven’t had my pills yet – she’s supposed to make me take my pills.

You had your pills – look at your dose box.

What day is it today.

You’ve got a newspaper in your hand – look it up.

She’s late this morning.

She just left.

I didn’t get my visit today.

Yes you did.

I haven’t had anything to eat yet.

You had breakfast an hour ago.

Are you making breakfast?

You had it.

Did I?

And on and on, the same point having to be made twenty, thirty times. Tomorrow morning she’ll say she didn’t eat anything all day.

Yesterday I popped out for some shopping, returning at four in the afternoon. She woke with a start, having fallen asleep in front of the TV. She was convinced it was four am and she’d slept there all night.

But she is capable of focussing, albeit briefly, if the issue is important to her. After several attempts to get her to accept cleaning help, I finally said, well Mum, you could always go and live somewhere where all these things, like cleaning, taking pills and so on, are done for you.

I am not going into a home! They all sit round staring at the walls and smelling of wee!

So let us get you all the help you need to stay here – it’s obvious you can’t manage on your own.

It’s not nice to be told you’ve got a dirty house. Is it really? It’s only while I’ve had this cold, it’s got on top of me a bit.

Mother, from what I’ve been cleaning up, it’s obvious this has been happening for months. We’re trying to get you the help you need to stay here.

Yes, and I don’t like some of the things you’re trying to make me do!

This is one conversation that sticks, is remembered, and returned to. Eventually she agrees, after three days of coming back to it, trying to think up objections, to let me arrange something.

But if I don’t like ‘em, they’re getting their marching orders!

Return to Oz

Little news seeps out of Australia now the election is over – Londoners ideas of Oz are derived from Summer Bay and Ramsay Street, not Canberra, and the pretensions of a little Sydney solicitor aren’t of much interest.

That’s another looking-glass effect. Australia is still living through that revolting time known in the UK as Thatcherism, without the swivel-eyed old harridan herself. Howard’s kinder, gentler presentation of that smug, self-satisfied, me first and bugger the rest of you creed, his veneer of respectability over the snobbishishness, has allowed it to continue, whereas here, people have gotten over it, and in fact mostly are a bit shamfaced for having been taken in for so long. I guess lounge-bar fascism finds colonial soil more fertile somehow.

What Thatcher – and Howard – have done is taken the half-baked unthinking nastiness that emerges from otherwise fairly nice people after a bottle or two of Chardy and dressed it up in polite language, elevated it to a political philosophy. Bush does much the same. The Cretin Fundamentalists like this kind of politician, because all of them prefer an unthinking electorate that simply does as it’s told, that operates on feeling, not thought. They offer simple solutions, either those of popular prejudice, or nostrums conjured from a 2000 year old book of magic and fairy tales. And behind this façade they more or less do as they and their backers wish.

Blair may be an over-earnest bore, and his government unwieldy, but although commentators bleat about his huge majority rendering him untouchable and in effect undemocratic, alternative parties still flop about in the shallowest of pools, gasping for support. He doesn’t offer easy solutions, but does try to spark honest debate. He would probably prefer an opposition – any opposition – to keep his party on it’s toes, the competition generating new ideas. What he doesn’t do – or at least, not so much – is over-simplify the complex, or pander to prejudice. Like him or not – and I don’t – he does at least try to do what he sees as the right thing, then packages it for sale.

What a difference from John Howard, who tries to do whatever will retain his grip on power, and if it means a few poufs and abbos have to be thrown overboard, who cares anyway? I suppose what I find most offensive about Howard is this power-at-any-cost attitude. Blair wants power for what he can do with it, and mainly wants to do good. Howard just wants.

The Hebbers of Wagga Wagga

The Dutch have a label for the sort of people who, a generation ago, were peasants on the land. They’ve moved to the city, done well for themselves, and have turned into mindless consumers. They want a big car, a fancy flat, flashy clothes, a big TV, the latest gadgets, fashionable furniture – all discarded as soon as something new comes along, again and again. The Dutch call them Hebbers, from the Dutch verb hebben, to have. They have to HAVE things, and once they have them, they lose interest, and want the next things.

It seems that this is the class Howard panders to. They want reconciliation – give it to them. They prefer the blacks died out – leave them to sniff themselves to death. They want to play at being American – sell the farm to the Yanks. They want to feel British and superior to the Yanks – keep the Queen as head of state. Contradictions don’t count, so long as the Hebbers get what they want when they want it. Howard isn’t concerned about principle, consistency, or doing what’s right, although he’ll use those words to cover his arse.

He knows the environment doesn’t play with these people – the hard decisions there mean telling them what they can’t have. So he doesn’t sign Kyoto, he doesn’t put money into renewable energy.

There are English Hebbers too – a recent cartoon had a smartly-dressed woman, leaning on her Humvee outside her suburban home and shouting angrily at a protester, “We’re very concerned about global warming too – we’ve just ordered an amphibious four-wheel drive.” She’d make a beaut Aussie!

At present, the Australian way looks for cheap petrol – cheat the Timorese, take a bung from your ethanol mates - the British way patiently explains the need for high petrol taxes, and uses the money to promote alternatives. And puts up with the squeals.

Oh well. Mother is stirring, so I’d better make a move.