Jacket potato with tuna and coleslaw, red leicester, and Spice Island hot sauce

Mum started off today pretty well: she got up, washed and dressed, ate a banana, and made a fuss of Suki. Then she (mum, not Suki) made a comment about the garden, and I said “oh, the gardener can do that this afternoon”.

Of course, panic immediately set in and, within half an hour, mum had retreated to bed. And there she stayed, refusing to answer the door when Prunella (the gardener’s code name: I must do a character list at some point, for my own benefit if nothing else), and coming out only to give a feeble “hello, I’m not well” before going back into hiding.

While this was happening, I received a copy of a letter from the Memory Service to mum’s GP, informing him that the psychologist who oversees mum’s care had decided mum shouldn’t be given antipsychotics to deal with her occasional paranoid delusions, and that was all.

I won’t go into all the problems with this letter, and will limit my comments to the two main ones:

1. The psychologist making this decision has never seen mum, or spoken to her or to me. All their decisions are based on second or third hand accounts of a person with complex clinical needs.
2. OK, if antipsychotics aren’t the way to go, what is? Just leaving her (and me) to suffer is less a solution than a complete abdication of clinical responsibility.

(If this reads as if I’m quite angry about this letter, then that is 100% accurate.)

I started drafting a response to the letter, but decided to leave sending it until I am fractionally less angry.

I was going to go into a detour here about the history of Portsmouth, inspired by the Spice Island brand hot sauce I had with dinner, but after rewriting the first sentence eight times I realised it wasn’t going to happen.

So I’ll just stop here and say: I’ll be back and more communicative tomorrow, I hope. See you then.