Polite Paradise

In the UK, so yes, tap water is safe to drink. We have a lot of variation in water hardness, so in some areas it may not taste great, but it won't do you any harm.

https://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/please

The Allusionist is my current choice of podcast when I walk, and this episode, on the use of 'please' and how it's done in different parts of the world, struck me as something that the rest of you might like. The episode page has a link to a transcript for anyone who would rather read than listen. The whole thing is only about 15 minutes.

The next episode, about continents, has some follow up at the end about how and when and to whom we say thank you.

Oh, merciful swearwords, the paperwork. The filing system that piles everything on the dining table, puts a dirty plate on top and adds a week old newspaper.

I have no solution for that, but I feel your pain.

The cancelling the carer thing must be beyond frustrating, but it might help to think that if your grandmother does have dementia (I know you said she didn't have a diagnosis), then the argument about her learning that she can get away with it isn't really valid. She may not any longer be able to process cause and effect that way.

That doesn't make it any less infuriating, of course. A while ago we were at an event for our university contemporaries, and somebody started a conversation about dealing with elderly parents. All but one of us at the table were dealing with it, and we must have bored and terrified him, because once we were started, we all couldn't stop. Everybody had some horror story, and I would say a good half of them included some variation on refusing help because 'my daughter (usually)/son will do that for me.'

So no helpful suggestions, just, yeah, I hear you.

I've posted on here before about Elderly Relative with the dementia diagnosis - who continues to live alone, although now in sheltered housing. Elderly Relative's Spouse, now dead, never had an official dementia diagnosis, but when I looked up vascular dementia on Dr Google, and found 14 listed symptoms, Spouse had 9 of them, and eventually Spouse's nursing home moved her from the main wing to the dementia wing, saying apologetically that it might not be dementia, but that since the behaviour was indistinguishable from dementia, that was the safest place for her to be.

Regarding both of them, I absolutely hear you about old, cranky, in pain, and taking stubbornness to previously unrecognised limits. I also know the thing about who copes best - in my case, these are relatives by marriage, not by blood, and I suspect that I cope better because I have an extra degree of distance. This is not my father so although I can and do grieve for the man who is slipping away, I don't have the deep attachment that goes 'this is my dad who is supposed to love me unconditionally and he says that?'

My DH and I hold power of attorney for ER, although we haven't invoked it - ER is mostly competent to manage his own affairs, but he manages them badly. But (in the UK at least) that isn't cause for the POA holder to take over. The person is allowed to make bad decisions as long as he understands the likely consequences of those decisions, the same as anybody with full mental capability. He doesn't even have to be able to remember that he made the decision. When he first got his dementia diagnosis, and asked us to take the POA, I went to an information session set up by a dementia charity, and they also said the things mentioned in the article: don't be too quick to correct them, particularly over things like who's dead; try to enter their reality because they aren't coming to yours; try not to take things personally.

The course leader described dementia as like Christmas tree lights: most of the lights are on but one or two are flickering - so sometimes Auntie knows quite well who you are, and sometimes she calls you by your sister's name, or your mother's name. Then one of the flickering lights fails, and she doesn't know who you are at all, although she may remember your sister quite well. She also told us that in many cases advanced dementia is like the course of somebody's life running backwards, so if Granny calls you by your mother's name, it's because she's lost the latest years, so she'll call you by the name of the person who was the age you are now, back in whenever she's living now, if you see what I mean. You're an important female relative, she knows that, and the important female relative is her daughter, so that's you.

I agree with Lynn2000 about inherent behaviour being let loose, too. I don't think that in general people change much as they age, they just become a more concentrated version of what they were before, so somebody who was sharp tongued becomes bitter, somebody who was short tempered becomes plain angry, etc.

A friend of mine whose father had dementia for several years said that she had been very shocked when he started using racist terms, which she couldn't ever remember him using before. However, as he retreated into his youth, she realised that he was simply using the vocabulary with which he had grown up, and which he had given up as society did.

Back in May when we were just getting going here, I mentioned home made liqueurs, and CatsNCorgis asked for a recipes thread. It went on my To Do list which is, let's face it, pure fiction, but since we're making an effort to post, here we are.

I thought we could start with Christmas Pudding Rum, partly because there's still time to do one before Christmas, and partly because I was inspecting mine today. There are several recipes going around for this, and I think mine started with the Hairy Bikers one, but I've tweaked it.

400g mixed dried fruit
100g molasses sugar (or dark brown soft)
150g Demerara sugar
50g flaked almonds
Piece cinnamon bark
5 cloves
1 star anise
¼ nutmeg, grated
Grated rind and juice of 1 orange
Grated rind and juice of 1 lemon
Handful of dried citrus peel (optional)
1 tsp Christmas spice or allspice or mixed spice
70cl dark rum

The supermarket cheap mixed fruit is fine for this, and the cheap supermarket brand rum too. Don't waste your money on good branded rum. Add whatever spices you like, really. I add the dried peel because I have it, but I don't think it was in the original recipe, so leave it out if you want. What I mean by Christmas spice is the jar I make up early in December of allspice, cardamom, cinnamon, clove, coriander, ginger, mace, nutmeg and black pepper, and which I then use to pep up anything that needs it. Basically, though, there are no rules here. Use whatever spices you would put in a Christmas pudding and leave out anything you don't like.

Throw everything into a large sealable container. This will just fit in a 1.5 litre Kilner type jar. Ideally use a wide necked container: the fruit is difficult to remove otherwise. Shake all together and leave for 1 month or longer. Try to remember to give it a brisk shake once a week or so to make sure that the sugar dissolves. Strain thoroughly – it's very cloudy, so I run mine through muslin and then through coffee filters, and bottle. Pick the whole spices and whole peel out and use the drained fruit for a simple cake or a sponge pudding.

It's like drinking Christmas flavours - it's very sweet so go carefully with it!

My understanding is that he wouldn't commit to marrying her - she was perfectly suitable - and in the end she broke it off and refused to wait any longer, and a while later married Andrew Parker Bowles. And then, of course, when their respective marriages were over, it was a long time before they felt able to marry, largely because of the role of the monarch as head of the Church of England.

With Diana, entirely apart from the fact that it was obvious to a lot of people that she had her head turned by him, and he was fond of her, but not in love with her, I always thought that part of the problem was that to begin with, they didn't give her enough to do. Bear in mind that the last woman before Diana to marry into the royal family at that sort of level was the Queen Mother, who had done it back in the days when an upper class gel from a good family wasn't actually expected to do anything except make a 'good' marriage. Then of course, she had never expected to become Queen, and she became Queen Mother relatively young, and was in a position to make that role what she wanted. Diana had held down a job, and I don't think the Establishment took that into account; they didn't think that towards the end of the 20th century, a role that really only encompassed producing a couple of children and looking pleasant in public wasn't going to be anything like enough. It was Diana who really started the public charity work; the family had always done it, but it was a time of huge change in the media and so on, and I don't think they altogether approved of how visible she was about it, or even understood how much public opinion was changing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSn4DdnbY9w

Tiramisu is such a boring and overrated dessert.